Feet That Washed Ashore in Northwest Identified

This file photo obtained from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police shows shoes recovered after they washed ashore in Canada’s Pacific coast in 2008 with the remains of feet in them.

Two of the mysterious 12 feet that have washed ashore near Vancouver recently have been identified as belonging to a missing Canadian woman.

The woman, whose name was withheld at the request of her family, jumped to her death from the Pattullo Bridge in New Westminster, B.C., in April 2004, according to the Coroners Service.

The woman’s right foot was found in May 2008, and the left was in November 2008, at two different points in the Fraser River near Richmond, B.C. The feet, which police said detached naturally from the body over time, were in New Balance running shoes.

The Coroners Service identified the woman through a postmortem investigation and DNA analysis, according to a statement.

Eleven feet in all have washed ashore on the Northwestern coast since 2007, when the phenomenon began. Canadian authorities have said that the eight feet in their province are most likely the result of suicide bridge-jumpers in the area’s many water-ways. After being submerged in water and strong currents, bodies begin to deteriorate, leading to the separation of foot from leg.

Police say the buoyant, lightweight sneakers found on most of the feet account for the recent trend: as the feet separate from the body, the sneakers carry them up to the surface, where they then wash ashore. Heavier sneakers and shoes sink to the bottom.

The BC Coroners Service has now positively identified six of the feet as belonging to four individuals.

via Feet That Washed Ashore in Northwest Identified – ABC News.

Xenophyophores: Deepest ocean trench home to race of giant amoebas

Scientists have discovered a community of 4-inch amoebas living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the world’s oceans. During a July 2011 voyage to the Pacific Ocean chasm, researchers with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and National Geographic engineers deployed untethered landers, called dropcams, equipped with digital video and lights to explore the largely mysterious region of the deep sea.

The team documented the deepest known existence of xenophyophores, single-celled animals exclusively found in deep-sea environments. Xenophyophores are noteworthy for their size, with individual cells often exceeding 4 inches (10 centimeters), their extreme abundance on the seafloor and their role as hosts for a variety of organisms. …

The researchers spotted the life forms at depths up to 6.6 miles (10,641 meters) within the Sirena Deep of the Mariana Trench. The previous depth record for xenophyophores was approximately 4.7 miles (7,500 m) in the New Hebrides Trench, although sightings in the deepest portion of the Mariana Trench have been reported.

Scientists say xenophyophores are the largest individual cells in existence. Recent studies indicate that by trapping particles from the water, xenophyophores can concentrate high levels of lead, uranium and mercury and are thus likely resistant to large doses of heavy metals. They also are well suited to a life of darkness, low temperature and high pressure in the deep sea.

“The identification of these gigantic cells in one of the deepest marine environments on the planet opens up a whole new habitat for further study of biodiversity, biotechnological potential and extreme environment adaptation,” said Doug Bartlett, the Scripps marine microbiologist who organized the expedition.

The xenophyophores are just the tip of the deep-sea ecosystem iceberg. The expedition also found the deepest jellyfish observed to date, as well as other mysterious animals.

“As one of very few taxa found exclusively in the deep sea, the xenophyophores are emblematic of what the deep sea offers. They are fascinating giants that are highly adapted to extreme conditions but at the same time are very fragile and poorly studied,” Levin said. “These and many other structurally important organisms in the deep sea need our stewardship as human activities move to deeper waters.”

The dropcams used to observe the creatures contained an HD camera and lighting inside a glass bubble that can withstand the extreme pressures encountered at these depths. …

via Deepest ocean trench home to race of giant amoebas – CSMonitor.com.

FBI: Gangs infiltrated every branch of military

Link: business insider

Snow White is red, and about half the size of Pluto.

A mysterious little world nicknamed “Snow White” is covered in ice and may sport the wispy remnants of an atmosphere, a new study of a dwarf planet that lies outside Neptune has found.

Even though Snow White — officially known as 2007 OR10, and orbiting the sun as part of the Kuiper belt — is actually red, half of the surface is covered by water ice that probably spewed from ancient cryovolcanoes, researchers said.

The dwarf planet’s reddish hue likely comes from a thin layer of methane, the last gasps of an atmosphere that has been bleeding off into space for eons.

“You get to see this nice picture of what once was an active little world with water volcanoes and an atmosphere, and it’s now just frozen, dead, with an atmosphere that’s slowly slipping away,” the study’s lead author Mike Brown, of Caltech, said in a statement. [Looking Back on Killing Pluto: Q & A With Mike Brown]

Snow White is about half the size of Pluto. Like Pluto, it’s part of the Kuiper belt, which is the ring of icy bodies that orbit the sun beyond Neptune.

At the time of its discovery in 2007, Brown guessed that Snow White had broken off long ago from another dwarf planet, called Haumea. Haumea, a weird, football-shaped body, is sheathed in water ice, so Brown figured this dwarf planet was, too — hence the nickname Snow White.

However, follow-up observations soon showed that Snow White, like many other Kuiper Belt objects, is actually quite red. So Brown and his team weren’t expecting to find a lot of water ice when they used the 6.5-meter Magellan Baade Telescope in Chile to take a closer look at Snow White last year.

