Inmates escape, steal cigarettes, return to prison

The state Department of Correction said two inmates escaped a minimum security prison in southwest middle Tennessee on Nov. 7 to steal cigarettes before returning, WSMV-TV in Nashville reported.

Adam Garland and Michael Queener are accused of escaping through a window in their cell at the Turney Center Annex and crawling under a fence.

While out, the men stole cigarettes and tobacco products from a convenience store before returning to the prison by going back through the window that they had escaped from, officials at the corrections department said.

Officers later discovered the contraband, and an investigation began.

Queener was serving a 10-year sentence for aggravated robbery. Garland was serving a five-year sentence for attempted aggravated burglary and theft.

The men will now face escape and burglary charges.

The corrections department said an internal review is under way.

via Inmates Escape, Steal Cigarettes, Return – News Story – KTVU San Francisco.

 

 

Agent showing house finds pile of bones

A real estate agent showing a house got to the basement and found about 100 human bones in a corner.

James Kenny, a forensic investigator with the Terrebonne Parish Coroner’s Office, says the bones found Saturday were so old that dirt had saturated the marrow inside them.

He says they probably are remains of Native Americans buried long before the house was built.

Kenny says he learned that the previous residents would often find bones while mowing the lawn or doing yard work, and would put them in the basement.

Half of the split-level house is on top of a circular mound, which parish officials suggest may be an Indian burial mound.

Neither the agent nor the home’s owner would talk to The Courier of Houma.

via Agent showing house finds pile of bones – Yahoo! News.

Obama to Robots: I’m Watching You

I don’t know about you, but I like a President who can throw a funny, geeky sci-fi reference once in a while. Clearly, el Comandante en Jefe has watched his Terminators and scary Big Dogs a few times. Obama said those words while presenting his “Educate to Innovate” campaign, which aims to promote the development of new inventions by students all around the country. – gizmodo

New Space Telescope to Watch the Sun

A new solar telescope, scheduled to launch this winter, will probe the sun’s atmosphere and inner workings, helping scientists better understand how solar storms.

During its five-year mission, the Earth-orbiting Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) will seek to reveal how the sun’s magnetic field works, what governs the ups and downs of the solar cycle and how solar activity affects Earth.

“The sun is a magnetic variable star that fluctuates on times scales ranging from a fraction of a second to billions of years,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead program scientist for the Living With a Star program (of which SDO is a part) at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. “SDO will show us how variable the sun really is and reveal the underlying physics of solar variability.”

Tracing magnetic fields

SDO will measure and observe the sun’s magnetic field, which powers all solar activity. Flow of hot, ionized gases in the sun’s convection zone — the region inside the sun where hot gas parcels rise and transport energy to the surface — act as electrical currents to generate the sun’s magnetic field.

The observatory will look at the fields at the surface of the sun and use those measurements to infer exactly where the fields originate inside the sun and where they are expressed as active regions, such as sunspots and coronal loops, to where they eject particles into space as coronal mass ejections and solar flares (both of which can impact the function of satellites and electrical grids on Earth).

The goal is to better understand how the sun’s magnetic field is generated and how its energy impacts solar radiation, which in turn affects the rest of the solar system, including Earth.

Ups and downs

SDO will also follow changes in the sun’s activity, which is known to rise and fall on a roughly 11-year cycle. A solar cycle is at its maximum when the greatest number of sunspots is counted in a year; the minimum occurs when the fewest are seen. Both of these markers can only be recognized after they have been passed.

And of course, the solar cycle doesn’t always follow that 11-year course. Between 1645 and 1715, for example, sunspots were rarely observed — a period called the Maunder Minimum — and Europe and North America both experienced bitterly cold winters — a time known as the “Little Ice Age.” (The sun is currently in a lull, with next maximum expected in 2013.)

- via Yahoo

Odd New Deep Sea Creatures (photos)

Chiasmodon niger, a deep sea fish sometimes called “the black swallower,” can devour fish larger than itself.

