Crocodile on plane kills 19 passengers

A STOWAWAY crocodile on a flight escaped from its carrier bag and sparked an onboard stampede that caused the flight to crash, killing 19 passengers and crew.The croc had been hidden in a passenger’s sports bag – allegedly with plans to sell it – but it tore loose and ran amok, sparking panic.

A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.

A lone survivor from the Let 410 plane told the astonishing tale to investigators.

Ironically the crocodile also survived the crash but was later killed with a machete by rescuers sifting through the wreckage. …

via Crocodile on plane kills 19 passengers | News.com.au.

One-Third of U.S. Adults Could Have Diabetes by 2050: CDC

The number of American adults with diabetes could double or triple by 2050 if current trends continue, warns a federal government study released Friday.

The number of new diabetes cases a year will increase from 8 per 1,000 in 2008 to 15 per 1,000 in 2050, predicts the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2050, between one-fifth and one-third of all adults could have diabetes — with virtually all the increase attributed to type 2 diabetes, which is largely preventable.

An aging population, an increase in minority groups at higher risk for diabetes, and the fact that diabetes patients are living longer are among the reasons for the steep projected rise.

“These are alarming numbers that show how critical it is to change the course of type 2 diabetes,” Ann Albright, director of CDC’s Division of Diabetes Translation, said in an agency news release. “Successful programs to improve lifestyle choices on healthy eating and physical activity must be made more widely available, because the stakes are too high and the personal toll too devastating to fail.” …

via One-Third of U.S. Adults Could Have Diabetes by 2050: CDC.

Here are some tips to avoid diabetes in an article from Jimmy Parker. Basically, eat right, drink water, and exercise every day you can.

1. Eat healthy and wisely. Eating smaller portions is a great way to lose weight. You can make it look like more by using a smaller plate or a salad plate. Avoid snacking while you are cooking. Don’t be tempted to eat the unfinished food to keep from throwing it away or storing it in the refrigerator. Eat breakfast every day, and make your meal and snack times regular by having them at the same time each day.
2. Limit your meat, poultry, and fish intake to no more than three ounces a day. In size, this is equal to about the size of a pack of cards. Another good tip is to listen to music instead of watching TV while you are eating. If you are watching TV while you are eating, you are not aware of how much you are eating and will almost always overeat.
3. Skip desserts and refined sugars. When eating out, have a good-sized vegetable salad to take the edge off your appetite. When you receive your entrée, share it with your dinner companion, or ask for a take-home box immediately after receiving your meal. Have meals that have been stir fried or baked.
4. Use low-salt broth instead of oil and butter.
5. Drinking a full glass of water before eating will also help reduce your appetite.
6. If you are eating at a fast-food restaurant, choose the healthier foods, such as grilled chicken, salads and fruits.
7. Increase your exercise. Next to diet, exercise is vital to a healthy body especially for diabetics. If nothing else, try walking every day or swimming at your local club. Taking walks is a nice way to keep up with your friends and an enjoyable, healthy way to take a break from work related stress. If possible, avoid the elevator and take the stairs as much as you can. You can try to march in place if you cannot get outside for some reason.

 

Neanderthal children were supersized

Jennifer Viegas – Neanderthal youngsters that made it to the “terrible twos” were large, sturdy and toothy, a study of the remains of a Neanderthal infant suggests. The child almost survived to such an age, but instead died when it was just one and a half years old.

The remains of this infant — a lower jaw and teeth unearthed in a Belgian cave — are the youngest Neanderthal ever found in northwest Europe, according to a study that will appear in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Since the remains of two adults were also previously discovered in the cave, the fossil collection may represent a Neanderthal family.

If the trio said “cheese” for a family portrait, their smiles would have been hard to miss, since Neanderthal front teeth were larger than those for modern humans.

When the infant died, “he already possessed Neanderthal characteristics, notably a strong mandibular corpus (toothy part of the lower jaw),” lead author Isabelle Crevecoeur told Discovery News. …

via Neanderthal children were supersized – Technology & science – Science – msnbc.com.

Jane Austen’s writing style might not be hers + Thoughts on being unmarried

The elegant writing style of novelist Jane Austen may have been the work of her editor, an academic has claimed.

Professor Kathryn Sutherland of Oxford University reached her conclusion while studying 1,100 original handwritten pages of Austen’s unpublished writings.

The manuscripts, she states, feature blots, crossing outs and “a powerful counter-grammatical way of writing”.

She adds: “The polished punctuation and epigrammatic style we see in Emma and Persuasion is simply not there.”

