Court found drugs courier's explanation that she thought 'grass' was for lawn unlikely

A woman caught smuggling seven kilograms of cannabis into Sweden via the Öresund train has claimed that she thought it was "grass" for the garden.
The woman was stopped on the train plying the route from Copenhagen to Malmö by customs officials. She was carrying a bag which contained the contraband.

The cannabis weighed in at 7.4 kilos and the woman admitted straight away that she was carrying "grass". But she claimed she had no idea that the find concerned a narcotic.

The woman claimed that she had no idea that the word "grass" is an established term used to refer to cannabis, explaining that her only knowledge of drugs came from seeing some white powder in a movie. Malmö District Court found this explanation unlikely and jailed her for two years and three months.

Woman agrees to return home after husband promises to construct a toilet

A 27-year-old Dalit woman has agreed to return to her husband’s home at a village in the Dewas district of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, after he promised before a court that he would get a proper toilet constructed.

Savita, who married to Devkaran Malviya (30) of Mundlaana village about seven years ago, left her husband three years ago. She went to live with her parents as she felt ashamed at being forced to answer the nature’s call in the open.

She filed a case in a local court seeking monthly maintenance from her husband. During the course of the trial, it came to light that she had a dispute with her husband over the absence of a proper toilet facility in his house.

She told the magistrate court that she would not go to her husband’s home unless a proper toilet was built there. Devkaran assured the court that he would ensure a proper toilet was installed at his home before January 10, which is the next date of hearing.

Man arrested for shooting neighbor's rooster with bow and arrow for flirting with his pet hen

It was a “love affair” that went terribly wrong. A rooster escaped death by a whisker after a man in India shot it with an arrow while it was fraternizing with his hen. The man in Dekakund village in Madhya Pradesh's Alirazpur district tried to kill the rooster when it was seen in the company of his pet hen. On Monday morning, Jagliya Bhil's pet rooster accidentally slipped into neighbor Gyan Singh Bhil's property. A little later, Gyan Singh's pet hen wandered around to join the rooster's company.

Seeing his hen in the company of somebody else's rooster infuriated Gyan Singh so much that he decided to teach the rooster a lesson that he would never dare enter his property again. So, furious Gyan Singh went back into his house, brought out a homemade bow and arrow and aimed at the rooster. A shocked Jagliya took his arrow-hit rooster to the Jobat Police Station where he lodged a complaint against Gyan Singh and then his rooster was taken to a hospital.

"We lodged a case against Gyan Singh Bhil and rushed the rooster for further treatment," in-charge of Jobat Police Station Asha R. Verma said. In the veterinary clinic, the doctor had to wait for the rooster's condition to improve before he could pull the arrow out successfully. A health officer in the hospital explained that had they removed the arrow immediately, the rooster would have lost too much blood and lost its life.

"The tissue elasticity has a tendency to compress the wound track and the arrow in situ tends to exert an incomplete tamponade on the wound. The delayed removal leads to local inflammatory process and a fibrous reaction which causes loosening of the arrow after which the arrow can easily be extracted without expanding the wound," he explained. The rooster's condition had improved by the time the it was handed back to its owner.

Are concussions related to Alzheimer’s disease?

Are concussions related to Alzheimer’s disease?

A new study suggests that a history of concussion involving at least a momentary loss of consciousness may be related to the buildup of Alzheimer’s-associated plaques in the brain. The research is published in the […]

Hospice stays get longer, and corporate profits rise

From the Washington Post:

Hospice patients are expected to die: The treatment focuses on providing comfort to the terminally ill, not finding a cure. To enroll a patient, two doctors certify a life expectancy of six months or less.

But over the past decade, the number of “hospice survivors” in the United States has risen dramatically, in part because hospice companies earn more by recruiting patients who aren’t actually dying, a Washington Post investigation has found. Healthier patients are more profitable because they require fewer visits and stay enrolled longer.

The proportion of patients who were discharged alive from hospice care rose about 50 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a Post analysis of more than 1 million hospice patients’ records over 11 years in California...

This vast growth took place as the hospice “movement,” once led by religious and community organizations, was evolving into a $17 billion industry dominated by for-profit companies...

Some of those patients simply outlived a legitimate prognosis of six months.
But much of the data suggests that the trend toward longer stays is a response to the financial incentive... multiple allegations have arisen from former hospice workers who say that the businesses took in people who weren’t in declining health.

