Scientists baffled as ‘suicidal’ cows throw themselves off cliff in Switzerland

In the picturesque Swiss village of Lauterbrunnen, the locals are worried.

Dozens of alpine cows appear to be committing suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff near the small village in the Alps.

In the space of just three days, 28 cows and bulls have mysteriously died after they plunged hundreds of metres to rocks below where they were killed instantly.

In each case, local mountain rescue services using a helicopter had to be called in to remove the bodies because of the danger to the local groundwater of pollution.

A police spokesman said: ‘There are no large carnivores living in the Alps anymore who would once have disposed of the bodies so they have to be moved.

via Scientists baffled as ‘suicidal’ cows throw themselves off cliff in Switzerland | Mail Online.

How about the large carnivore which is the most dangerous to cows world wide? Are there any crazy humans around driving these poor cows over the cliff? Other thought is mad cow disease.

Giant cockroach is world’s heaviest insect? Naw.

…Australia’s giants give birth to live young, look after them in a burrow, make “great pets” and dine on leaves.

“Native to western NSW and north Queensland, they can reach 30 to 35g and more than 85mm in length,” Sydney University senior biology lecturer Nathan Lo said yesterday.

“They are the world’s heaviest cockroach and if not the heaviest of all insects, they are certainly a contender.

“They are different to other insects in a lot of ways and are totally unrelated to the American or German cockroaches found in Australian households.”Giants can live up to eight years, which is pretty amazing for an insect.

via Giant cockroach is world’s heaviest insect | The Daily Telegraph.

Another site says:

The heaviest insect in the world is the Goliath Beetle. It is found most commonly in tropical African rainforests, but can also survive in many other areas of Africa. Their size does vary with species. The largest species is “Goliathus goliath”, weighing on average, 3.5 ounces (nearly 100 grams).

Now THIS is probably the world’s heaviest insect species:

Father’s outrage over ‘pornographic’ candy wrappers

A father-of-two has spoken of his disgust after spotting fruity cartoon characters appearing to have sex on SWEET wrappers.

Simon Simpkins was buying Haribo MAOAM sour candies for his children when he noticed the ‘pornographic’ illustrations of limes, lemons and cherries romping with each other.

Mr Simpkins, of Pontefract, West Yorkshire, said: ‘The lemon and lime are locked in what appears to be a carnal encounter.

‘The lime, whom I assume to be the gentleman in this coupling, has a particularly lurid expression on his face.’

He said: ‘I demanded to see the shop manager and, during a heated exchange, my wife became quite distressed and had to sit down in the car park.’

A spokesman for Haribo said the ‘fun’ packaging of the sweets was introduced in Germany 2002 and added: ‘This jovial MAOAM man is very popular with fans, both young and old.’

via Father’s outrage over ‘pornographic’ Haribo MAOAM sweet wrappers | Mail Online.

Most popular comment:

I think she had to sit down because she thought “Oh God, my husband’s making an idiot of himself again!” – Carlos Karloff, Bonn, Germany, 29/8/2009 14:18

Facebook ‘London’ Scam Picking Up In Intensity

A phishing scam that seems to have hooked and hacked many Facebook members’ accounts since early this year appears to have picked up in intensity over the last month. Hackers are logging into users’ accounts, but it’s actually not the hacked member who falls victim to the lucrative scam. It’s their friends.

It was a bit of a surprise when my friend Blaire sent me a chat message on Facebook earlier this week to tell me she was in London when she had just come up to Manhattan two days earlier and mentioned nothing of the upcoming trip. It was even more surprising when she told me she was mugged and robbed at gunpoint a night earlier, and needed me to send her nearly a thousand bucks so she could get back to the U.S.

Turns out Blaire wasn’t even in London, she was at work in Baltimore, clueless to what was going on, and it didn’t take me long to realize someone had hacked into her account and was fishing for sympathetic friends who would open their wallets to help a friend in trouble.

“I need your help,” the fake Blaire asked me. “I want you to loan me.”

Consider that the line that gave it away.

“I want you to loan me.” Who says that?

I played along to get some more info so I could report the incident. They told me to wire them $975 and have it sent to 147, Cromwell Road, Kensington, London.

“The money will be sent to me via western union. I hope you have your credit card with you? Did you have it with you at the moment?” the hacker asked.

Yeah. I’m right on top of that. While I was quick to the punch line, a Google search turned up plenty of similar incidents, including ones about a few folks who weren’t so Web savvy and lost a wad of cash in an effort to reach out to a desperate friend.

via Facebook ‘London’ Scam Picking Up In Intensity – wcbstv.com.

