Google Earth 5: see Mars in 3D … including the face

The tour above doesn’t go visit the ‘Face on Mars’, but it’s well worth checking out.

Most people have seen the imagery released by NASA showing the Face in more detail, but there’s nothing quite like flying around and zooming in wherever you want.

I was going to create a screencast, but then I decided (a) I didn’t have time, and (b) you’re all big people who can download Google Earth and do it yourself.

So instead, here’s just a quick screenshot.

Click for a larger version

Remember too that you can use Google Earth as a sky-viewing program, to help spot constellations, stars and planets in the night sky from your location.

A great program for kids (even those with decades on Earth under their belt). – tdg

‘Longevity Gene’ Common Among People Living To 100 Years Old And Beyond

A variation in the gene FOXO3A has a positive effect on the life expectancy of humans, and is found much more often in people living to 100 and beyond – moreover, this appears to be true worldwide

A research group in the Faculty of Medicine at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel (CAU) has now confirmed this assumption by comparing DNA samples taken from 388 German centenarians with those from 731 younger people. The results of the study appear this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (“PNAS”).

Previously, in September 2008, an American research team led by Bradley J. Willcox had published in PNAS a study that indicated a higher frequency of this genetic variation in long-lived Americans of Japanese origin (ages 95 and above). Professor Almut Nebel, the scientific leader of the “Research Group for Healthy Ageing” at Kiel, comments: “That published result is only of scientific value if it can be confirmed in a study with an independently chosen sample population. Without that there must still remain a tinge of doubt. We have now eliminated that uncertainty about the connection between FOXO3A and longevity, both by our results from the German sample study and by the support from our French partners in Paris, whose research on French centenarians showed the same trend. This discovery is of particular importance as there are genetic differences between Japanese and European people. We can now conclude that this gene is probably important as a factor in longevity throughout the world.”

FOXO3A is of great interest for genetic research on ageing, since it was reported in the 1990s that the gene was connected with ageing processes in worms and flies. It is because of those observations that the Kiel research group at the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology has been working for a long time on variations of this gene in humans.”The most difficult problem is to get enough old people, especially those aged 100 or more, to take part in such a study. Interestingly, the genetic effects are much more evident in 100-year-olds than in 95-year-olds”, notes the first author of the report, Dr. Friederike Flachsbart of the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Kiel University. However, through the support of the Schleswig Holstein biobank Popgen, which now contains over 660 DNA samples from centenarians, the institute in Kiel has access to one of the world’s largest collections of DNA samples from long-lived research subjects.

via ‘Longevity Gene’ Common Among People Living To 100 Years Old And Beyond.

Masked Man Robs Convenience Stores With Klingon Sword

Colorado Springs police are looking for a man who hit two 7-Eleven convenience stores early Wednesday, armed with a Klingon sword.

The first robbery was reported at 1:50 a.m., at 145 N Spruce St. The clerk told police a white man in his 20s, wearing a black mask, black jacket, and blue jeans, entered the store with a weapon the clerk recognized from the Star Trek TV series.

The robber demanded money and left with an undisclosed amount.

A half hour later, police received a call from a 7-Eleven at 2407 N. Union Blvd., where a man matching the previous description entered the store with a similar weapon. He also demanded money from the store clerk. The clerk refused and the robber “transported” himself out of the store on foot.

Both clerks described the weapon as a Star Trek Klingon-type sword, called a “Batleth.”

Neither clerk was injured in the robberies.

Officers are reviewing the surveillance tapes from inside the store but Lt. David Whitlock said he does not plan to release the video or photographs “at this time.”

via Masked Man Robs Convenience Stores With Klingon Sword – Denver News Story – KMGH Denver.

Cylinder-shaped UFO hovers 250 feet over PA town

JAN. 3, 2009 – A cylinder-shaped UFO hovered just 250 feet above the ground here in broad daylight as a man watched from his car in this small community just outside of Greensburg.

Ufologist Stan Gordon got the witness call soon after the event – which occured at about 1:30 p.m. He said the witness – a businesman who was traveling in the area – first saw the object on the opposite side of Route 30 from Greensburg’s Westmoreland Mall – where the two-lane Donahoe Road winds behind a Sheraton Hotel into the country side.

The man was driving along Donahoe Road when he saw the object at a low level moving from his right to left. He made a left turn onto Crows Nest Road and stopped in the middle of the road to get a better look at it. The man moved a little further down the road and was eventually about 250 feet from the object, which hovered about 250 in the air.

… The 2009 year has started out with a detailed, low level daylight UFO observation. The incident occurred on January 3, 2009, at about 1:30 p.m., near the small community of Bovard, in Westmoreland County, which is located just a few miles from the city of Greensburg. The witness is a businessman who was traveling through the area at the time. The man was driving his vehicle down Donahoe Road and was talking on the cell phone when he noticed, to his left, what he thought was an aircraft moving very low across the sky.  The aerial object appeared to be moving over Bovard toward the tunnel, so it was moving from the right toward the left.  The driver made a left off of Donahoe Road, and turned onto Crows Nest Road, from where the object could be seen ahead. He was so dazed by what he was observing, that he stopped in the middle of the road.