World's hottest pepper is grown in South Carolina

Ed Currie holds one of his world-record Carolina Reaper peppers by the stem, which looks like the tail of a scorpion. On the other end is the bumpy, oily, fire-engine red fruit with a punch of heat nearly as potent as most pepper sprays used by police. It's hot enough to leave even the most seasoned spicy food aficionado crimson-faced, flushed with sweat, trying not to lose his lunch.
Last month, The Guinness Book of World Records decided Currie's peppers were the hottest on Earth, ending a more than four-year drive to prove no one grows a more scorching chili. The heat of Currie's peppers was certified by students at Winthrop University who test food as part of their undergraduate classes.
But whether Currie's peppers are truly the world's hottest is a question that one scientist said can never be known. The heat of a pepper depends not just on the plant's genetics, but also where it is grown, said Paul Bosland, director of the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State University. And the heat of a pepper is more about being macho than seasoning.
"You have to think of chili heat like salt. A little bit improves the flavor, but a lot ruins it," Bosland said.
Some ask Currie if the record should be given to the single hottest pepper tested instead of the mean taken over a whole batch. After all, Usain Bolt isn't considered the world's fastest man because of his average time over several races.
But Currie shakes off those questions.
"What's the sense in calling something a record if it can't be replicated? People want to be able to say they ate the world's hottest pepper," Currie said.
The record is for the hottest batch of Currie's peppers that was tested, code name HP22B for "Higher Power, Pot No. 22, Plant B." Currie said he has peppers from other pots and other plants that have comparable heat.
The science of hot peppers centers around chemical compounds called capsaicinoids. The higher concentration the hotter the pepper, said Cliff Calloway, the Winthrop University professor whose students tested Currie's peppers.
The heat of a pepper is measured in Scoville Heat Units. Zero is bland, and a regular jalapeno pepper registers around 5,000 on the Scoville scale. Currie's world record batch of Carolina Reapers comes in at 1,569,300 Scoville Heat Units, with an individual pepper measured at 2.2 million. Pepper spray weighs in at about 2 million Scoville Units.
Pharmacist Wilbur Scoville devised the scale 100 years ago, taking a solution of sugar and water to dilute an extract made from the pepper. A scientist would then taste the solution and dilute it again and against until the heat was no longer detected. So the rating depended on a scientist's tongue, a technique that Calloway is glad is no longer necessary.
"I haven't tried Ed's peppers. I am afraid to," Calloway said. "I bite into a jalapeno — that's too hot for me."
Now, scientists separate the capsaicinoids from the rest of the peppers and use liquid chromatography to detect the exact amount of the compounds. A formula then converts the readings into Scoville's old scale.
The world record is nice, but it's just part of Currie's grand plan. He's been interested in peppers all his life, the hotter the better. Ever since he got the taste of a sweet hot pepper from the Caribbean a decade ago, he has been determined to breed the hottest pepper he can. He is also determined to build his company, PuckerButt Pepper Company, into something that will let the 50-year-old entrepreneur retire before his young kids grow up.
The peppers started as a hobby, grown in his Rock Hill backyard. The business now spreads across a number of backyards and a couple dozen acres in Chester County. As his business grew, Currie kept his job at a bank because he promised his wife, whom he wooed a decade ago by making her a fresh batch of salsa, he wouldn't leave the lucrative position until they were out of debt. She released him from that vow in February.
Currie has about a dozen employees. Even with the publicity of the world record, he still gets nervous about making payroll. He said the attention has helped him move closer to the goal of making PuckerButt self-sustaining.
Currie's peppers aren't just about heat. He aims for sweetness, too. He makes sauces and mustards with names like "Voodoo Prince Death Mamba," ''Edible Lava" and "I Dare You Stupit" with a goal to enhance the flavor of food.
And the hot pepper market is expanding. In less than five years, the amount of hot peppers eaten by Americans has increased 8 percent, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics.
Currie's world record has created quite a stir in the world of chiliheads, said Ted Barrus, a blogger from Astoria, Ore., who has developed a following among hot pepper fans by videotaping himself eating the hottest peppers in the world and posting the videos on YouTube under the name Ted The Fire Breathing Idiot.
Barrus said Currie's world record is just the latest event in a series of pepper growers to top one another with hotter and hotter peppers.
"That's the biggest bragging rights there are. It is very, very competitive," he said.
The reason people love super-hot peppers isn't much different than any other thrill seekers. Barrus talks lovingly about trying the Carolina Reaper, even though the peppers usually send him into spasms of hiccups and vomiting.
"You only live once. This is safer than jumping out of an airplane," he said.
Barrus said Currie's news has other growers sending him peppers that seem hotter than the Carolina Reaper on his tongue, although they will await scientific testing.
That's fine with Currie. He knew the record would be challenged quickly and has sent off what he thinks are even hotter batches to the students at Winthrop University to test.
"Nobody is going to grow hotter peppers than Ed Currie," he said.