Professor Sutherland of the Faculty of English Language and Literature claims her findings refute the notion of Austen as “a perfect stylist”.

It suggests, she continues, that someone else was “heavily involved” in the editing process.

She believes that person to be William Gifford, an editor who worked for Austen’s publisher John Murray II. …

Professor Sutherland, an Austen authority, said studying her unpublished manuscripts gave her “a more intimate appreciation” of the author’s talents.

The manuscripts, she went on, “reveal Austen to be an experimental and innovative writer, constantly trying new things.”

They also show her “to be even better at writing dialogue and conversation than the edited style of her published novels suggest.” …

via BBC News – Jane Austen’s style might not be hers, academic claims.

Here are the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice, which Austen started writing in 1796, available free to read on line.

Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Chapter 1

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

As a single man in possession of a good fortune who has never been married, I’d point out that fewer people are getting married these days (Oct 2006 statistics):

Married couples, whose numbers have been declining for decades as a proportion of American households, have finally slipped into a minority, according to an analysis of new census figures by The New York Times.

The American Community Survey, released this month by the Census Bureau, found that 49.7 percent, or 55.2 million, of the nation’s 111.1 million households in 2005 were made up of married couples — with and without children — just shy of a majority and down from more than 52 percent five years earlier.

The numbers by no means suggests marriage is dead or necessarily that a tipping point has been reached. The total number of married couples is higher than ever, and most Americans eventually marry. But marriage has been facing more competition. A growing number of adults are spending more of their lives single or living unmarried with partners, and the potential social and economic implications are profound.

via NYT

The number of married couples continues to fall, slowly. The survey for 2009 shows that 49.1 percent of households are married.

I joke that I am “the illegible bachelor” because I’m hard to read. I like having a girlfriend, but I’ve never met a woman who really “gets” me (pun on being single intended).

There are about 20 million single women in the USA in my age range right now according to CensusScope. Add these filters, however: An IQ in the  top 2% of country, musically gifted, emotionally stable, financially responsible, healthy, attractive, hot body, not religious, philosophical, interested in science and politics, loves learning, into science fiction, somewhat geeky and awkward … and madly in love with me… add those filters and my marriage prospects are down to … a certain number of compromises.

Nevertheless, I’m a life-long believer in the pursuit of happiness, a diurnal optimist.

Runway opens at world’s first spaceport

Nearly 400,000 classified Iraq war documents leaked

The documents on WikiLeak describing human rights abuses in Iraq may implicate British as well as US forces, a human rights lawyer has said. Photograph: Jehad Nga/Corbis

The UN has called on Barack Obama to order a full investigation of US forces’ involvement in human rights abuses in Iraq after a massive leak of military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes. …

Assange highlighted how the reports documented 109,000 deaths – including 66,000 civilians, of which 15,000 were previously undocumented. “That tremendous scale should not make us blind to the small human scale in this material. It is the deaths of one and two people per event that killed the overwhelming number of people in Iraq.”

The electronic archive is believed to emanate from the same dissident US army intelligence analyst who earlier this year is alleged to have leaked a smaller tranche of 90,000 logs chronicling bloody encounters and civilian killings in the Afghan war.

via GuardianUK

… The documents also suggest “hundreds” of civilians were killed at US military checkpoints after the invasion in 2003.  …. The death toll was put at 109,000, of whom 66,081 were civilians.The US government has criticised the leak, which is the largest in American military history. …

via BBC News

WikiLeaks full public release on its website of 400,000 classified military documents from Iraq war operations is shameful, the Pentagon press secretary, Geoff Morrell, said tonight. … More than 150,000 forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already in considerable danger, he said. “That danger is now exponentially multiplied as a result of this leak because it gives our enemies the wherewithal to look for vulnerabilities in how we operate and to exploit those opportunities and potentially kill our forces. That is just shameful.” …

“We have not always been perfect but we have been far better than anyone else has in the history of warfare,” he added, “and we continue to do everything in our power to prevent innocent civilians from being killed in the war zones.”

A U.S. Department of Defense task force has been combing through the Iraq data base to assess the damage that the WikiLeaks publication of the activity reports could pose to the U.S. military, Iraqi allies and on-going operations.

“Potentially what one could mine from a huge data base like this are vulnerabilities in terms of how we operate, our tactics, our techniques, our procedures, the capabilities of our equipment, how we respond in combat situations, response times – indeed how we cultivate sources,” Morrell said. “All of that, [given the] thinking and adaptive enemy we’ve been facing in Iraq and Afghanistan, can be used against us.”…

via Haaretz

Iraqi forces systematically beat and tortured prisoners …. Some of the files also detail serious and sexual assaults on women, on young people – including a boy of 16 who was hung from the ceiling and beaten – the old and vulnerable, including a disabled man whose damaged leg was deliberately attacked.