After the initial phone call from the witness, we met at the location of the sighting where I conducted the second interview . I was told that the object seemed to be hovering just above the trees and the railroad trestle. The witness watched the object hover, and was trying to rationalize to himself what this object was. The man described what he saw as appearing bright metallic, and something like a cylinder in shape, “kind of like a hot dog with a fin on the back.”

The witness told me that he drove a little further down the road to get a closer look from where he could see the object unobstructed.  The witness estimated that he was about 250 feet away from the object. He also felt that the object was also about 250 feet in the air.

As he watched, the object inverted itself.  As it was explained to me, the object flipped up from the bottom to the top. The witness stated, “when it inverted, and the fin disappeared, it looked like a totally different craft.” The object looked more like a saucer with some type of ridges or bumps, or rivets on it,  which appeared to define the object. These structures could possibly have been ports, windows, or circles.

They were seemingly rounded, about 10 to 12 in number, and were evenly spaced. They were located toward the lower edge of the object, but apparently not underneath it. From the observer’s distance to the object, he estimated it to be about 15 to 20 feet in length, and  it did not appear to be very wide.

As the object hovered up and down, it dropped to about 150-200 feet in the air. It then seem to come to a complete stop. It continued to hover about 10 seconds over trees, then the object suddenly moved from a hovering level position, then moved to the left, then “in a backwards J-shape motion, it shot up approximately 50 to 60 feet” higher in the sky. After the object had accelerated, it moved off in the direction of Greensburg.

The duration of the entire observation was about two minutes. The witness was very upset after his observation. He told me that he became very shaky and nervous. After his sighting, the man went home and told his family about what he had seen. He said they looked at him like he was nuts. He said that by then, his body was so shaken and nervous, ”and my stomach was completely sick.”

The witness had called in the initial report to see if others in the area had reported what he had seen. So far, this is the only report locally for that date. – examiner

Both parties move to aid homeowners

Four months after Congress tried to rescue the economy with a $700 billion bailout for the financial industry, Republicans and Democrats are suddenly competing to bail out financially struggling homeowners.

Having spent hundreds of billions of dollars rescuing financial institutions, only to see the economy spiral even deeper into crisis, liberal and conservative economists and lawmakers are pushing to redirect the economic stimulus bill to what they say is the core problem: the housing market.

Senate Republicans are seeking new tax breaks and up to $300 billion in mortgage subsidies to attract homebuyers. Democrats want to spend at least $50 billion on federal programs aimed at reducing mortgage foreclosures.

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The Obama administration is hammering out its own plan to spend $50 billion to $100 billion to prevent home foreclosures. And later this month, Democrats hope to pass a measure that would give bankruptcy judges the power to reduce monthly mortgage payments for homeowners who are in default.

There is a growing consensus among lawmakers in both parties that the deepening collapse of the housing market is at the heart of the country’s acute economic downturn.

But beneath the consensus over helping the housing market, there are huge differences over who should benefit under the competing plans. Democrats want to aim money directly at people in the greatest distress; Republicans want to aim money at almost all homebuyers, on the theory that a rising tide will eventually lift all boats.

“Most people recognize that housing itself is at the root of the current economic downturn,” said Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader. “We should fix this problem before we fix anything else.”

via NYT: Both parties move to aid homeowners – The New York Times- msnbc.com.

Countrywide has declined my second attempt at a loan modification because I can’t afford the payments based on my take home pay (which is the same, incidentally, as when I purchased the place.) They still are not offering a principle reduction via the Help For Homeowners plan, and they do not know when that will be available. So, I’m back to having a forclosure happen unless they are willing to work something else out. Time for another call to the hope line.

The Hope Now Alliance (888-995-HOPE) provides referrals to counselors approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Result: No hope. Countrywide is not doing principle reductions at this time. Next step is I get reviewed by laywers for a foreclosure, I get a sale date, then I get 60 to 9o days to get out. Meanwhile, I’ve put the place back on the market.

Exploding mobile phone kills Chinese man

A Chinese man was reportedly killed at a computer shop last Friday after the cell phone in his chest pocket exploded, severing a major artery in his neck and leading to massive blood loss.

According to local news reports, the man worked as a shop assistant at the store. An employee at a neighboring 7-11 convenience store told local media that she heard a loud bang and saw her colleague lying on the floor in a pool of blood. She said the man had recently swapped his mobile phone battery for a new one.

Police have not released the make or model of the phone. Some reports indicate the fatal explosion occurred at a Lenovo store in Guangzhou, China — although it’s not clear whether the shop was an official outlet or whether it just advertised Lenovo products.

Most reports of exploding handset batteries have involved low-quality third-party products, although that’s not always the case.

via Exploding mobile phone kills Chinese man • The Register.