But that’s just what they saw. Spectral data showed that water ice abounded on Snow White’s surface.

“That was a big shock,” Brown said. “Water ice is not red.” …

via Tiny World ‘Snow White’ Has Water Ice and Maybe Atmosphere | Dwarf Planets & 2007 OR10 | Kuiper Belt & Outer Solar System | Space.com.

Oak Grove Cemetery: Bones And Caskets Popping Out At Iowa Graveyard

That which is buried six-feet-under, should probably remain six-feet-under.

So when one Iowa woman visited her relatives in Lehigh’s Oak Grove Cemetery only to find herself stepping onto the set of a horror film — complete with exposed bones and jutted out caskets — she felt nothing short of disturbed.

“To me it’s just the lowest form of disrespect,” Karen Long-Fladeboe, told Des Moines’ KCCI-8.

The graveyard’s resemblance to “Night Of The Living Dead” is now of public interest, but caretakers have actually known about the erosion problem for at least two years.

In 2009, heavy rains washed away the wall supporting part of the cemetery, leaving misplaced gravestones, bones, and coffins littered along the property.

“The whole hillside just dropped into the ravine, and there’s nothing nobody can do about it,” Phil Burgland, a township trustee, told local ABC affiliate WOI-DT. “The whole hillside just slid.”

Burgland says that he and the other trustees “don’t want a situation like this,” but the protocol for moving the deceased isn’t exactly cut and dry. Any relocating of a gravesite requires “cause of death, date of death, and next of kin,” according to Burgland. With the cemetery in shambles and many of the headstones worn over the course of a century, finding that information is almost like catching a ghost.

via Oak Grove Cemetery: Bones And Caskets Popping Out At Iowa Graveyard (VIDEO And PHOTOS).

Spooky.

Global warming confirmed by independent study

The Earth’s surface really is getting warmer, a new analysis by a US scientific group set up in the wake of the “Climategate” affair has concluded.

The Berkeley Earth Project has used new methods and some new data, but finds the same warming trend seen by groups such as the UK Met Office and Nasa.

The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.

“Climategate”, in 2009, involved claims global warming had been exaggerated.

Emails of University of East Anglia (UEA) climate scientists were hacked, posted online and used by critics to allege manipulation of climate change data.

The Berkeley group says it has also found evidence that changing sea temperatures in the north Atlantic may be a major reason why the Earth’s average temperature varies globally from year to year.

The project was established by University of California physics professor Richard Muller, who was concerned by claims that established teams of climate researchers had not been entirely open with their data.

He gathered a team of 10 scientists, mostly physicists, including such luminaries as Saul Perlmutter, winner of this year’s Nobel Physics Prize for research showing the Universe’s expansion is accelerating.

Funding came from a number of sources, including charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists, who have also donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.

“I was deeply concerned that the group [at UEA] had concealed discordant data,” Prof Muller told BBC News.

“Science is best done when the problems with the analysis are candidly shared.”

The group’s work also examined claims from “sceptical” bloggers that temperature data from weather stations did not show a true global warming trend.

The claim was that many stations have registered warming because they are located in or near cities, and those cities have been growing – the urban heat island effect.

The Berkeley group found about 40,000 weather stations around the world whose output has been recorded and stored in digital form.

It developed a new way of analysing the data to plot the global temperature trend over land since 1800.

What came out was a graph remarkably similar to those produced by the world’s three most important and established groups, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles. …

Two of those three records are maintained in the US, by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa).

The third is a collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), from which the e-mails that formed the basis of the “Climategate” furore were hacked two years ago.

“Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK,” said Prof Muller.

“This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.” …

via BBC News – Global warming ‘confirmed’ by independent study.

I don’t buy the idea that there is a conspiracy of many different kinds of scientists all over the world to invent fake global warming.

Steve Jobs refused cancer treatment for too long, says biographer

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs refused potentially life-saving cancer surgery for nine months, shrugging off his family’s protests and opting instead for alternative medicine, according to his biographer.

When Jobs eventually sought surgery, the rare form of pancreatic cancer had spread to the tissues surrounding the organ, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, said in an interview with 60 Minutes on CBS, to be aired on Sunday.

Jobs also played down the seriousness of his condition and told everyone he was cured but kept receiving treatment in secret, Isaacson said in the interview.

The biography hits bookstores on 24 October and emerged from scores of interviews with Jobs. It is expected to paint an unprecedented, no-holds-barred portrait of a man who fiercely guarded his privacy, but whose death ignited a global outpouring of grief and tribute.

The book reveals Jobs was bullied in school, tried various quirky diets as a teenager, and exhibited early strange behaviour such as staring at others without blinking, according to reports.

In his 60 Minutes interview, Isaacson confirmed details that had been speculated upon or widely reported, including that Jobs might have been cured of his “slow-growing” cancer had he sought professional treatment sooner, rather than resorting to unconventional means.

Jobs deeply regretted putting off a decision that might have ultimately saved his life, according to Isaacson.

“He tries to treat it with diet. He goes to spiritualists. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn’t get an operation,” Isaacson said in the interview.