The funny looking roundnose grenadier.

As an adaptation to low temperatures, the Antarctic ice fish has no red blood pigments and no red blood cells.

Thus the fish’s blood is more fluid and the animal saves energy.

A cuttlefish, spotted at Lizard Island, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Deep Sea Oddities and More from the Census of Marine Life

The 10-year Census of Marine Life project aims to exhaustively image the creatures of the oceans, cataloging the many diverse life forms found in the sea. Five of the Census’s 14 field projects aim to plumb the depths of the ocean, and recently turned up a variety of outlandish deep sea creatures. Here, a look at the newly discovered creatures, as well as other strange marine life uncovered and documented by the project.

via Deep Sea Oddities and More from the Census of Marine Life – FOXNews.com.

Scared rich people in Tiburon to record license of every car entering or leaving town

A novel anti-crime surveillance program that will record the license plate number of every car entering and leaving Tiburon should be up and running within six months, officials said Thursday.

The Town Council voted 4-0 late Wednesday – with Vice Mayor Miles Berger absent – to install six cameras that recognize license plate characters on Tiburon Boulevard and Paradise Drive. Those are the only two roads that feed into the Tiburon peninsula, which also includes the smaller city of Belvedere on its southwestern edge.

Tiburon will be the first community in the Bay Area, and perhaps the country, to line its borders with the cameras, which have drawn criticism from privacy rights advocates.

Plates will be compared to databases of stolen or wanted cars, with matches triggering an immediate alert to local officers. If detectives are investigating a crime, they will be able to search the records to try to find possible suspects.

“I think it makes the community safer,” Police Chief Michael Cronin said. He said the town still needs to select a camera vendor and secure construction permits before installing the system.

Tiburon and Belvedere are affluent communities with low crime rates, and some residents at Wednesday’s meeting said the cameras would help keep it that way.

“If it lowers the crime rate even a little bit, then it’s a great idea,” said Yami Anolik, a 64-year-old real estate investor whose husband, Al Anolik, spoke in favor of the cameras at the meeting.

She said she did not share the privacy concerns of some of her neighbors, explaining, “If you’re driving on a public road, you gave up your privacy already. If you want to be private, stay at home.” …

via Tiburon to record every car coming and going.

The town of Tiburon should be moved to England. There are plenty of control freaks with snooping cameras on every corner over there. Yami Anolik of Tiburon may not value her privacy but others do. I don’t think she understands how this can be exploited by criminals. Off the top of my head, what if someone fakes Yami’s license plate on a car similar to hers while driving through her town and commits a robbery or a murder?  Will she understand then? When you give up privacy to get security, you get neither.

NSA helped with Windows 7 development

The National Security Agency (NSA) worked with Microsoft on the development of Windows 7, an agency official acknowledged yesterday during testimony before Congress.

“Working in partnership with Microsoft and elements of the Department of Defense, NSA leveraged our unique expertise and operational knowledge of system threats and vulnerabilities to enhance Microsoft’s operating system security guide without constraining the user to perform their everyday tasks, whether those tasks are being performed in the public or private sector,” Richard Schaeffer, the NSA's information assurance director, told the Senate’s Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security yesterday as part of a prepared statement.

“All this was done in coordination with the product release, not months or years later during the product lifecycle,” Schaeffer added. “This will improve the adoption of security advice, as it can be implemented during installation and then later managed through the emerging SCAP standards.”

Security Content Automation Protocol, or SCAP, is a set of standards for automating chores such as managing vulnerabilities and measuring security compliance. The National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) oversees the SCAP standards.

This is not the first time that the NSA has partnered with Microsoft during Windows development. In 2007, the agency confirmed that it had a hand in Windows Vista as part of an initiative to ensure that the operating system was secure from attack and would work with other government software. Before that, the NSA provided guidance on how best to secure Windows XP and Windows 2000. …

via NSA helped with Windows 7 development.