Ziggy

12 Maps Of America From Before We Knew What It Looked Like

The island of California. A huge triangle of land called Florida. A great ocean that cut down from the Arctic into the Midwest. As the New World came into focus beginning in the 17th century, explorers and cartographers struggled to measure a massive expanse of land that would take centuries to accurately map.

Take a look at these 12 maps, which include the first to use the name 'America' and the first map printed in the new world.

The world's tallest palm trees

These are wax palms (palma de cera), photographed in Colombia's Cocora Valley by Alex Treadway for National Geographic.

Under ideal growing conditions the wax palm can grow to a height of 50 meters (160 ft)—or rarely, even as high as 60 meters (200 ft)—making it the tallest palm and by extension the tallest monocot in the world...

The palm is recognized as the national tree of Colombia, and since the implementation of Law 61 of 1985 it is legally a protected species in that country. Ceroxylon quindiuense has an extremely slow growth and can live up to one hundred years...

Utility companies go to war against solar

Utility companies across America are fighting solar, imposing high fees on homeowners who install their own solar panels to feed back into the grid. This one was predictable from a long, long way out -- energy companies being that special horror-burrito made from a core of hot, chewy greed wrapped in a fluffy blanket of regulatory protection, fixed in their belief that they have the right to profit from all power used, whether or not their supply it. Bruce Sterling once proposed that Americans should be encouraged to drive much larger trucks, big enough to house monster fuel-cells that are kept supplied with hydrogen by decentralized windmill and solar installations -- when they are receiving more power than is immediately needed, they use the surplus to electrolyze water and store the hydrogen in any handy nearby monster-trucks' cells. When the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining, you just plug your house into your enormous American-Dream-mobile -- no need for a two-way grid.
This solution wasn't just great because it aligned the core American value of driving really large cars with environmental protection, but also because it was less vulnerable to sabotage from hydrocarbon-addicted energy companies.

HECO, despite criticism from Hawaii’s solar industry, denies the moratorium is anything more than an honest effort to address the technical challenges of integrating the solar flooding onto its grid.
The slowdown comes in a state where 9 percent of the utility’s residential customers on Oahu are already generating most of their power from the sun and where connections have doubled yearly since 2008.
In California, where solar already powers the equivalent of 626,000 homes, utilities continue to aggressively push for grid fees that would add about $120 a year to rooftop users’ bills and, solar advocates say, slow down solar adoptions.
Similar skirmishes have broken out in as many as a dozen of the 43 states that have adopted net-metering policies as part of their push to promote renewable energy. In Colorado, Xcel Energy Inc. has proposed cutting the payments it makes for excess power generated by customers by about half, because it says higher payouts result in an unfair subsidy to solar users.

Utilities Feeling Rooftop Solar Heat Start Fighting Back

Italian Cheeses Melt Icy Roads in Wisconsin

Italian Cheeses Melt Icy Roads in Wisconsin

Cheese brine, a byproduct of the huge Wisc. cheesemaking industry, turns out to be cheaper and better than rock salt for icy roads.

2013's Wild, Unforgettable Weather

2013's Wild, Unforgettable Weather: A Roundup

Typhoons and tornadoes took a terrible toll in 2013, despite a dearth of tropical storms and twisters in many parts of the world.

Daily Comic Relief

Pristiophorus lanae

New Species of Sawshark Discovered

by Natali Anderson

Scientists from the United States have described a new sawshark species from off the Philippine Islands.

Pristiophorus lanae.

