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Thursday, December 17, 2009

Dead Can Return, online


Until now, there have been few ways to control our virtual afterlives, but a Swedish internet site is launching a service that offers to manage e-mail and social networking accounts after death. `My Webwill' is set to test launch in Sweden and the US this month and go live in Britain and Germany at the start of next year. Users can set up a digital will with directions on what should happen to their e-mail and social network accounts after they die. It offers a range of services, including posting prepared messages, changing profile pictures or updating status bars. Users can also pre-write e-mails that will be passed on to designated receivers.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Say the Truth

Scientists have now discovered the physiological mechanisms in the brain, which they claim can enable predicting whether someone will break a promise. A team at the University of Zurich carried out an experiment in a brain scanner where the breach of a promise led both to monetary benefits for the promise breaker and to monetary costs for the partner. The study showed that there was increased activity in areas of the brain playing a vital role in processes of emotion and control.
The pattern suggests that breaking a promise triggers an emotional conflict in a promise breaker due to suppression of an honest response.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Sure find


A schoolgirl's lost dinner money has turned up 27 years after it went missing. Lisa O'Neill, 35, lost the handwritten brown envelope containing two £1 notes at school when she was eight years old. But 27 years on, builders have rediscovered the lost cash while refurbishing the cloakroom. Lisa, now Lisa Dugdale, a section manager at Marks & Spencer in Dumfries, said: "I got a shock when the school rang to tell me they'd found my dinner money. I don't remember losing it, but I know I was in the second year of school at the time." She plans to either frame one of the old £1 notes or put them in a trust fund for her baby.

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Circus pig

This pig can get an entry to a circus anytime. Gwen Howell discovered her pet's hidden talent after leaving her on the family's trampoline in their garden. Scarlet, a Hungarian mangalitza, loves bouncing around the orchard of her home in Shrewsbury, Shropshire. Howell, 46, an estate agent, said the piglet took over the hobby from their other pet pig Percy after he got too fat. She and husband Steve, 43, had placed Percy, who is also Scarlet's father, on their eight year-old daughter Alex's trampoline several months ago when they discovered its unique circus skills.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Low fat house

Skinniest house in Britain up for sale at £550,000 At just 66 inches wide, this house has been dubbed the `skinniest home in Britain', but its price is anything but small at more than half a million pounds. Estate agents are using the property's unusual size as its selling point, and have put it on the market at £549,950. The house on Goldhawk Road in Shepherd's Bush, west London, has five levels -a lower ground, ground, first, second and third floor, with 1,000 sq ft of space. It looks set to record a good price as a shortage of stock across London and low interest rates continue to drive prices up. The advertised price is £61,450 more than what it was sold for three years ago.

Saturday, December 05, 2009

What do cats do when their owners are away? There was one way to find out -"cat cams." Fifty house cats were given collar cameras that took a photo every 15 minutes. The results put a digital dent in some human theories about catnapping. Based on the photos, about 22 per cent of the cats' time was spent looking out of windows, 12 per cent was used to interact with other family pets and 8 per cent was spent climbing on chairs or kitty condos. Just 6 per cent of their hours were spent sleeping. Some 777 photos showed the cats looking at a TV, computer or DVDs 6 per cent of the time. Coming in at 5 per cent was playing with toys; eating or looking at food finished at 4 per cent.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Magic spys


The CIA hired America's most famous magician to write a manual on the arts of trickery, concealment and secret communication during the Cold War.
John Mulholland was paid $3,000 for tips on slipping a pill into the drink of the unsuspecting, tying shoelaces to give uncover signals and on the "surreptitious removal of objects." His guidance was part of a CIA effort, called MK-ULTRA, developed to counter Soviet mind-control and interrogation techniques. It involved dosing suspects with LSD, dropping depilatory powder into Fidel Castro's boots, or planting an explosive in his cigar.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Mouth of discovery

A new species of chameleon was discovered in an African forest living in the mouth of a snake. The tiny lizard came out of the mouth of a twig snake disturbed by Dr Andrew Marshall in Tanzania's Magombera forest.
He said, "I was doing conservation research when I came across this snake.
It saw me and fled, and as it did so spat out a chameleon. I took photos and showed them to a local herpetologist, who instantly recognised that it was a new species.''
The creature, small enough to sit in the palm of a hand, was named as Kinyongia magomberae by scientists.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Italy for sale


