Robbers in Dinant destroy building and kill themselves using too much dynamite trying to open ATM

In Dinant two men tried to rob a bank Friday night using dynamite. They used far too much and part of the building was blown up. One of the men was taken to hospital but died of his injuries. The other man was found dead under the rubble hours later.The two gangsters went to work about 3 am Saturday morning.

It looks like they wanted to blow up an automated teller machine but the force of the dynamite caused much of the building to collapse. One of the men was killed. The police were still searching the wreckage to see if there was a second body through the afternoon. The second body was finally recovered Saturday evening..

A delousing squad is also at the scene to make sure there is no dynamite left that did not explode. The bank safe and the money machine were undamaged by the blast.

via flandersnews.be: Body recovered from wreckage in Dinant.

Palau pioneers ‘shark sanctuary’

Palau is to create the world’s first “shark sanctuary”, banning all commercial shark fishing in its waters.

The President of the tiny Pacific republic, Johnson Toribiong, announced the sanctuary during Friday’s session of the UN General Assembly.

With half of the world’s oceanic sharks at risk of extinction, conservationists regard the move as “game-changing”.

It will protect about 600,000 sq km (230,000 sq miles) of ocean, an area about the size of France.

President Toribiong also called for a global ban on shark-finning, the practice of removing the fins at sea.

As many as 100 million sharks are killed each year around the world.

“These creatures are being slaughtered and are perhaps at the brink of extinction unless we take positive action to protect them,” said President Toribiong.

“Their physical beauty and strength, in my opinion, reflects the health of the oceans; they stand out,” he told BBC News from UN headquarters in New York.

The president also called for an end to bottom-trawling, a fishing method that can destroy valuable seafloor ecosystems such as coral reefs.

Local benefits

A number of developed nations have implemented catch limits and restrictions on shark finning.

Some developing countries such as The Maldives have also taken measures to protect the creatures; but Palau’s initiative takes things to a new level, according to conservationists close to the project.

…

“Palau has recognised how important sharks are to healthy marine environments,” said Matt Rand, director of global shark conservation at the Pew Environment Group.

“And they’ve decided to do what no other nation has done and declare their entire Exclusive Economic Zone a shark sanctuary.

“They are leading the world in shark conservation.”

Mr Rand said that about 130 threatened species of shark frequented waters close to Palau and would be likely to gain from the initiative.

Although the country has only 20,000 inhabitants, its territory encompasses 200 scattered islands, which means that its territorial waters are much bigger than many nations a thousand times more populous….

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Palau pioneers ‘shark sanctuary’.

New tunnel in Istanbul inadvertently unearths 1,000 year-old Byzantine ships

It’s a common sight in the traffic-clogged streets of Istanbul, a city that straddles two continents.

… The “radical system” city planners embarked on five years ago involved construction of a new subway tunnel beneath the Bosphorus Strait, the spectacular body of water that cuts this city in two. By the year 2025, engineers predict more than one million people a day will use the tunnel to travel between Istanbul’s Asian and European shores.”We will connect two continents, Asia and Europe,” said Nusret Ilbay, one of the many engineers working on the $3 billion Marmaray Tunnel Project. He was standing on scaffolding, overlooking a gaping 30-meter deep hole that will one day be a subway station on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. A concrete wall is all that holds back a churning river of sea water.

Watch video of the tunnel being constructed

“As you can see, some leakage on the wall face has been observed,” Ilbay explained on a tour of the construction site. “In order to overcome these leakages, we have applied chemical grouting.”

Legend has it, thousands of years ago Jason and the Argonauts narrowly escaped death sailing up the Bosphorus in search of the mythological Golden Fleece.

Today, engineers face equally daunting challenges building a tunnel beneath one of the world’s busiest shipping channels, at depths of up to 55 meters, in an active earthquake zone. …

First they dredged a trench on the bottom of the Bosphorus. Then, using divers and undersea cameras, they submerged and buried 11 massive pre-fabricated tunnel segments, almost all of them longer than a football field.

To enter the unfinished tunnel, visitors must climb down a steep staircase in a construction tower surrounded by water in the middle of the strait. During the descent, the temperature plummets and humidity rises.

Construction workers toil here in the gloom of this 1.4 kilometer long tube on the bottom of the sea, their welding torches spraying showers of sparks in the darkness.