No longer content to simply burn a nipple, an exploding cell phone has taken a man’s life. That one in South Korea didn’t count according to Gizmodo:

The South Korean man who was reportedly killed by an exploding cellphone battery, well, wasn’t. Apparently the damage to his lungs, heart, spine and ribs was too extensive to be caused by one measly cellphone. Still, he did have a melted phone in his breast pocket and they aren’t quite sure how exactly he got so messed up, but they’re pretty certain it wasn’t just his phone. Any hypotheses, super sleuths? [Yahoo News]

Vancouver Film School – My Top 5 Strange Short Film Picks

I’m enjoying some strange short films from the Vancouver Film School tonight on youTube. Here are my favorite five from all the ones I watched tonight:

Ross Jones runs a site with independent films. He wrote to me asking if I could let you all know about icewhole.com. I checked it out and thought you might like some of his favorites:

Check out a couple of my favourite films: ‘The Trip’ and ‘I love you, Joseff Hughes’ oh, and ‘E.T.A’.

“Love You, Joseff Hughes” was powerful and beautifully done. Independent films are a whole new world for me, a great source of brain food for those who crave newness. If you find a short film on line you think is amazing, post the link in a comment.

Iran launches homegrown satellite

Iran says it has launched its first domestically made satellite into orbit.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the launch had been successful and that with it Iran had “officially achieved a presence in space”.

The satellite, carried on a Safir-2 rocket, was meant for telecommunication and research purposes, state TV said.

A US state department official said the launch was of “great concern” and could lead to ballistic missile development. Iran insists its intent is peaceful.

France has also expressed concern, saying the technology used was “very similar” to that used in ballistic missiles.

Iran is subject to United Nations sanctions because some Western powers think it is trying to build a nuclear bomb.

Tehran denies that claim and says its nuclear ambitions are limited to the production of energy.

via BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iran launches homegrown satellite.

And also, YouTube seems to be knocked out right now… wow, strange… most video of the lauch is knocked out right now including Ap.org, … Ah, here’s one: Times.UK, and YouTube is back.  They say, “We are currently performing site maintenance. Be cool – we’ll be back 100% in a bit.”

Early Humans Had ‘Jaws Of Steel’

Your mother always told you not to use your teeth as tools to open something hard, and she was right. Human skulls have small faces and teeth and are not well-equipped to bite down forcefully on hard objects. Not so of our earliest ancestors, say scientists.

New research published in the February 2009 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals nut-cracking abilities in our 2.5-million-year-old relatives that enabled them to alter their diet to adapt to changes in food sources in their environment.

Mark Spencer, an Arizona State University assistant professor, and doctoral student Caitlin Schrein in ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change, are part of the international team of researchers who devised the study featured in the article “The feeding biomechanics and dietary ecology of Australopithecus africanus.” Using state-of-the-art computer modeling and simulation technology – the same kind engineers use to simulate how a car reacts to forces in a front-end collision – evolutionary scientists built a virtual model of the A. africanus skull and were able to see just how the jaw operated and what forces it could produce.

… hard nuts and seeds – were important survival strategies during a period of changing climates and food scarcity,” he added. “Our research shows that early, pre-stone tool human ancestors solved problems with their jaws that modern humans would have solved with tools.”

via Early Humans Had ‘Jaws Of Steel’.

Animal-human clones don’t work: study

Researchers who tried to use mouse, cow and rabbit eggs to make human clones said on Monday the effort failed to produce workable embryos but added that they showed human cloning should work in principle. Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly, said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology.

But using human cells did reprogram the egg cell or oocyte and activate the genes needed to make a viable embryo, Lanza and colleagues reported in the journal Cloning and Stem Cells. Several teams have tried to make animal-human hybrids as a source of embryonic stem cells, the master cells of the body. Because human eggs are scarce — it requires a surgical procedure to get them from a woman — some scientists came up with the idea of using animal egg cells. The cloning technique is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. The nucleus is removed from an egg cell and replaced with the nucleus from another type of cell from the donor animal or person who is to be cloned. Done right, the process starts the egg growing and dividing as if it had been fertilized by a sperm, but the resulting embryo carries mostly the DNA of the donor.

“The idea was to simply to plunk a patient’s DNA into an empty cow or rabbit egg — and presto — you reprogram the DNA back into a stem cell,” Lanza said in a telephone interview. But teams that have tried to do this have always ended up with what looks like a cell dividing over and over to become an embryo, but which eventually fizzles out. Mixing human and animal cells does not appear to program the egg properly …

“We got beautiful little hybrid embryos, but it didn’t work no matter how hard we tried.” … A mouse-human hybrid petered out after just one division. The cow and rabbit human hybrids went further, but stopped at the point when maternal DNA is supposed to kick in and turn the ball of cells into a proper embryo, Lanza said.

via NewsDaily: Animal-human clones don’t work: study.