Tiny teenager from India is smallest girl in the world

A teenager from India who stands at a tiny 1ft 11in (58cm) tall is the smallest girl in the world.

Jyoti Amge, 14, is shorter than the average two-year-old child and only weighs 11lb (5kg).
She has a form of dwarfism called achondroplasia and won’t grow any taller than her current height.

Due to her size, Jyoti has to have clothes and jewellery made for her. She sleeps in a tiny bed and uses special plates and cutlery to eat, as normal-sized utensils are too big.

Despite this, she goes to a regular school in Nagpur, central India, where she has her own small desk and chair, and her classmates treat her like any other student.

Jyoti also shares common interests with other teenagers, with a love for DVDs and fashionable dresses.

She said: ‘I am proud of being small. I love all the attention I get. I’m not scared of being small and I don’t regret it.

‘I’m just the same as other people. I eat like you, dream like you. I don’t feel any different.’

Jyoti is treated like a mini-celebrity in her home town, where people flock to meet her and some even treat her like a goddess.

She will even be releasing an album with her favourite Indian pop star, the bhangra/rap star Mika Singh. Her mum, Ranjana Amge, 45, said: ‘When Jyoti was born, she seemed quite normal. We came to know about her disorder when she was five.

‘We consulted a specialist and he said she will be this size all of her life. Jyoti is small, yet cute, and we love her very much.’

Jyoti is ambitious and hopes to work as a Bollywood actress one day.

She said: ‘I would love to work in a big city like Mumbai, act in films and travel to London and America. I’m proud of being small. I love all the attention I get because of it.’

Her dad, Kishanji Amge, 52, said: ‘I can’t separate myself from her even for a single day. I love her very much.

‘She makes me proud. Lots of gurus come to see and bless her. They pray for her happiness and long life.’  - believe it or not

Blood of alligators and crocodiles has proteins with high antibacterial and antifungal activity

In the blood of alligators and crocodiles proteins were discovered with high antibacterial and antifungal activity.

Unlike men, alligators can combat fungi, viruses and bacteria without the body being previously subjected to these micro-organisms. The researchers have demonstrated the McNeese State University and Louisiana state university who collected the blood from alligators and analyzed the white blood cells, which are the cells appointed to immune defense.

According to the results of the study, presented to Congress by the American Chemical Society in New Orleans Corsican (USA), from these cells can be extracted a protein that has a high antibacterial activity. It is possible that this feature is due to an adjustment mechanism that leads to faster healing of injuries, since the alligators are frequently injured during the struggle for the conquest of territory.

The protein extract was tested on different types of bacteria, including microbes particularly resistant to antibiotics already in use as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, very widespread. The results are promising, given the good activities on six of the eight strains of Candida albicans which has been tested. The next step will be to identify the chemical structures of proteins and identify which are the most effective. According to the researchers, the white blood cells of alligators could contain at least four promising substances and, once understood, we can begin to think of the new antibiotic drugs.  - coolstuff

Flying with 600 helium balloons :: Amazing

An incredible achievement: Flying with 600 helium balloons at an altitude of 11,000 ft (4km). It’s wonderful to be at that altitude without any noisy engine! Amazing! - coolstuff

from www.c00lstuff.com posted with vodpod

Man ‘targeted by aliens’

A Bosnian man whose home has been hit an incredible five times by meteorites believes he is being targeted by aliens.

Experts at Belgrade University have confirmed that all the rocks Radivoje Lajic has handed over were meteorites.

They are now investigating local magnetic fields to try and work out what makes the property so attractive to the heavenly bodies.

But Mr Lajic, who has had a steel girder reinforced roof put on the house he owns in the northern village of Gornja Lamovite, has an alternative explanation.

He said: “I am obviously being targeted by extraterrestrials. I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit five times has to be deliberate.”

The first meteorite fell on his house in November last year and since then a further four have smashed into his home. The strikes always happen when it is raining heavily, never when there are clear skies.

He said: “I did not know what the strange-looking stones were at first but I have since had them all confirmed as meteorites by experts at Belgrade University.

“I am being targeted by aliens. They are playing games with me. I don’t know why they are doing this. When it rains I can’t sleep for worrying about another strike.” - ananova

See  Paranoid Thoughts Are Relatively Common

Rare seahorses breeding in Thames

Colonies of rare seahorses are living and breeding in the River Thames, conservationists have revealed.

The short-snouted variety are endangered and normally live around the Canary Islands and Italy.

Experts at London Zoo said the species had been found at Dagenham in east London and Tilbury and Southend in Essex, over the last 18 months.

The revelation coincided with new laws which came into force on Sunday to give the creatures protected status.

The seahorses, or Hippocampus hippocampus, are now protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.

They are usually found in shallow muddy waters, estuaries or seagrass beds and conservationists said their presence in the Thames is another good sign that the water quality of the river was improving. - bbc

Act repeal could make Franz Herzog von Bayern new King of England and Scotland

Gordon Brown is considering repealing the 1701 Act of Settlement as a way of healing a historic injustice by ending the prohibition against Catholics taking the throne.