One worker claimed that during the lunch break, when the machinery came to a stop, he could hear the sound of oil tanker and cargo ships’ engines as they motored past in the waters overhead.

As a precaution in the event of a catastrophic flood in the tunnel, engineers constructed an emergency bunker on the bottom of the sea. Stocked with food and water and equipped with a heavy water-proof door, the “emergency room” is supposed to protect survivors for up to 10 days, until they can be rescued.

But, in their rush to modernize Istanbul’s transport system, city planners ran into an unforeseen obstacle: history.

In Yenikapi, a neighborhood of textile factories and seedy hotels where one of the main transit stations for Istanbul’s new subway and commuter rail system was to be built, archaeologists discovered the lost Byzantine port of Theodosius.

It was originally built at the end of the 4th century AD by Emperor Theodosius I when Istanbul — then known as Constantinople — was the capital of the eastern Roman Empire. The port’s harbor silted over centuries ago, and eventually disappeared beneath subsequent layers of civilization. Until its rediscovery in 2004, archaeologists said they only knew about the port from ancient books.

“This was a big moment of joy and happiness for us, an unexplainable feeling,” recalls Professor Zeynep Kiziltan, the acting director of Istanbul’s Archaeology Museum

“At around one meter below sea level, we started finding the remains of ropes. As we continued [digging] a bit more, the remains of a boat surfaced.”

Since that discovery, armies of hundreds of laborers and archaeologists have been working in a giant pit, three shifts a day, seven days a week. The scale of the excavation is unusual in modern-day archaeology, says Cemal Pulak, an anthropologist from Texas A&M University’s nautical archaeology program.

“Its mind-boggling … it really looks like an Indiana Jones-type operation,” says Pulak, who has worked as a consultant on the excavation of the lost port.

The Yenikapi dig has uncovered an ancient armada: 34 Byzantine ships ranging from dating between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. In one tent, two workers carefully uncover the ancient wooden beams of a 40-meter long merchant vessel. A third man preserves the wood by keeping it moist, sprinkling the relics with water from a hose.

… Plans to travel beneath the Bosphorus have been delayed at least four years by the excavation of the Theodosious Port. The postponement has added untold millions of dollars have also been added to the cost of the entire project.

In the rush to move forward, the residents of Istanbul have accidentally uncovered a valuable piece of their city’s ancient past.via Tunnel links continents, uncovers ancient history – CNN.com.

NASA’s Spitzer Spots Clump Of Swirling Planetary Material

Image: This artist’s conception shows a lump of material in a swirling, planet-forming disk. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Astronomers have witnessed odd behavior around a young star. Something, perhaps another star or a planet, appears to be pushing a clump of planet-forming material around. The observations, made with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, offer a rare look into the early stages of planet formation.

Planets form out of swirling disks of gas and dust. Spitzer observed infrared light coming from one such disk around a young star, called LRLL 31, over a period of five months. To the astronomers’ surprise, the light varied in unexpected ways, and in as little time as one week. Planets take millions of years to form, so it’s rare to see anything change on time scales we humans can perceive.

One possible explanation is that a close companion to the star — either a star or a developing planet — could be shoving planet-forming material together, causing its thickness to vary as it spins around the star.

“We don’t know if planets have formed, or will form, but we are gaining a better understanding of the properties and dynamics of the fine dust that could either become, or indirectly shape, a planet,” said James Muzerolle of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md. Muzerolle is first author of a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “This is a unique, real-time glimpse into the lengthy process of building planets.”

via NASA’s Spitzer Spots Clump Of Swirling Planetary Material.

Body’s immune system response to dental plaque varies by gender and race

Will neglecting to brush your teeth damage more than just your smile? Can failing to attack dental plaque increase your risk of heart damage?

The answer to both questions may be yes if you are male and black, an Indiana University School of Dentistry study published in the current issue of the Journal of Dental Research reports.

The researchers, led by Michael Kowolik, B.D.S., Ph.D., professor of periodontics and associate dean for graduate education at the IU School of Dentistry on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, studied 128 black and white men and women and found that dental plaque accumulation did not result in a change in total white blood count, a known risk factor for adverse cardiac events. However, in black males the researchers noted a significant increase in the activity of neutrophils, the most common type of white blood cell and an essential part of the immune system.

