Russia poised to breach mysterious Antarctic lake

For 15 million years, an icebound lake has remained sealed deep beneath Antarctica’s frozen crust, possibly hiding prehistoric or unknown life. Now Russian scientists are on the brink of piercing through to its secrets.

“There’s only a bit left to go,” Alexei Turkeyev, chief of the Russian polar Vostok Station, told Reuters by satellite phone. His team has drilled for weeks in a race to reach the lake, 3,750 meters (12,000 ft) beneath the polar ice cap, before the end of the brief Antarctic summer.

It was here that the coldest temperature ever found on Earth — minus 89.2 Celsius (minus 128.6 Fahrenheit) — was recorded.

With the rapid onset of winter, scientists will be forced to leave on the last flight out for this season, on Feb 6.

“It’s minus 40 (Celsius) outside,” Turkeyev said. “But whatever, we’re working. We’re feeling good. There’s only 5 meters left until we get to the lake so it’ll all be very soon.”

Scientists suspect the lake’s depths will reveal new life forms, show how the planet was before the ice age and how life evolved. It could offer a glimpse at what conditions for life exist in the similar extremes of Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“It’s like exploring an alien planet where no one has been before. We don’t know what we’ll find,” said Valery Lukin of Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg, which oversees the expedition. …

OASIS UNDER THE ICE

Lake Vostok, about the size of Lake Baikal in Siberia, is the largest, deepest and most isolated of Antarctica’s 150 subglacial lakes. It is supersaturated with oxygen, resembling no other known environment on Earth.

“The Russians are leading the way with a torch,” said John Priscu of Montana State University, a chief scientist with the U.S. program to explore another Antarctic lake.

Beneath the endless white landscape, Priscu suspects creatures may lurk, far from the sunlight, around thermal vents in the depths of Lake Vostok.

“I think Lake Vostok is an oasis under the ice sheet for life. It would be really wild to thoroughly sample… But until we learn how to get into the system cleanly that’s an issue,” he told Reuters.

The low-lying, snow-drift buildings and radio towers of Vostok Station sit above the eponymous lake. The borehole, pumped full of Kerosene and Freon to keep it from freezing shut, hangs poised over the pristine lake.

The explorers now face the question: How do we go where no one has gone before without spoiling it or bringing back some foreign virus?

“I feel very excited but once we do it there is no going back,” Alexei Ekaikin, a scientist with the expedition said from Vostok Station. “Once you touch it, it will be touched forever.”

via NewsDaily: Russia poised to breach mysterious Antarctic lake.

Found: Stunning Roman super-highway built 1,900 years ago

It was a route once trod by legionnaires as they marched across a conquered land.

But, eventually, the Romans left Britain and the magnificent highway they created was reclaimed by nature and seemingly lost for ever.

Now, some 2,000 years after it was built, it has been uncovered in the depths of a forest in Dorset.

And, remarkably, it shows no sign of the potholes that blight our modern roads.

Constructed by the Roman invaders as part of a route from London (Londinium) to Exeter (Isca), the 85ft wide earthwork stands more than 15ft high and consists of a sweeping road with deep ditches at the side.

It was so densely covered by trees, however, that although its existence was known about, it simply could not be found until now.

One of the country’s first roads, it was uncovered when the Forestry Commission, acting on advice from English Heritage expert Peter Addison, cleared the Norway spruce fir trees in Puddletown Forest.

Mr Addison said it was the biggest Roman road he had come across and that it was probably designed to make a statement. It is thought that it might have been built shortly after the Roman conquest in the first century and its scale would have been chosen to intimidate people living nearby. …

via Motorway maximus: Unearthed, a stunning Roman super-highway built 1,900 years ago | Mail Online.

Sicily couple murdered man with butter

A Sicilian couple thought they had the perfect weapon to get rid of her ex-husband — a slab of butter which would melt after they asphyxiated him, the Corriere della Sera newspaper reported Saturday.

