Turtles on runway delay NYC flights

The speed of the world’s biggest jets was no match against the slow and steady pace of a group of turtles who delayed flights at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Wednesday morning.

A runway that juts out into a bay was closed for 35 minutes while 78 diamondback terrapin turtles, each weighing 2-3 pounds (1-2 kilograms), were removed, said a spokesman for airport operator The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

“They came up out of the water,” the spokesman said. “It happens, but it doesn’t happen a lot.”

The closure caused delays of 1-1/2 hours at the airport, which caters to about 48 million passengers a year. The turtles were taken away and released back into the wild — away from the airport.

via Turtles on runway delay NYC flights | Oddly Enough | STV News.

10,000-year-old seeds debunked, 10,000-year-old lemmings: real

The oldest viable seeds in the world, dating from the Pleistocene era, are not what we thought.

New dating techniques have revealed that the seeds, which have been grown into live Arctic lupine plants, are not 10,000 years old as believed.

Instead they are modern seeds which contaminated ancient rodent burrows.

However, it remains possible that plants may yet be grown from seeds trapped in ice age permafrost, says the scientist who debunked the record.

More than four decades ago, Canadian scientists published details in one of the world’s foremost scientific journals of how they discovered two dozen seeds of an Arctic lupine plant within ancient lemming burrows.

In Science, they described how these burrows, found at Miller Creek within the Yukon territory of western Canada, had been buried deep within frozen silt since the Pleistocene.

That made them over 10,000 years old. As well as rodent nests, faecal pellets and seeds, they also contained an ancient lemming skull, further confirming their old age.

Crucially, the seeds remained viable, as the scientists managed to germinate and cultivate normal healthy Arctic lupine (Lupinus arcticus) plants from them.

“These were considered to be the oldest viable seeds to have ever grown,” says Grant Zazula, a scientist working for the Yukon Palaeontology Program run by the Government of Yukon, based in Whitehorse, Canada.

via BBC – Earth News – ‘10,000-year-old’ seeds debunked.

Substance found on Easter Island raises life extension hopes

A plaque reminding of the discovery of rapamycin (sirolimus) on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), near Rano Kau. The plaque is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and reads: In this location were obtained, in January 1965, soil samples that allowed for the obtainment of rapamycin, a substance that inaugurated a new era for organ transplant patients.

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A drug discovered in the soil of a South Pacific island may help to fight the ageing process, research suggests.

When US scientists treated old mice with rapamycin it extended their expected lifespan by up to 38%.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, raise the prospect of being able to slow down the ageing process in older people.

However, a UK expert warned against using the drug to try to extend lifespan, as it can suppress immunity.

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Rapamycin was first discovered on Easter Island in the 1970s.

It is already used to prevent organ rejection in transplant patients, and in stents implanted into patients to keep their coronary arteries open. It is also being tested as a possible treatment for cancer.

Researchers at three centres in Texas, Michigan and Maine gave the drug to mice at an age equivalent to 60 in humans.

The mice were bred to mimic the genetic diversity and susceptibility to disease of humans as closely as possible.

Rapamycin extended the animals’ expected lifespan by between 28% and 38%.

The researchers estimated that in human terms this would be greater than the predicted increase in extra years of life, if both cancer and heart disease were prevented and cured.

Researcher Dr Arlan Richardson, of the Barshop Institute, said: “I’ve been in ageing research for 35 years and there have been many so-called ‘anti-ageing’ interventions over those years that were never successful.

“I never thought we would find an anti-ageing pill for people in my lifetime; however, rapamycin shows a great deal of promise to do just that.”

… Rapamycin appears to have a similar effect to restricting food intake, which has also been shown to boost longevity.

It targets a protein in cells called mTOR, which controls many processes involved in metabolism and response to stress.

The researchers had to find a way to re-formulate the drug so that it was stable enough to make it to the mice’s intestines before beginning to break down.

The original aim was to begin feeding the mice at four months of age, but the delay caused by developing the new formulation meant that feeding did not start until the animals were 20 months old.

The researchers thought the animals would be too old for the drug to have any effect – and were surprised when it did.

via BBC NEWS | Health | Tests raise life extension hopes.

Prankster strikes: Man trashes hotel room

Lisa Kantorski took the call from the person who claimed to be a front-desk clerk about a gas leak in their hotel room near Orlando International Airport.

She frantically relayed the information to her husband, Mark, an Indian River County deputy. He followed the caller’s instructions … and smashed the window of his room with a toilet tank.

“When I broke the window, I got suspicious,” Mark said. “It didn’t seem right, but she [Lisa] was panicking, so I continued.”

Just before 7 a.m. Monday, the Kantorskis had no idea they were the latest victims of a prankster — or pranksters — whose tricks are sweeping the nation. The unknown protagonists dupe otherwise rational people into doing outrageous things, including driving trucks through storefronts and breaking hotel windows to test fire alarms.