“I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don’t want something to exist, you can have magical thinking,” he said. “We talked about this a lot.” …

via Steve Jobs refused cancer treatment for too long, says biographer | Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Xenophilius Lovegood actor to play the real behind the fraud William Shakespeare

Did he or didn’t he? That is the question. The debate over whether William Shakespeare could write his own name, let alone the body of works considered among the greatest in English literature, has consumed minds for more than 150 years.

Now a new film, Anonymous, by Independence Day director Roland Emmerich, is about to throw more fuel on the fire.

Anonymous, released on October 28, is set in the political snake-pit of Elizabethan England. It asserts that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the Bard’s plays. And Shakespeare, an actor, was a mere provincial frontman for the plays so Oxford’s authorship could remain secret.

The film includes a masterful performance from Rhys Ifans as the brooding genius Oxford, with the mother-and-daughter team of Joely Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave playing the young and old Queen Elizabeth. Ifans might seem a more obvious choice for the comic role of the buffoonish, scheming Shakespeare, but that part is taken by Rafe Spall, son of Timothy.

Anonymous is no wordy but drab costume drama. Emmerich brings his epic style to bear on the exterior shots, swooping over Tudor London in all its teeming glory and culminating in Elizabeth’s funeral procession along a frozen Thames, an icy finality to the story. …

via Was William Shakespeare a fraud? – Telegraph.

Vitamin B-based treatment for corneal disease may offer some patients a permanent solution

The cornea is normally rounded, but with keratoconus, may bulge and become cone-shaped.

Mary Wade – Patients in the United States who have the cornea-damaging disease keratoconus may soon be able to benefit from a new treatment that is already proving effective in Europe and other parts of the world. The treatment, called collagen crosslinking, improved vision in almost 70 percent of patients treated for keratoconus in a recent three-year clinical trial in Milan, Italy. The treatment is in clinical trials in the United States and is likely to receive FDA approval in 2012. The results of the Milan study are being presented today at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology in Orlando, Florida.

In a session titled Long-term Results of Corneal Crosslinking for Keratoconus, Paolo Vinciguerra, MD will describe the treatment and three-year follow up of more than 250 keratoconus patients who received collagen crosslinking at his clinic. Sixty-eight percent of the 500 eyes treated gained significant visual acuity, with their results remaining stable at the end of the follow-up period. Patients over age 18 were most likely to improve.

In the collagen crosslinking procedure, riboflavin (vitamin B) is applied to the cornea, which is then exposed to a specific form of ultraviolet light. Collagen fibers regenerate with new bonds forming between them, increasing corneal stiffness and strength. The treatment also combats the causes of keratoconus, reducing the chance that it will recur. The rest of the eye receives only minimal UV exposure during treatment. Dr. Vinciguerra’s new study confirms that adverse effects are rare. Previous research by his team indicated no loss of corneal endothelial cell, a measurement used to assess the safety of corneal treatments, in patients who received collagen crosslinking.

“For many people with keratoconus, collagen crosslinking can provide a better and more permanent solution to their vision problems,” said Dr. Vinciguerra. “Given that no current treatment in use in the U.S. offers permanent correction, this effective option represents a significant advance for corneal medicine.”

One in 2,000 people in the United States and worldwide are diagnosed with keratoconus, a disease that damages the collagen fibers that form the structure of the cornea, which is the outer surface of the eye. The cornea’s crucial task is to focus, or “refract,” incoming light toward the eye’s lens. To perform properly, the cornea needs to be rounded, like the surface of a ball. As keratoconus worsens and the cornea becomes thinner, it may bulge outward in a cone shape, causing nearsightedness and/or astigmatism, making clear vision impossible. As the number of fibers and links between them decline, the cornea loses up to 50 percent of its normal stiffness.

Standard treatments in the U.S., such as specialized eyeglasses, contact lenses, or implanted lenses, cannot permanently correct keratoconus, and none of these treatments address the underlying causes. Severe keratoconus often requires corneal transplant.

via Vitamin B-based treatment for corneal disease may offer some patients a permanent solution.

Video: Robot beats human at solving Rubik’s Cube puzzle

CubeStormer II solves the Rubik’s Cube puzzle faster than the human world record.

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The HuffingtonPost has this:

They’ve beat us in chess, and now comes one more sign that humanity will soon bow before a new mechanical overlord: A robot now holds the record for fastest time to solve Rubik’s Cube.

A robot made out of Legos and powered by an android smartphone claimed the title, reports CBS News.

Dubbed CubeStorm II, the robot, which was invented by David Gilday and Mike Dobson, finished the puzzle in 5.352 seconds, notes Gizmodo.

Australian Feliks Zemdegs previously set the Guinness World Record for solving the Rubik’s Cube in 5.66 seconds, according to the World Cubics Association.

CubeStorm II relies on a little help from algorithms along with an android app that runs on Samsung Galaxy SII, ARM processors and LEGO Mindstorm NXT kits.

SingularityHub.com mentions CubeStorm II will be unveiled at the semiconductor conference ARM TechCon 2011 next week in Santa Clara.