But doing so would have the unforeseen consequence of making a 74-year-old German aristocrat the new King of England and Scotland.

Without the Act, Franz Herzog von Bayern, the current Duke of Bavaria, would be the rightful heir to the British Crown under the Stuart line.

The bachelor, who lives alone in the vast Nymphenberg Palace in Munich, is the blood descendant of the 17th-century King Charles I.

“If it [the Act] goes then the whole Catholic line is reinstated,” said Prof Daniel Szechi, a lecturer in early modern history at the University of Manchester.

“Franz becomes the rightful claimant to the throne. We would just exchange one German family for another one.”

The Act was introduced as part of the power struggle between Parliament, the Christian churches and the monarchy, then dominated by the House of Stuart.

It prohibits any Roman Catholic from having access to the throne, even through marriage. Once a person marries a “Papist” they shall be “for ever incapable to inherit, possess or enjoy the Crown”, it asserts.

The legislation effectively severed the Stuart line of succession, a family who favoured Catholicism, and switched it to their distant relatives the Hanoverians, from which our current Queen descends. James II, the son of King Charles, fled into exile. - tg

US Army toyed with telepathic ray gun

A recently declassified US Army report on the biological effects of non-lethal weapons reveals outlandish plans for “ray gun” devices, which would cause artificial fevers or beam voices into people’s heads.

The report titled “Bioeffects Of Selected Nonlethal Weapons” was released under the US Freedom of Information Act and is available on this website (pdf). The DoD has confirmed to New Scientist that it released the documents, which detail five different “maturing non-lethal technologies” using microwaves, lasers and sound.

Released by US Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade, Maryland, US, the 1998 report gives an overview of what was then the state of the art in directed energy weapons for crowd control and other applications.

Some of the technologies are conceptual, such as an electromagnetic pulse that causes a seizure like those experienced by people with epilepsy. Other ideas, like a microwave gun to “beam” words directly into people’s ears, have been tested. It is claimed that the so-called “Frey Effect” – using close-range microwaves to produce audible sounds in a person’s ears – has been used to project the spoken numbers 1 to 10 across a lab to volunteers’. - ns

First Lungless Frog Discovered

Researchers have confirmed the first case of complete lunglessness in a frog, according to a report in the April 8th issue of Current Biology. The aquatic frog Barbourula kalimantanensis apparently gets all the oxygen it needs through its skin.

Previously known from only two specimens, two new populations of the aquatic frog were found by the team during a recent expedition to Indonesian Borneo.

“We knew that we would have to be very lucky just to find the frog,” said David Bickford of the National University of Singapore. “People have been trying for 30 years. But when we did and I was doing the initial dissections — right there in the field — I have to say that I was very skeptical at first [that they would in fact lack lungs]. It just did not seem possible. We were all shocked when it turned out to be true for all the specimens we had from Kalimantan, Indonesia.

“The thing that struck me most then and now is that there are still major firsts (e.g., first lungless frog!) to be found out in the field,” he added. “All you have to do is go a little ways beyond what people have done before, and — voila!”

Of all tetrapods (animals with four limbs), lunglessness is only known to occur in amphibians. There are many lungless salamanders and a single species of caecilian, a limbless amphibian resembling an earthworm, known to science. Nevertheless, Bickford said, the complete loss of lungs is a particularly rare evolutionary event that has probably only occurred three times.

The discovery of lunglessness in a secretive Bornean frog supports the idea that lungs are a malleable trait in amphibians, which represent the evolutionary sister group to all other tetrapods, according to the researchers. Barboroula kalimantanensis lives in cold, fast-flowing water, they noted, so loss of lungs might be an adaptation to a combination of factors: a higher oxygen environment, the species’s presumed low metabolic rate, severe flattening of their bodies that increases the surface area of their skin, and selection for negative buoyancy–meaning that the frogs would rather sink than float.

The researchers said that further studies of this remarkable frog may be hampered by the species’ rarity and endangerment. They therefore strongly encourage conservation of the frogs’ remaining habitats.

“This is an endangered frog — that we know practically nothing about — with an amazing ability to breathe entirely through its skin, whose future is being destroyed by illegal gold mining by people who are marginalized and have no other means of supporting themselves,” Bickford said. “There are no simple answers to this problem.” -sd

Texas raid: 401 FLDS kids in custody

In the largest child welfare action undertaken here, or perhaps anywhere in the nation, officials said they now have temporary legal custody of 401 children taken from a polygamous sect’s ranch in Eldorado.
And 133 women are with the children at Fort Concho, a historic military base 45 miles from the sect’s compound in West Texas.
An affidavit explaining why the state moved to take custody was filed for each child late Monday, but 51st District Judge Barbara Walther had not yet decided whether they could be released under Texas law.
The judge did release copies of a new search warrant she signed at 10 p.m. on Sunday. - sltrib

If there is child abuse then address it, but control freaks need to let people live the way they want. Who cares if a man has more than one wife or a wife has more than one husband? Not me. Marriage as a lifetime commitment between one man and one woman does not work for a huge number of people. So, let people try other arrangements.