With Lisa clutching their three kids, Mark listened to the caller as he barked out more instructions:

Break the mirror on the wall. Check.

Use the lamp to bash in the wall to get to the trapped man on the other side. OK.

Throw the mattress out the window and jump for safety. Out the mattress went.

Room 204 of the Hilton Garden Inn on South Semoran Boulevard was a shambles.

“I’m not one to argue much with her,” Mark said. “When you slow down everything, the situation was kind of odd.”

The Kantorskis never got the chance to jump. Hilton Garden Inn manager Samir Patel appeared at the door to address a noise complaint, an Orlando police report states.

Patel broke the news to the Kantorskis: There was no gas leak.

When police officers arrived, Patel said he recently received a memo from his corporate office warning about “dangerous pranks” pulled at hotels in other states. Patel did not return calls Wednesday.

Police don’t know who called the Kantorskis, who were not arrested “because he was responding to what he believed to be an emergency,” said Sgt. Barbara Jones, a police spokeswoman.

via Prankster strikes: Man trashes hotel room – OrlandoSentinel.com.

Is Obesity An Oral Bacterial Disease?

A scientific team from The Forsyth Institute has discovered new links between certain oral bacteria and obesity. In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated that the salivary bacterial composition of overweight women differs from non-overweight women. This preliminary work may provide clues to interactions between oral bacteria and the pathology of obesity. This research may help investigators learn new avenues for fighting the obesity epidemic.This work will be published in the Journal of Dental Research.”There has been a world-wide explosion of obesity, with many contributing factors,” said Dr. J. Max Goodson, senior author of the study. “However, the inflammatory nature of the disease is also recognized. This led me to question potential unknown contributing causes of obesity. Could it be an epidemic involving an infectious agent?” “It is exciting to image the possibilities if oral bacteria are contributing to some types of obesity,” added Goodson.

… more than 98 percent of the overweight women could be identified by the presence of a single bacterial species, called Selenomanas noxia, at levels greater than 1.05 percent of the total salivary bacteria. These data suggest that the composition of salivary bacteria changes in overweight women. It seems likely that these bacterial species could serve as indicators of a developing overweight condition and possibly be related to the underlying causation.

via Is Obesity An Oral Bacterial Disease?.

The genus Selenomonas constitutes a group of motile crescent-shaped bacteria within the Veillonellaceae family and include species living in the gastrointestinal tracts of animals, in particular, the Ruminants. – wiki

The Selenomonas noxia bacteria is a

“species of motile and nonsporeforming anaerobic gram-negative rods that have deoxyribonucleic acids with guanine-plus-cytosine contents of 56 to 58 mol%, produce major amounts of propionic and acetic acids…” – sgmjournals

Strange Exits: Worker dies after fall into Hershey’s-bound chocolate

A temp worker at a Camden chocolate processing plant died this morning after he fell into an eight-foot vat that was mixing and melting chocolate to be used in Hershey’s candy.

Vincent Smith II, 29, of Camden, was standing atop a platform and tossing blocks of solid, raw chocolate into the tank, Jason Laughlin, spokesman for the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office, said.

The tank was heated at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and paddles inside stirred the chocolate as it was thrown in.

When Smith fell around 10:30 a.m., one of his three coworkers on the platform immediately rushed to turn the machine off and the two others tried to pull him out.

But Smith had been struck by one of the paddles, suffering fatal injuries. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and Camden firefighters pulled his chocolate-covered body out of the tank.

via Worker dies after fall into Hershey’s-bound chocolate | Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/08/2009.

Bigfoot is big fake in Fairfield

It goes by many names: Bigfoot, Sasquatch — the legendary half-human, half-ape creature that, according to legend, prowls the great northern woods of the U.S. and Canada.

Some insist, however, that the hairy beast is real. Sasquatch “sightings” have primarily been reported in the Northwest.

Until now, that is.

A woman driving on Unquowa Road about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday called police to report that she “almost hit Sasquatch,” which was standing in the middle of the road. She said it was 8 feet tall and very hairy, with a large body and “legs like tree trunks.” When she switched her headlights to highbeams, she said, the creature covered its face and ran into the woods.

The driver told police it was “human like,” but more “like an animal.”

Unlike other Sasquatch sightings, where the elusive beast melts back into the deep woods, this one was located in Fairfield.

Bigfoot turned out to be a big joke — a 16-year-old dressed in a gorillalike costume, police said. The teen told officers he was standing at the intersection of Unquowa and Sturges roads, waving at passing cars while friends watched.

A police officer escorted the sham Sasquatch back home and turned him over to his parents, who, the police report states, agreed he should have shown better judgment.

via Bigfoot is big fake in Fairfield – The Connecticut Post Online.

Mountain lays eggs as big as car tires?

