Airborne Bacteria Make It Rain, Snow, Researchers Find

The sky is not an ethereal, sterile realm. It’s teeming with bacteria, and scientists say that the microbes play a powerful role in producing rain and snow.While the idea that bacteria could prompt precipitation was previously known, a paper published this week in Science shows that they’re more important than anyone expected.

Researchers led by Louisiana [...]

Man in Critical Condition in Ricin Case

A man who stayed in a Las Vegas hotel room where ricin was discovered on Thursday has been hospitalized in critical condition since Feb. 14 with symptoms consistent with exposure to the deadly toxin, Las Vegas police said Friday.
The man’s identity, age and hometown were being withheld on Friday as investigators tried to determine why [...]

Test post from Google Partner web page

Google allows you to set up your own web pages now if you are a company. Similar to wordpress, you can add widgets to your page.
Check out the Xenophilia Google page for an example of something created quickly. The UFOMaps - sightings as they happen only shows up for me when I’m logged in…

Bats Use Magnetic Substance As Internal Compass To Help Them Navigate

They may not be on most people’s list of most attractive species, but bats definitely have animal magnetism. Researchers from the Universities of Leeds and Princeton have discovered that bats use a magnetic substance in their body called magnetite as an ‘internal compass’ to help them navigate.
Dr Richard Holland from Leeds’ Faculty of Biological Sciences [...]

Sea reptile is biggest on record

A fossilised “sea monster” unearthed on an Arctic island is the largest marine reptile known to science, Norwegian scientists have announced.
The 150 million-year-old specimen was found on Spitspergen, in the Arctic island chain of Svalbard, in 2006. The Jurassic-era leviathan is one of 40 sea reptiles from a fossil “treasure trove” uncovered on [...]

Employee’s suit: Company used waterboarding to motivate workers

A supervisor at a motivational coaching business in Provo is accused of waterboarding an employee in front of his sales team to demonstrate that they should work as hard on sales as the employee had worked to breathe. In a lawsuit filed last month, former Prosper, Inc. salesman Chad Hudgens alleges his managers also [...]

Accountant Found Dead of Suicide in Brooklyn Hotel Room

An accountant was found dead in a hotel bathtub with his face covered by duct tape in what authorities say was a suicide.Paul Mento, 52, worked for The Associated Press for 26 years, including more than 15 as budget director. His body was discovered Monday afternoon at a Best Western in Brooklyn by a hotel [...]

Sicily Mafia ‘restoring US links’

Sicily’s Mafia is rebuilding its networks in the US, according to an Italian parliamentary report. The report says Cosa Nostra has been sending people to the US to form alliances with families with which it had lost contact in the 1980s. It says that while the mob maintains a foothold in the lucrative drugs trade, [...]

Record-high ratio of Americans in prison

For the first time in U.S. history, more than one of every 100 adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report documenting America’s rank as the world’s No. 1 incarcerator. It urges states to curtail corrections spending by placing fewer low-risk offenders behind bars.
Using state-by-state data, the report says 2,319,258 Americans were [...]

‘Bird Boy’ Found In Russia

A young boy is close to being more bird than human because he was never spoken to while living in a virtual aviary. Authorities say the 7-year-old boy’s only form of communication was “chirping” after spending his life in a bird cage-filled apartment with a mother who treated him like one of her pets.The “bird-boy” [...]