Returning to renting after owning a home? Know your rights, and get a good deal.

There are many places for rent in my town right now.

Home owners returning to renting: In my town at least, Owners/Managers are making deals left and right on rentals. Most 2 bedroom places list for around $1250, but …  if you ask in the right way, the real going rate is about $1080. Some places give first month’s rent free. Some let you paint. Some have pools that are open all night.

Good news: I’ve been up front with each apartment about my bad credit due to a pending short sale. I’ve had several comments that this is better than a foreclosure, and most importantly, they’ve all been very sympathetic. Everyone I’ve talked to is aware of the housing market disaster and I’m told they will not hold my lack of payments to the bank against me in determining my eligibility for renting. A few places don’t even run credit checks. Most don’t charge a fee or will waive the fee for the credit check they do.

Did I mention that my house sold for $170,000? The short sale is going forward.  Home inspection was today. No word from my CPA yet about the California tax consequences of $130,000 debt cancellation income in 2009, that’s the looming question.

Watch for hidden fees! Apartments have started charging for:

• Water Sewer and Garbage (this is new, they can and some do!)
• Mandatory renter’s insurance (seems to be legal? )
• Parking (fully lame,  but legal, be sure to ask!)
• Making you pay for paint and carpet cleaning when you move out, even for normal wear and tear. (often this is NOT legal!)

As far as I can tell, these rate sheets that apartments have with painting and carpet cleaning fees built in are not legal because California Civil Code Section 1950.5(b),(e) prohibit withholding security deposits for normal wear and tear.

For many years, landlords, tenants and courts used the “clean as it was when the tenant moved in” standard as the practical standard for determining whether the departing tenant left the rental unit clean. A new law has made this practical standard the legal standard as well. (Civil Code Section 1950.5(b)(3). The new legal standard applies to tenancies for which the tenant’s right to occupy the unit began after January 1, 2003. ….

the tenant is not responsible for damages resulting from normal wear and tear (Civil Code Sections 1950.5(b),(e))

A landlord can withhold from the security deposit only those amounts that are reasonably necessary for these purposes. The security deposit cannot be used for repairing defects that existed in the unit before you moved in, for conditions caused by normal wear and tear during your tenancy or previous tenancies, or for cleaning a rental unit that is as clean as it was when you moved in.(Civil Code Sections 1950.5(b),(e).) A rental agreement or lease can never state that a security deposit is “nonrefundable.”¹⁹³ – ca.gov

Space probes fly in tandem to search for lunar water

To:

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Note:

A delicate joint manoeuvre between US and Indian space probes orbiting the moon could turn up evidence for valuable lunar water.

Some scientists suspect water ice – which would be a precious resource for future explorers – may be trapped in permanently shadowed craters at the moon’s poles.

Water ice can be distinguished from other materials by the way its radar echoes vary according to the position of the listener. In 1994, the US Clementine spacecraft bounced radar signals off the moon and found hints of the water-ice signature.

But it listened for the reflections jointly with a radio observatory on Earth, and getting unambiguous evidence for water requires more closely spaced listening posts. A recent joint experiment involving the US and Indian space agencies has provided a unique opportunity to get that data.

“It’s a unique experiment that can only be conducted by two spacecraft in orbit at the same time,” says Jason Crusan of NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.

On 20 August, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and Chandrayaan-1 were manoeuvred to within a few dozen kilometres of each other, which required close communication and coordination between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Once in proper formation, Chandrayaan-1 fired its radar beam at a crater near the moon’s north pole, while both spacecraft listened for the echoes. On Monday, Crusan said scientists were still analysing the data to make sure the experiment worked, but added that both spacecraft were in the right positions at the right time for it to go as planned.

This is probably the only time the two spacecraft will perform this kind of joint radar measurement, since LRO will soon move to a lower orbit than Chandrayaan-1 in order to begin its main observing phase.

But last week’s experiment marks a new level of space cooperation between the US and India. “I hope this is a sign of the future for how we will do cooperative exploration,” Crusan says. “I think it’s a good first step.”

via Space probes fly in tandem to search for lunar water – space – 25 August 2009 – New Scientist.

Will they find some soon? Some water on the moon?

Germany unveils 2,000-yr-old statue of horse’s head

German archaeologists on Thursday unveiled a bronze and gold horse’s head they said was believed to be a remnant of a 2000-year-old Roman statue.