Unlike most other studies that attempt to understand the link between oral inflammatory disease and heart disease risk, these study participants did not have periodontal disease. They were healthy individuals who by the study design were asked to neglect oral hygiene.

“We are talking about healthy people who simply neglect oral hygiene and if they were male and black, we found a response from their white blood cells, or neutrophils, that might be a cause for concern,” said Dr. Kowolik.

“If you get a bacterial infection anywhere in the body, billions of neutrophils come flooding out of your bone marrow to defend against the intruder. Our observation that with poor dental hygiene white blood cell activity increased in black men but not black women or whites of either sex suggests both gender and racial differences in the inflammatory response to dental plaque. This finding could help us identify individuals at greater risk for infections anywhere in the body including those affecting the heart,” he said.

Physicians have known for about a quarter of a century that one of the principal risk factors for a heart attack is an elevated white blood cell count. “While we did not observe higher white blood cell counts as the result of dental plaque accumulation, the increased activity of white blood cells, which we did find, may also carry a higher risk for heart disease,” he added.

via Body’s immune system response to dental plaque varies by gender and race.

I am filled with rage

I need some anger management.

As I clear out of my home, I find myself surprisingly angry.  Oh, I’m calm and  pleasant enough when talking to people, but rage is my true mental state this weekend.

There is something about selling all my stuff for pennies on the dollar on Craigslist, so I can fit into a small apartment after my failed home owning experiment, that is really pissing me off.

What do you do when you are incredibly angry?

I’m angry at the bank for talking me into a loan I could not afford, at the housing market for taking the biggest dive in history right after I bought my first home, and I’m angry at myself for biting off more loan than I could handle based on an overly optimistic view of the future.

Anger compounds.

Moving is hard. I fell down my stairs carrying a cabinet and damaged my knee.

Later I tore a muscle in my back and broke the desk that my ex got me in the process.

Damage to physical things sucks. Pain sucks.

Damage to my reputation hurts even more: I am incredibly ticked off at myself for screwing up something important that was totally unrelated to housing or relationships that I tried my best to get right … which I had screwed up two times previously … over the course of six months. My best effort was inadequate, and as a perfectionist, this REALLY gets my goat.

Then there is the leaking bleach container that just burned a nice  spot into my old dining room carpet. I hope the new owners like purple. Just an accident, I didn’t know it was leaking! Damn. They already bought it, why should I care? Why should I spend so much time cleaning it? Because it is the right thing to do.

On top of all of this, the short sale, I’m told, could still fall through 4 days before the close of escrow because the 2nd loan was sold to another holder who is not aware that they hold the loan, thus, they can’t acknowledge that they accept the short pay off.  Last little trick by the bank?

Ego. It must all be the fault of ego. Humility must be the answer.

Perhaps I would feel more humble if I took an old laptop out into the hills and shot it all to hell with an assortment of firearms while screaming, “DIE, DAMN YOU!! DIE!!!

Hmm.  This thought seems to help:

“No one can change the past. What did you learn? What will you do differently?”

That’s it. Make the changes and drop it. Let it be.

More help for the angry over at the Angry People of America  (APA) dot org.

Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible

A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings — the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level — appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.

The team used computational reconstruction of ancestral gene sequences, DNA synthesis, protein engineering and X-ray crystallography to resurrect and manipulate the gene for a key hormone receptor as it existed in our earliest vertebrate ancestors more than 400 million years ago. They found that over a rapid period of time, five random mutations made subtle modifications in the protein’s structure that were utterly incompatible with the receptor’s primordial form.

The discovery of evolutionary bridge burning implies that today’s versions of life on Earth may be neither ideal nor inevitable, said Joe Thornton, a professor in the UO’s Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards,” Thornton said, “but the issue has remained unresolved because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms. We solved those problems by studying the problem at the molecular level, where we can resurrect ancestral proteins as they existed long ago and use molecular manipulations to dissect the evolutionary process in both forward and reverse directions.”

via Mutations Make Evolution Irreversible: By Resurrecting Ancient Proteins, Researchers Find That Evolution Can Only Go Forward.

There is no such thing as “de-evolution” but traits that once existed to cope with a past environment can and will evolve again if the Earth’s environment changes back to what it once was (low oxygen, for example.)