Tourism chiefs in China are trying to attract visitors by claiming that a mountain lays eggs.

Officials at Gulu village, Guizhou province, claim a cliff of Gandeng Mountain has laid more than 100 eggs, reports Guizhou Metropolis News.

They claim the eggs, as big as car tyres, appear in ’sockets’ in the cliff around every two years.

Yang Shengjia, director of the local tourism bureau, said: “Another mountain egg is expected to be laid soon.

“If people, like visitors, can have long enough patience, they may view the astonishing scene of the mountain laying an egg.”

Locals say each socket produces an egg every 30 years and that eggs have recently appeared in March 1999, May 2003, June 2005, March 2007 and January 2009. – ananova.com

via News – A Step Beyond: ‘Mountain lays eggs as big as car tyres’.

Did the CIA Lie to Congress? About what?

The head of the CIA has admitted concealing “significant actions” from the US Congress over the past eight years, according to several Democrat members of the House intelligence committee.

Leon Panetta’s testimony was made behind closed doors, but yesterday the details of a letter written by Democrats to the intelligence chief discussing his committee appearance said the CIA had “misled members”.

Rush Holt, one of the signatories, would not identify the classified matter the CIA has been accused of lying about but said: “We wouldn’t be doing this over a trivial matter.” …

In May the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, accused the agency of intentionally misleading her by not telling her in a 2002 briefing about its use of waterboarding against a terrorism suspect. – guardian

Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon E. Panetta has told lawmakers that the agency “concealed significant actions” from Congress, according to a letter released Wednesday from seven Democratic lawmakers,” the Wall Street Journal writes. “The letter also contends that Mr. Panetta said CIA officials have misled Congress since 2001.” – msnbc

“Recently you testified that you have determined that top CIA officials have concealed significant actions from all members of Congress, and misled members for a number of years from 2001 to this week,” said the letter, signed by Eshoo and six other House Democrats — Reps. John Tierney of Massachusetts, Mike Thompson of California, Rush Holt of New Jersey, Alcee Hastings of Florida, Adam Smith of Washington and Janice Schakowsky of Illinois. Read the signed letter on Rep. Eshoo’s Web site – cnn

The mainstream press is focused on Pelosi and waterboarding, but isn’t the real point that torture was used to frame people for the attacks of 9/11? How far down the rabbit hole did Panetta lay this secret egg?

How Dinosaurs Got so BIG…

The secret to mega-dinosaurs’ impressive sizes may be that the reptiles used more of their energy for growing and less for keeping their bodies warm compared with some creatures.

A new model could help explain how some dinosaurs, such as long-necked sauropods, could have achieved masses of around 60 tons — about eight times the mass of an African elephant, the largest land animal alive today.

The two main factors that determine vertebrate size are the amount of available food and how the creature expends its energy, said researcher Brian K. McNab, a paleontologist at the University of Florida. For example, elephants can be quite large because they feed off grasses, a relatively abundant food supply as opposed to say, the nectar that hummingbirds and bees consume, McNab said.

Energy expenditure depends in part on how an organism controls its body temperature. Mammals and birds, which are warm-blooded, must expend energy to keep their internal body temperatures constant, and so they have a high metabolic rate. But cold-blooded creatures such as reptiles rely on their environment for body heat, and their internal temperature fluctuates depending on the surrounding conditions.

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Warm-blooded animals must eat a lot more than cold-blooded animals to produce their own body heat.

Whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded or cold-blooded has been a hotly debate issue among paleontologists. McNab attempted to answer this question by looking at what food resources were available to dinosaurs, and included this factor in his model that describes how vertebrate size, energy expenditure and food resources tie together.

If resources were much more abundant in the Mesozoic Era — the time period when the dinosaurs lived — than today, it may have been possible for dinosaurs to be warm-blooded, even though they would need to eat a lot to maintain their body temperature. Indeed, blue whales, the largest creatures thought to have ever lived on Earth, are warm-blooded. They fuel their 160-ton bodies by feeding off of the plentiful resources in marine environments.

However, McNab concluded this was not the case for dinosaurs.

“I think it was impossible for [dinosaurs] to have really high metabolic rates like mammals and birds, simply because the resources weren’t there,” he told LiveScience.

For example, there were no grasses in the Mesozoic, which are a major food source for herbivores, McNab said.

“How is it that dinosaurs got larger than mammals if the resources were either equal to or poorer than today? My argument is, it’s because they took most of the energy they consumed and put it into growth rather than into maintenance of a high body temperature,” he said.

So were dinosaurs cold-blooded? Not exactly, said McNab. He thinks that dinosaurs were “homeothermic,” somewhere in between warm and cold-blooded. They did not have a high metabolic rate, but their internal temperature did not fluctuate like that of cold-blooded creatures. Instead, their sheer size kept their body temperature constant.