Benito Mussolini's granddaughter demanded a police investigation on Friday after the late Italian dictator's blood and brain were reportedly offered for sale on eBay, the online auction website. The initial asking price was 15,000 euros, or £13,000, but nobody had had a chance to bid, eBay said. The online auctioneer does not permit the sale of body parts on its website and removed the listing hours after it was posted. Miss Mussolini said the remains could have been stolen from a hospital in Milan where an autopsy was carried out on the dictator's body after he was killed and strung up by partisans at the end of the Second World War.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Tip thief


A couple who refused to leave a tip after receiving bad service in a Pennsylvania restaurant were arrested by police after being accused of theft. Leslie Pope and John Wagner were handcuffed and hauled away after they failed to leave the restaurant's mandatory 18 per cent gratuity -- totalling $16. The couple had joined six friends at Lehigh Pub for dinner. They said they had to wait almost an hour for their meal to arrive and that the service was so shoddy they had to get their own cutlery and napkins. They had to repeatedly ask for drink refills while their waitress smoked outside the pub.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Forest fugitive

France's most wanted fugitive ­ who escaped from prison in a cardboard box and lived in the woods for ten weeks ­ has been caught, the interior minister announced on Friday night.
Jean-Pierre Treiber, 47, a former forest worker and game-keeper, is accused of the kidnapping and double murder of a young couple in 2004. He had been on the run since September 8, when he shut himself into a cardboard box he had made and jumped from a lorry after it drove out of prison in Auxerre, Burgundy. His ability to survive in the forest had captured the French imagination ­ turning him into an anti-hero for some ­ but had become a source of great embarrassment to the police.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Chicken smuggler


An employee at a Johannesburg jewelers has been arrested after trying to smuggle gold out of the store in a cooked chicken. The unnamed worker was nabbed at a security checkpoint set up by Browns jewellers at its head office in northern Johannesburg. Police said the man had stuffed the unspecified amount of gold into the cooked bird and was attempting to leave the premises when he was caught. Following the alleged theft, Browns issued a company edict telling female workers to wear bras without underwire at its Dunkeld workshop. Belinda Phillips, the general manager, declined to say whether the new policy was a bid to avoid interference with metal detectors.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Facebook Hero

A New York teenager narrowly avoided a 25-year jail term for armed robbery thanks to a Facebook status update he posted about pancakes. Rodney Bradford was held by police for 13 days, accused of breaking into a Brooklyn residence, but was able to corroborate his alibi thanks a posting to his Facebook page that showed what he was doing at the time of the crime. Bradford's comment, teasing his girlfriend about not having joined him to eat pancakes and accompanied by a time-stamp, was probably instrumental in the district attorney's decision to drop the charges, his lawyer Robert Reuland said

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Carrot Monster


Vicki Larrieux, a 22-year-old student from Portsmouth, claims she is unable to keep to a healthy diet because she is frightened of vegetables. She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.
Larrieux survives on a diet of meat, potatoes, cereals and an occasional apple but refuses even a single slice of carrot on her dinner plate. "Every time I would see vegetables not just on my plate, but anywhere I would get feelings of panic, start sweating and my heart rate would shoot up.
Treatments for the condition include "psychological re-programming."

Mega Lottery


Two British ticket holders have become the country's biggest lottery winners after scooping a whopping £45,570,835.50 each in the latest EuroMillions draw. The only two winning tickets for the massive £91 million jackpot were bought in the UK so each ticket holder will get half the winnings, smashing the previous record of the highest lottery payout in the UK which previously was £35.4 million. The holders of the winning tickets now have 179 days to claim their prize and make this an official record in England.
In May this year a 25-year-old Spanish woman broke the world record of the highest lottery payout by becoming the biggest EuroMillions, ever, winner when she won £110 million.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Save Scooby-doo


Cartoons should be given movie-style age ratings to protect children from the violence shown in programmes such as Scooby Doo and Batman, a child safety expert has warned. A senior lecturer at Lincoln University, USA, said that risky behavior which would normally lead to injury is rarely shown to have negative consequences in cartoons. She claims to have found evidence that there children who watch violent programmes are more likely to engage in risky behavior and injure themselves. Among the programmes she deemed to contain the most risky behavior were Scooby-Doo, Batman, X-Men and Ben 10.
There have been some protests among children against this but they have failed to bring any change as thet are very localised, being limited to households and neighborhoods.