But a post-mortem found remains of the butter in the airways of Calogero Lo Cocco and the pair were unmasked, the paper said.

On Wednesday Lo Cocco, 40, had gone back to the marital home he had not visited since his divorce, where his ex-wife lived with her new boyfriend at Campobello di Licata near Agrigente in southern Sicily.

They had set upon him and suffocated him with the butter, before claiming he had arrived drunk and attacked them, forcing them to tie him up, when he had suddenly collapsed and died.

via Sicily couple murdered man with butter – Yahoo! News UK.

What is that quote from the Princess Bride? “Never match wits with a Sicilian when death is on the line!”

Pope can no longer donate organs: Vatican

Pope Benedict has a soft spot in his heart for organ donations but his body parts can’t be donated to save lives after he dies, the Vatican says.

A doctor in Germany had been using the fact that the pope possessed an organ donors’ card from a medical association to advocate the practice. The Vatican asked him to stop but he did not.

To settle the matter, the pope’s secretary, Monsignor Georg Gaenswein, sent a letter to the doctor and the missive was reported in the German program of Vatican Radio.

“It’s true that the pope owns an organ donor card … but contrary to public opinion, the card issued back in the 1970s became de facto invalid with Cardinal Ratzinger’s election to the papacy,” Vatican Radio quoted from the letter.

In 1999, six years before he was elected to the papacy, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger disclosed that he always carried an organ donor’s card with him and encouraged the practice as “an act of love.”

Vatican officials say that after a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire Church and must be buried intact. Furthermore, if papal organs were donated, they would become relics in other bodies if he were eventually made a saint.

via Pope can no longer donate organs: Vatican – Yahoo! News.

Minnesota Ice Fishermen Catch Scuba Diver on Lake

A pair of ice fishermen thought they had caught a monster fish — but they got an even bigger surprise than they bargained for at the end of the line.

Jason Mechtel and Jeff Klein went out on Lake Waconia in Minnesota to try and lure a monster muskie, but they quickly got a shock, MyFoxTwinCities reported.

“I mean, it didn’t take two seconds and this rattle reel went off,” said Klein.

Soon, every line was going crazy. The pair thought they had a monster fish pulling their lines out until they looked down.

“I literally almost had a heart attack,” said Klein.

A hand broke the surface of the water.

“I didn’t know what to do — if I should shake it, or what,” said Mechtel.

A scuba diver whose safety line got snagged began sending rope up to them, and soon, they found their hook.

They removed the hook and sent the line back down, and were given a thumbs up by their aquatic acquaintance.

It turned out that three divers had gone into a hole just a short distance from where the two men were fishing, and had placed a flag indicating that they were down — but the two fishermen had never seen one before and didn’t know what it meant.

The diver later came by to apologize and offered a couple beers as a peace offering, the fishers said.

via Minnesota Ice Fishermen Catch Scuba Diver on Lake – FoxNews.com.

Toronto man cracked the code to scratch-lottery tickets

Jennifer Yang – …  Over their three decades of friendship, Hartzell has come to accept that Srivastava is simply smarter than most people. So when the 52-year-old geological statistician told him he could identify a winning scratch lottery ticket — without the use of pennies or fingernails — Hartzell believed him.

“There’s been so many things he’s done that after the fact, people go, ‘Oh yeah, why didn’t I see that?’ ” Hartzell said. “But Mo has one of those rare minds.”

Most people see a random jumble of numbers when they look at a scratch lottery ticket like Ontario’s “Tic Tac Toe” game. But for Srivastava, he saw that certain numbers appeared only once in the grids — and when these “singletons” lined up three in a row, chances were the ticket was a winner.

He calculated this held true 95 per cent of the time and notified the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp. Within days, they pulled the game — the first time in OLG history a recall was prompted by a customer-identified flaw. …

Srivastava bought 20 tickets and tied them, unscratched, into two bundles — the winners and losers. Just in case the rubber bands broke and the tickets got mixed up, he wrote a cover letter listing the serial numbers of each ticket and what his prediction was for it.