The 391,831 documents date from the start of 2004 to January 1, 2010, providing a ground-level view of the war written mostly by low-ranking officers in the field.

via Telegraph

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an August 16 letter to the head of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the leak had not revealed any “sensitive intelligence sources or methods.”

via Reuters

At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports (‘The Iraq War Logs’), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a ‘SIGACT’ or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.

The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 ‘civilians’; 23,984 ‘enemy’ (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 ‘host nation’ (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 ‘friendly’ (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths.That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the ‘Afghan War Diaries’, previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size.

via Wikileaks

Every death mapped (guardianUK):

• DATA: download details of every death in Iraq (Google Fusion tables)
• DATA: download our analysis spreadsheet

Year	Coalition forces	Iraqi forces	Civilians	Enemy	TOTAL DEATHS	TOTAL WOUNDED, all categories
2004	747	1,031	2,781	5,995	10,554	18,567
2005	856	2,256	5,746	3,594	12,452	24,850
2006	821	4,370	25,178	4,657	35,026	41,164
2007	919	4,718	23,333	6,793	35,763	55,804
2008	282	1,948	6,362	2,635	11,227	23,632
2009	146	873	2,681	310	4,010	12,365
TOTAL	3,771	15,196	66,081	23,984	109,032	176,382

Gold bullion – coming soon to a vending machine near you

Kate Connolly -

Apart from the gold-plated exterior – and the fact that they are bulletproof – they seem much like any other vending machine. But instead of condoms or chocolate bars, a network of “gold-to-go” machines dispenses 24-carat bullion in a smart presentation box.

Originally designed as a marketing device for an online gold trading business, the machines have become such a success that their inventor plans to build a global network, installing them everywhere from fitness centres to cruise ships. …

via Gold bullion – coming soon to a vending machine near you | Business | The Guardian.

‘Junk DNA’ uncovers the nature of our ancient ancestors

Image: A sea lamprey

The key to solving one of the great puzzles in evolutionary biology, the origin of vertebrates — animals with an internal skeleton made of bone — has been revealed in new research from Dartmouth College and the University of Bristol.

Vertebrates are the most anatomically and genetically complex of all organisms, but explaining how they achieved this complexity has vexed scientists. The study, published today [20 October] in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claims to have solved this scientific riddle by analysing the genomics of primitive living fishes such as sharks and lampreys, and their spineless relatives such as sea squirts.

Alysha Heimberg of Dartmouth College and colleagues studied the family relationships of primitive vertebrates. The team used microRNAs, a class of tiny molecules only recently discovered residing within what has usually been considered ‘junk DNA’, to show that lampreys and slime eels are distant relatives of jawed vertebrates.

Alysha said: “We learn from our results that lamprey and hagfish are equally related to jawed vertebrates and that hagfish are not representative of a more primitive vertebrate, which suggests that the ancestral vertebrate was more complex than anyone had previously thought. …

Professor Kevin Peterson of Dartmouth College said: “This study not only points the way to understanding the evolutionary origin of our own lineage, but it also helps us to understand how our own genome was assembled in deep time.”

via ‘Junk DNA’ uncovers the nature of our ancient ancestors.

Scientists find first real evidence you CAN see the future

Carol Pinchefsky – … Ever think you could predict the future? The good news is, you’re not crazy. The better news is—there’s now scientific evidence that backs you up.

In a test that we wouldn’t have believed had it not been documented, 100 Cornell students were shown 48 common nouns and given three seconds to observe and visualize each word. Then they were asked to type out as many words as they could remember. After that, a computer re-displayed half of those words, which the students then retyped.

You don’t have to be psychic to know where we’re going with this: It turns out that the students more likely recalled the words that they were later asked to retype.

In his original paper, Dr. Bem wrote, “The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words.”

… Einstein believed that the mere act of observing something here could affect something there, a phenomenon he called “spooky action at a distance.”

Similarly, modern quantum physics has demonstrated that light particles seem to know what lies ahead of them and will adjust their behavior accordingly, even though the future event hasn’t occurred yet.

The study will be published in an upcoming volume of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But if you can’t wait to read it, the adventurous among you can download the non-edited draft of Bem’s paper for yourselves. ….

via Scientists find first real evidence you CAN see the future | Blastr.