Mail thief attempted to make getaway in stolen kayak without a paddle

A suspected mail thief in Sammamish, Washington, chose an unusual getaway vehicle, then got caught in the middle of a lake. "I just thought it was a kayak theft, a kayak hijacking,” said Brian Conway. Little did he know that the man who hijacked his kayak, then became involved in what was described as a low-speed pursuit, was wanted for mail theft. Kerek Edwards had confronted the alleged thieves earlier, and police said they ditched a stolen car full of stolen mail in a driveway in Sammamish early on Christmas Eve morning. Neighbors called police, then another neighbor used her car to block theirs and the pair ran through Edwards' backyard.
Jail records confirm it was Jeremy Webb and Desiree Segar who ran into the woods behind Edwards' house. Police caught her, but he made it down a hill to Brian Conway's dock, where he hopped in a kayak without a paddle. Brian's son, Nolan, grabbed another kayak from the garage and gave chase. “And we got a paddle,” Brian Conway said. “I think what this poor fellow is going to have a lot of time to think about is if you take the kayak, you've got to take the paddle, too."
“I think he thought I was a sheriff, initially,” Nolan Conway said. “He was very apologetic. It was a little sad to be out there. He was so wet and so cold; he was so miserable." Webb has nearly 50 charges against him from possessing stolen property to drugs and resisting arrest. Segar has a handful of theft and drug charges from 2007. Both suspects are now in King County Jail for investigation of mail theft.

Daily Comic Relief

The 8 Most Intriguing Unsolved Crimes

When a crime is never solved, it can become both maddening and tantalizing. The victims never get justice, their loved ones never get closure, and law enforcement officers can turn into haunted, True Detective-style obsessives.
Here are eight fascinating cases that remain unsolved to this day.

Facebook must face privacy violation lawsuit over scanning users' messages to target ads

A judge in Oakland, California ruled that Facebook does indeed have to face a class action lawsuit charging that the social media firm violated user privacy when it scanned the contents of users' messages for the purposes of targeting advertising to those users.
From the Los Angeles Times:

Judge [Phyllis] Hamilton denied Facebook’s bid to dismiss the lawsuit, which was filed by Facebook users Matthew Campbell and Michael Hurley in 2013. The suit alleges that until October 2012, when the social network says it stopped the practice, it scanned the content of private messages sent between users for links to websites, which were then used for delivering targeted advertising. The complaint alleges that this violated the federal and state privacy laws by “reading its users’ personal [and] private Facebook messages without their consent."
Facebook had argued that the practice was covered by an exception under the federal Electronics Communications Privacy Act, and that it disclosed to users that it “may use the information we received about you” for “data analysis." But Judge Hamilton said the company had “not offered a sufficient explanation of how the challenged practice falls within the ordinary court of business,” and that the disclosure was not specific enough to establish that users expressly consented to the scanning of the content of their messages.

Facebook will have to face lawsuit over scanning of users' messages

A Warm, Cozy Fire and Your Health

A Warm, Cozy Fire May Be Good for Your Health

A new study hypothesizes that we derive health benefits from just staring at a comfy fire, or even video of a comfy fire! Trace explains why a toasty hearth might make a dent in your blood pressure.

Workaholics Actually Get Less Work Done

Workaholics Actually Get Less Work Done

A new study looks at the kind of hard-charging workers who don't even know how to let the holiday season interrupt their efforts. If you pass up holiday pie for working late, you may be a workaholic. Julian explains why this is a bad thing. 