He couriered the package to the OLG. At this point, he finally felt free of the obsession that had gripped his imagination for days.

“I remember dropping them off and actually feeling that sense of this whole thing bleeding away,” he laughed. “I was like, let it go. This is about as crazy as it gets.”

But two hours later, he got a phone call. It was a member of the OLG’s security team.

“The first thing he says is, ‘We need to talk,’ ” Srivastava recalled.

Within days, the OLG pulled the game from their 10,000 retailers. Srivastava spent the next few months testing other lottery tickets from around North America, inputting data into spreadsheets and trying to determine how systemic the problem was. In 2007, he notified the OLG of a second scratch ticket that was possibly flawed, the popular Super Bingo game. The ticket was recalled as a “precautionary measure” and an independent audit was unable to prove it could be broken, said OLG spokesman Tony Bitonti.

In the end, he said, none of the lottery corporations or ticket printers were interested in fixing the problem he identified. The issue was brushed off as a “fluke” and one American ticket printer even threatened him with litigation, he said.

Today, Srivastava says it’s quite likely flawed tickets are still on store shelves. He sees potential for greater consequences —evidence suggests flawed lottery tickets are being exploited for money laundering — and is confused by the lack of will to remedy a problem he helped identify.

“If there are some people that are skimming winners, or more able to skim winners, what that means for everyone else is they’re getting more losers,” he said. “There’s kind of a cruel unfairness for the people left over who weren’t in on the trick.”

via Toronto man cracked the code to scratch-lottery tickets – thestar.com.

Male Rights Activist Calls for Valentine’s Day Boycott

David Moye – Any guy who gives flowers on Feb. 14 is a blooming idiot.

So says Marc Rudov, a relationship expert in Los Gatos, Calif., who is on a campaign to get American men to boycott Valentine’s Day.

According to Rudov, who has authored books such as “Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze or Jumper Cables,” believes Valentine’s Day should be canceled permanently because it promotes unequality of the sexes.”There’s nothing romantic about coercing men to oblige female entitlement,” Rudov said. “Valentine’s Day artificially and unilaterally caters to women. It’s the media’s annual male-bashing fest.”

Rudov believes the holiday is better named “Nomance Day” and says he expects all “real men” to boycott it.

This is the fifth year that Rudov has declared his boycott, and he admits it’s been an uphill battle.

“Have I made a dent?” Rudov rhetorically asked AOL News. “Absolutely not! That’s because men are wimps and they do what their women want. Guys [celebrate Valentine's Day] because they’re afraid they’ll get rejected in the bedroom.” …

via Male Rights Activist Calls for Valentine’s Day Boycott.

Freak Wave Kills Canadian Couple on Mexican Beach

A freak wave off Mexico’s Pacific coast killed a Canadian couple who were walking along the beach.Dale and Linda McDougall of Calgary, Alberta, were walking along the picturesque Divorce Beach in Cabo San Lucas with five relatives, including three grandchildren, The Vancouver Sun reported.The rogue wave struck the group, yanking several members of the family out to sea.”They were all standing on the beach holding hands and a rogue wave came and swept them all up,” said daughter-in-law Rebbekka McFadden.When Dale, 62, saw Linda, 59, in the water, he tried to rescue her, to no avail.”Linda started to drown and Dale started to try and get her. Unfortunately, neither of them could get out,” McFadden said.Sponsored LinksFamily members waved down passing boats, one of which managed to pick up Linda, The Winnipeg Free Press reported.Paramedics attempted to resuscitate Linda, but she was later declared dead at a nearby hospital. The Mexican navy recovered Dale’s body from the ocean that night.Dale worked for 25 years at a car dealership in Calgary, while Linda was a certified dog trainer. …

via Freak Wave Kills Canadian Couple on Mexican Beach.