A team digging at a former Roman town near Waldgirmes in central Germany found the life-sized head along with the foot of a rider on August 12.

“This bronze sculpture counts among the best pieces to have ever been found from the area of the former Roman empire,” said Eva Kuehne-Hoermann, Hesse’s state minister for science, at the unveiling in Frankfurt.

Experts say the statue dates from around 3 or 4 BC when the Roman outpost near Waldgirmes was set up, and probably depicts the Emperor Augustus.

After defeating the Romans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, German tribes broke up the statue and ritually disposed of the head in the well, the archaeologists said.

“Nowhere else is there a finding of this form or quality,” said Kuehne-Hoermann.

The horse’s bridle is embellished with images of Mars, god of War and Victoria, who personifies Victory.

via Germany unveils 2,000-yr-old statue of horse’s head | Science | Reuters.

>Take head.
(Horse Head Statue) Taken.   *** Your score has just increased! ****

>Examine head.
(Horse Head Statue) Examining the horse head statue reveals a secret compartment in the nose.

>Open nose.

(Horse Head Statue Compartment) Opened.
A swarm of 2,000 year old Trojan killer bees is unleashed. They are hungry. They consume you in seconds.
*** You have died. ***

Human Ingredients T-Shirt

Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox

Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal – but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.

The laws of physics, which describe everything from electricity to moving objects to energy conservation, are time-invariant. That is, the laws still hold if time is reversed. However, this time reversal symmetry is in direct contrast with everyday phenomena, where it’s obvious that time moves forward and not backward. For example, when milk is spilt, it can’t flow back up into the glass, and when pots are broken, their pieces can’t shatter back together. This irreversibility is formalized through the second law of thermodynamics, which says that entropy always increases or stays the same, but never decreases.

This contrast has created a reversibility paradox, also called Loschmidt’s paradox, which scientists have been trying to understand since Johann Loschmidt began considering the problem in 1876. Scientists have proposed many solutions to the conundrum, from trying to embed irreversibility in physical laws to postulating low-entropy initial states.

Maccone’s idea, published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, is a completely new approach to the paradox, based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is valid at all scales. He theoretically shows that entropy can both increase and decrease, but that it must always increase for phenomena that leave a trail of information behind. Entropy can decrease for certain phenomena (when correlated with an observer), but these phenomena won’t leave any information of their having happened. For these situations, it’s like the phenomena never happened at all, since they leave no evidence. As Maccone explains, the second law of thermodynamics is then reduced to a mere tautology: physics cannot study processes where entropy has decreased, due to a complete absence of information. The solution allows for time-reversible phenomena to exist (in agreement with the laws of physics), but not be observable (in agreement with the second law of thermodynamics).

via Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox.

Single molecule’s stunning image

The detailed chemical structure of a single molecule has been imaged for the first time, say researchers.

The physical shape of single carbon nanotubes has been outlined before, using similar techniques – but the new method even shows up chemical bonds.

Understanding structure on this scale could help in the design of many things on the molecular scale, particularly electronics or even drugs.

The IBM researchers report their findings in the journal Science.

It is the same group that in July reported the feat of measuring the charge on a single atom.

In both cases, a team from IBM Research Zurich used what is known as an atomic force microscope or AFM.

Their version of the device acts like a tiny tuning fork, with one of the prongs of the fork passing incredibly close to the sample and the other farther away.

When the fork is set vibrating, the prong nearest the sample will experience a minuscule shift in the frequency of its vibration, simply because it is getting close to the molecule.

Comparing the frequencies of the two prongs gives a measure of just how close the nearer prong is, effectively mapping out the molecule’s structure.

The measurement requires extremes of precision. In order to avoid the effects of stray gas molecules bounding around, or the general atomic-scale jiggling that room-temperature objects experience, the whole setup has to be kept under high vacuum and at blisteringly cold temperatures.

However, the tip of the AFM’s prong is not well-defined and isn’t necessarily sharp on the scale of single atoms. The effect of this bluntness is to blur the instrument’s images.

The researchers have now hit on the idea of deliberately picking up just one small molecule – made of one atom of carbon and one of oxygen – with the AFM tip, forming the sharpest, most well-defined tip possible.

Their measurement of a pentacene molecule using this carbon monoxide tip shows the bonds between the carbon atoms in five linked rings, and even suggests the bonds to the hydrogen atoms at the molecule’s periphery….

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Single molecule’s stunning image.