Stress makes us work harder for pleasurable rewards, but doesn't make us appreciate them more

 A new study from researchers at the University of Geneva suggests that while stress can cause us to work very, very hard to achieve rewards, being stressed out doesn't help us enjoy those rewards.
Specifically, the study helps shed light on why stress can often lead to binge-eating, relapses in alcoholism and drug addiction, or gambling.
"Most of us have experienced stress that increases our craving for rewarding experiences, such as eating a tasty bar of chocolate, and it can make us invest considerable effort in obtaining the object of our desire, such as running to a convenience store in the middle of the night," said the study's lead author Eva Pool, MS, a doctoral student at the University of Geneva. "But while stress increases our desire to indulge in rewards, it does not necessarily increase the enjoyment we experience."
From the study announcement:

Stress prompted chocolate lovers in an experiment to exert three times as much effort to smell chocolate than unstressed chocolate lovers, but both groups reported about the same level of enjoyment when they got a whiff of the pleasing aroma, according to the study, published in APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition.
For the experiment, researchers recruited 36 university students, of whom 19 were men, who said they love chocolate. To induce stress, the researchers asked students to keep one hand in ice-cold water while being observed and videotaped. Another group immersed a hand in lukewarm water. Ten minutes before and 30 minutes after the task, researchers collected samples of the participants' saliva and tested them for levels of cortisol, a hormone involved in stress response. Following the stress conditioning, all participants had to press a handgrip for the chance to smell chocolate when they saw a certain symbol. The researchers measured the amount of effort participants invested for a chance to smell the chocolate, and asked participants how pleasant they found the odor.
"Stress plays a critical role in many psychological disorders and is one of the most important factors determining relapses in addiction, gambling and binge eating," said another author, Tobias Brosch, PhD, also of the University of Geneva. "Stress seems to flip a switch in our functioning: If a stressed person encounters an image or a sound associated with a pleasant object, this may drive them to invest an inordinate amount of effort to obtain it."

Here's the summary from the report:

Stress can increase reward pursuits: This has traditionally been seen as an attempt to relieve negative affect through the hedonic properties of a reward. However, reward pursuit is not always proportional to the pleasure experienced, because reward processing involves distinct components, including the motivation to obtain a reward (i.e., wanting) and the hedonic pleasure during the reward consumption (i.e., liking). Research conducted on rodents demonstrates that stress might directly amplify the cue-triggered wanting, suggesting that under stress wanting can be independent from liking. Here, we aimed to test whether a similar mechanism exists in humans. We used analog of a Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer test (PIT) with an olfactory reward to measure the cue triggered wanting for a reward but also the sensory hedonic liking felt during the consumption of the same reward. The analog of a PIT procedure, in which participants learned to associate a neutral image and an instrumental action with a chocolate odor, was combined with either a stress-inducing or stress-free behavioral procedure. Results showed that compared with participants in the stress-free condition, those in the stress condition mobilized more effort in instrumental action when the reward-associated cue was displayed, even though they did not report the reward as being more pleasurable. These findings suggest that, in humans, stress selectively increases cue-triggered wanting, independently of the hedonic properties of the reward. Such a mechanism supports the novel explanation proposed by animal research as to why stress often produces cue-triggered bursts of binge eating, relapses in drug addiction, or gambling.

PDF: Stress Increases Cue-Triggered “Wanting” for Sweet Reward in Humans

Awesome Pictures

10 Things About France That Shock First-Time Visitors

Before you dive head first into a trip to France, you better get to know some of the local customs or you might just be a little disappointed. Check out these 10 things that often shock first-time visitors to France.

Archaeological Discoveries of 2014

Coolest Archaeological Discoveries of 2014

From a mysterious Greek tomb to revelations about King Richard, 2014 was a big year for big finds.

Peru providing its citizens with free solar power

YouTube link.

“This program is aimed at the poorest people, those who lack access to electric lighting and still use oil lamps, spending their own resources to pay for fuels that harm their health."

