Woman who sang tune about fire charged with seven arsons near Philadelphia

Police in a Philadelphia suburb say a 19-year-old woman accused of arson was caught on a surveillance camera singing, “The fire department is going to be mad at me.”

Police say Amanda Gessner touched off seven blazes in trash and brush between 3 a.m. and 5:45 a.m. Tuesday within blocks of where she lives in Upper Darby Township.

Officials say Gessner was witnessed earlier in the evening at a local convenience store singing the ditty about the fire department and her tune was caught on the store’s surveillance camera.

One fire damaged a home where a family of four was sleeping but they escaped without injury.

Gessner is being held on US$100,000 bail, charged with arson and related offences.

Authorities say they have no reason to believe she is connected to the recent arsons in Coatesville, a few kilometres away.

via Woman who sang tune about fire charged with seven arsons near Philadelphia.

Archaeologists find rare intact mummy

Egyptian archaeologists found a rare intact mummy dating to pharaonic times when they opened a sealed limestone sarcophagus on Wednesday in the shadow of the world’s oldest standing step pyramid at Saqqara.

The well-preserved mummy, which escaped plunder by thieves in ancient times, could contain scores of gold amulets in the folds of its linen wrappings, Egypt’s chief archeologist Zahi Hawass said.

“It is a typical mummy of the 26th dynasty…This mummy should contain amulets, golden amulets, to help the deceased go to the afterlife,” Hawass told reporters after ascending from the mummy’s burial chamber, accessible only by a rope pulley.

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“To find an intact mummy inside a limestone sarcophagus is not common. It’s rare. It’s very rare,” he said.

Archaeologists found the ancient mummy when they removed the lid of its sarcophagus deep in a burial chamber in the desert on the western side of Saqqara, about 20 km (12 miles) south of Cairo. Thirty other mummies were also found in the same room.

The 26th dynasty ruled Egypt from about 664 to 525 BC, immediately before Persians occupied the area. Hawass said the mummy found in the sarcophagus, believed to be the original owner of the burial room, would undergo scans to determine if it did contain amulets.

via Archaeologists find rare intact mummy – Science- msnbc.com.

Genes fuel financial risk-taking

Some people who take big risks on the stock market can blame their genes for their behaviour, work suggests.

The US scientists say their findings might give an insight into one reason for the current economic slump.

The Northwestern University team found two genes that regulate the hormones dopamine and serotonin could predict whether a person would gamble.

The same genes have already been linked to addiction and negative emotions, PLoS ONE journal says.

In the study, 65 volunteers were asked to make investment decisions – some high risk and some low risk – as part of an experiment.

The investigators collected saliva from each participant to look at the DNA.

They discovered that the volunteers who took the most risks had a particular version of a dopamine-regulating gene and another gene that regulates serotonin.

Specifically, people with the short serotonin transporter 5-HTTLPR were far more cautious than those with the long version.

Similarly, people with the 7-repeat allele of the dopamine DRD4 gene took more risks than those with other versions of the same gene.

Although the researchers say less than 30% of variation across people in risk-taking comes from genetics, the rest comes from experience and upbringing, they believe their findings do shed some light on the current financial crisis.

via BBC NEWS | Health | Genes fuel financial risk-taking.

Debris Monitored After Satellite Collision

Scientists are keeping a close eye on orbital debris created when two communications satellites — one American, the other Russian — smashed into each other hundreds of miles above the Earth.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the unprecedented crash and whether any other satellites or even the Hubble Space Telescope are threatened.

The collision, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday, was the first high-speed impact between two intact spacecraft, NASA officials said.

“We knew this was going to happen eventually,” said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the international space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course.

A spokesman for the Russian civilian space agency Roscosmos, Alexander Vorobyev, said on state-controlled Channel I television that “for the international space station, at this time and in the near future, there’s no threat.”

There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days. …

The Iridium orbiter weighed 1,235 pounds (560 kilograms), he said, and the decommissioned Kosmos-2251 military communications craft weighed nearly a ton. The Kosmos was launched in 1993 and went out of service two years later in 1995, Yakushin said.

Some Soviet-built, nuclear-powered satellites long out of action in higher orbits may also be vulnerable to collisions, Lisov said. If one of them collides with the debris, the radioactive fallout would pose no threat to Earth, Lisov said, but its speeding wreckage could multiply the hazard to other satellites.

via Debris Monitored After Satellite Collision.

Insane Rainbow Lady from Northern California

What do you think, was she serious?