French find prehistoric animal worship site

French archaeologists have discovered the oldest known place of worship dedicated to the dugong, or sea cow, on an island just north of Dubai, two research centres said Thursday.

The sanctuary believed to date back to 3,500 to 3,200 years BC was discovered on Akab island in the United Arab Emirates, 50 kilometres (30 miles) north of Dubai.

The French archaeological mission in the Emirates and the Umm al-Quwain museum there said in the specialist magazine Antiquity that the sanctuary on the deserted island provided key details “on the rituals of prehistoric coastal societies in the Gulf.”

Akab was a tuna fisherman’s village more than 6,500 years ago with circular buildings and a pile of dugong bones detected in the 1990s.

The scientifically named “Dugong dugon” still exists in the Gulf, with adults growing up to four metres (12 feet) long and weighing up to 400 kilogrammes (880 pounds).

The sanctuary was first thought to be an abattoir but on analysis was found to be a carefully constructed platform on two levels containing the remains of around 40 dugongs as well as tools, stones and ornaments.

The archeologists said the Akab monument was used for rituals celebrating the giant mammal and “has no parallel in neolithic times in other parts of the world.”

Similar structures have been found off the Australian coast but are only several hundred years old.

via French find prehistoric animal worship site – Yahoo! News.

How is it determined that the humans of that time were “worshiping” these animals?

White buck at home in the Forest

This buck could be the offspring of the white stag killed in 2007

I was saddened by the loss of our white stag in the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, in 2007 and I thought I would never have the opportunity to see and photograph one of these magnificent beasts in our forest again.

However, this was until Tuesday, 22 September, 2009, when I found and photographed a young pure white buck, probably around four years old which could well be the offspring of our fallen giant.

In Pictures: Fallow deer in the Forest of Dean

Although not native to Britain, the fallow deer have been present since the Normans introduced them to our forests during the 11th Century.

via BBC – Gloucestershire – White buck at home in the Forest.

Four-winged dino may be missing link in bird debate

The stunning remains of a “four-winged” dinosaur have confirmed that birds owe their ancestry to two-footed dinosaurs that lived millions of years ago, the world’s most famous fossil-hunter said.

Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing is staking the claim thanks to an astonishingly-preserved fossil of a bird-like dinosaur called Anchiornis huxleyi.

Until now, A. huxleyi was thought to be a primitive bird. It was presumed to have been a near-contemporary of Archaeopteryx, the first recognised bird, which flew around 150 million years ago.

But these opinions were based on an incomplete fossil.

The new, nearly-complete specimen gives a different picture, suggesting that A. huxleyi is millions of years older than Archaeopteryx and has both dinosaur and avian features.

It is the long-sought evidence that proves birds descended from theropod dinosaurs, argues Xu.

His team, whose work was announced late Thursday by the British journal Nature, describe a dinosaur with long feathers covering its arms, tail as well as its feet.

This is an arrangement that Xu says is “four-winged”, although no guarantee that the creature had aerial ability. In contrast, its elongated lower legs suggest it was a good runner.

Some evolutionary biologists have suggested that a four-winged condition played a role in the origin of flight, but the idea is opposed by others.

The plumage attachment is especially important because it shows how bird-like dinosaurs developed skeletal and other features enabling them to have feathers, the paper says.

via Four-winged dino may be missing link in bird debate – Yahoo! News.

Exceptionally well preserved dinosaur fossils uncovered in north-eastern China display the earliest known feathers.

The creatures are all more than 150 million years old.

The new finds are indisputably older than Archaeopteryx, the “oldest bird” recognised by science.

Professor Xu Xing and colleagues tell the journal Nature that this represents the final proof that dinosaurs were ancestral to birds.

The theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs has always been troubled by the absence of feathers more ancient than those on the famous Archaeopteryx.

This has given critics room to question the idea.

But the new fossils, which come from two separate locations, are in most cases about 10 million years older than the primitive Archaeopteryx discovered in the late 19th Century.

One of the new dinosaur specimens, named Anchiornis huxleyi, is spectacular in its preservation.

It has extensive plumage covering its arms and tail, and also its feet – a “four-winged” arrangement, says Professor Xu from the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing. …

- via bbc