Sawsharks (family Pristiophoridae) are a small group of bottom sharks, easily distinguished by their saw-like snouts and a pair of long barbels. They have two dorsal fins, no anal fin, a short mouth and small teeth in both jaws.

Because of their snout, sawsharks can sometimes be confused with sawfishes. However, the sawshark’s gills are on the side of its head, while the sawfish’s gills are underneath. Also, the sawfish does not have a pair of barbels.

These sharks are found in waters from the western North Atlantic in the vicinity of the Bahamas to the southeastern Atlantic, in the western Indian Ocean from South Africa to southern Mozambique, and in he western Pacific off Japan, the Koreas, China, the Philippines and Australia.

Sawsharks first appeared in the fossil record during the late Cretaceous of Lebanon, about 90 million years ago, and were more widespread, in the eastern Pacific and eastern North Atlantic.

Currently, the sawshark family Pristiophoridae includes two genera – Pliotrema and Pristiophorus.

The newly discovered species, named Pristiophorus lanae, is the second member of the genus Pristiophorus described from the western North Pacific.

“The species name, lanae, is after shark enthusiast Lana Ebert on the occasion of her graduation from the University of San Francisco. The proposed common name is the Lana’s Sawshark,” co-authors Dr David Ebert from the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, California Academy of Sciences and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity, and Dr Hana Wilms from the University of California wrote in a paper published in the journal Zootaxa (paper in .pdf).

Pristiophorus lanae is a slender-bodied five-gilled sawshark, measuring up to 80-85 cm in lenght. It is known from seven specimens (six females and a single male), caught off Zamboanguita, Apo Island between Negros and Siquijor, and off southern Luzon in Balayan Bay and Ragay Gulf, the Philippine Islands.

The 10 Weirdest Animal Stories of 2013

The 10 Weirdest Animal Stories of 2013

From cold-loving cockroaches to bat-eating spiders, 2013 was a strange year for the animal kingdom.

Why Do Animals Have Soft White Underbellies?

The phrase 'soft white underbelly' describes the anatomy of a broad spectrum of animals ranging from sharks to amphibians to birds and even some mammals. Why is the most notorious biological vulnerability on Earth so ubiquitous?

Animal Pictures

Drifting Along

Carolina Naturally is going minimal today. With the body aches, runny eyes and nose of the flu it makes it hard to concentrates between coughing fits so we are posting a minimal amount to today. We hope the worst is over and tomorrow we can return to our regular postings.

South Dakota: the Bermuda of the prairie, letting billionaires avoid millions in estate tax

America's billionaires are able to avoid paying millions in inheritance taxes by renting empty storefronts in South Dakota in order to give their trust-funds an SD address, from which they can exploit a deliberate loophole in state tax-law. Over $121 billion in trust-funds is administered through South Dakota, mostly for out-of-state families -- a figure that's tripled in four years. South Dakota's corrupt tax laws also allow for avoiding millions in tax from ordinary investments by the richest people in NY and MA. South Dakota itself has some dire poverty -- two of the 10 poorest counties in America are in SD -- and lawmakers describe their project to turn the state into "the Bermuda of the prairie" as an economic development project, creating jobs for lawyers and bankers, and "[forging] ties with prosperous families that may one day decide to build a factory or a warehouse here."
The project has failed. The entire trust industry only employs about 100 South Dakotans, but repugican Governor Dennis Daugaard, a former banker, says it's worth it: "If you've got several hundred well-paying jobs, it's worth it to us."

Trusts overseen in the Kresge five-and-dime building hold all kinds of assets, from stakes in private companies to a castle in Italy. While their holdings aren’t public, securities filings sometimes offer a glimpse. In July, the two top executives at Monster Beverage Corp. (MNST), the Corona, California-based energy drink maker, shifted $478 million of their stock to undisclosed “entities” controlled by a trust company based in the building.
In 2010, the Pritzker family, whose members include U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, revealed in a securities filing that one branch had moved $360 million of Hyatt Hotels Corp. (H) stock to trusts overseen by a native South Dakotan named Thomas J. Muenster. Muenster, whose sister married a Pritzker, maintains an office in the Kresge building...
... In 2007, the Wrigley family, heirs to the candy fortune, transferred oversight of family trusts holding $1.9 billion of company stock to a private trust company in the Kresge building, according to an SEC filing.

Moguls Rent South Dakota Addresses to Dodge Taxes Forever

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