The water cycle, and water in the earth's mantle

An article at BoingBoing makes note of the vast quantities of water stored in the earth's mantle.
Deep inside the mantle, where the temperature and pressure are so high you would think it impossible, viscous crystalline rocks potentially trap the equivalent of the Pacific Ocean...
We know that ringwoodite can hold water, but it has been determined that below 660 km, ringwoodite transitions into yet another form of olivine called bridgmanite, which can't hold much water. However, seismic mapping experiments have detected areas of melt, melted material held within the crystalline solids that differ in their chemical composition, and which are possibly indicative of water, at depths of 760 km. This is 100 km deeper than water should be able to venture...
Whereas previous estimates have put the amount of water in the mantle at 1-3 times the amount of water on the surface, this study brings that quantity down to a single ocean. Regardless of the reduction, this is still substantial considering that all of the water could have originated from geochemical processes alone.

Ziggy

Even NASA wastes money

In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349 million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space. Then, NASA did something odd.
As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially “mothballed” — closed up and left empty — without ever being used... The reason for the shutdown: The new tower — called the A-3 test stand — was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010.
But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didn’t want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress — at the urging of a senator from Mississippi — swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what.
The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didn’t need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse...
So the tower stand has taken its place on NASA’s long list of living dead. Last year, the agency’s inspector general found six other test stands that were either in “mothball” status, or about to be. Some hadn’t been used since the 1990s. Together, those seven cost NASA more than $100,000 a year to maintain. More grim details at the Washington Post.

Understanding Moon Phases

Why does the moon seem to change its shape every night? The answer is the moon is a world in space, just as Earth is. Like Earth, it's always half illuminated by the sun. In other words, the round globe of the moon has a day side and a night side.

From our earthly vantage point, as the moon orbits around Earth, we see varying fractions of its day and night sides. These are the changing phases of the moon. As the moon orbits Earth, it changes phase in an orderly way. Understand the various phases of the moon.

Martian Dust Devils

Dust Devils' Powerful Updrafts Could Drive Mars Climate

Mars' atmosphere is often viewed as frigid and unchanging, but in studies of the red planet's aeolian processes, nothing could be further from the truth -- particularly where Martian dust devils are concerned.

Martian Frosting

The Frosted Slopes of Mars

Although this crater rim is entering summer, its south-facing slopes are still festively frosted in ice.

Buffalo vs. Bison

We’ve all known someone like this, right? And we’ve all had the urge to shoot them, but luckily did not have our pedantic jackass rifle around at the time. This comic is from Neil Kohney at the webcomic The Other End. 

Animal Pictures

The Daily Drift

Hey, wingnuts why don't you watch a REAL news channel ...!

 

Carolina Naturally is read in 200 countries around the world daily.   

 
Almost Everyone Loves Chocolate ... !

Today is  -  National Chocolate Day

Don't forget to visit our sister blog: It Is What It Is

Some of our readers today have been in:

The Americas

Rio De Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil

Montreal and Quebec, Canada

Boaco and Managua, Nicaragua

Lima, Peru

Liquillo, Puerto Rico

Montevideo, Uruguay

Europe

Brussels, Belgium

Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Sofia, Bulgaria

Prague, Czech Republic

London, England

Tampere, Finland

Lyon, Magenta, Rouen and Velizy-Villacoublay, France

Frankfurt Am Main, Hamburg and Karlsruhe, Germany

Athens, Greece

Budapest, Hungary

Reykjavik, Iceland

Waterford, Ireland

Florence, Naples, Ravenna and San Girogio a Cremano,  Italy

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Lisbon and Porto, Portugal

Lipetsk, Moscow, Ryazan and Vladivostok, Russia

Ljubljana, Slovenia

L'Olleria, Madrid and Murcia, Spain

Kista, Sweden

Ankara and Istanbul, Turkey

Kharkiv, Ukraine

Asia

Beijing, China

Bangalore, Bhubaneshwar, Dehra Dun, Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Naini Tal, New Delhi, Patna, Pune, Shillong and Yanamalakuduru, India

Jakarta, Indonesia

Bahar, Neka and Tehran, Iran

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia

Ar'ar and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Bangkok and Chaiyaphum, Thailand

Africa

Cape Town and Randburg, South Africa

Lusaka, Zambia

The Pacific

Goulbum, Homebush and Sydney, Australia

Pasig, Philippines