Fat Kill


A jury on Friday convicted a man of murdering his former son-in-law, rejecting the man's defence that he was too fat to have run up and down a flight of stairs to commit the crime and make a quick getaway.
Edward Ates was found guilty of murder and weapons counts for killing Paul Duncsak, who was shot six times at his home in Ramsey, about 25 miles north-west of New York.
Ates had argued he did not have the energy to accurately shoot Duncsak from a perch on the staircase at Duncsak's home in August 2006. He was 62 years old and 285 pounds at the time of the murder. Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor termed Ates' defense "nonsense."

Sunday, November 08, 2009

Hitler help


A council in Austria is attempting to block the sale of the house where Adolf Hitler was born over fears it could fall into the hands of neo-Nazis who would turn it into a shrine to his memory and again propagate his ideals. The owner of the house in Braunau-am-Inn wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million. But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property and the council plans to appeal to the government. Hitler was born in the house on April 20, 1889. His mother Klara and father Alois, rent ed a suite of rooms above the pub and lived in the apartment until 1892 when they moved to Linz.

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Hopelessly happy


Researchers have found that giving patients with serious illnesses hope for a cure can make them more depressed. Peter Ubel, director of the University of Michigan Centre for Behavioural and Decision Sciences in Medicine, spoke about "the dark side of hope". "Sometimes, if hope makes people put off getting on with their life, it can get in the way of happiness," he explained. "We think they were happier because they got on with their lives. They realised the cards they were dealt and recognised that they had no choice. This sopped their need to recover, and they could focus on the better aspects of life" Ubel looked at a group of adults who had their colons removed.

Monday, November 02, 2009

Royal transfer


Prince Harry's dreams of taking on the Taliban in an Apache helicopter in war-ravaged Afghanistan are said to have been shattered, after his instructors told him that he is not suited to fly the chopper. The third-inline to the British throne is feeling somewhat downhearted, after being told he is unlikely to fulfill his dream of fighting the Taliban. Instead, the Prince is likely to be trained to fly the more sedate Lynx when he moves soon to his next posting at the Army Air Corps Base at Middle Wallop in Hampshire, the British newspaper said.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Birth on plane, Free filghts for life


A Malaysian woman, who gave birth to a boy on board an aeroplane minutes before it landed, has been promised free flights for life, as has her child, an airline official said on Friday. Liew Siaw Hsia (31) gave birth on budget carrier AirAsia's flight from Penang to Kuching on Wednesday. Nazatul Mokhtar, a spokesman for the airline, said on Friday that the flight had been diverted to nearby Kuala Lumpur for an emergency landing when Liew had labour pains. A doctor on the flight helped the woman deliver her son, while the plane was still 2,000 feet in the air in its final approach to land

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Old road

The first road atlas of its kind in western Europe, a 17th century book showing a highway network in England and Wales of just 73 roads, is to be sold at auction for up to £9,000. The route atlas, published in 1675, includes 100 double pages of black and white maps laid out in continuous strips depicting the major roads and crossroads across England and Wales. The work from the Britannica first volume ­ also marks the first time in England that an atlas was prepared on a uniform scale, at one inch to a mile. The 17th century map-maker claimed 26,600 miles of road was surveyed for preparing the atlas.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Micro trains



The world's smallest working model train set has been unveiled ­ measuring just 1/8th of an inch by 1/4 of an inch. At 1-35200 scale to the real thing, the five-carriage train travels around an oval route including ride through a tunnel. Created by New Jersey model train enthusiast David Smith, the model was built using nothing more fancy than a craft knife and a steady hand. It is powered by a standard two inch rotating motor head and carved out of mouldable plastic.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Pen DNA


One of darkest criminal mysteries in France, the murder of a little boy a quarter century ago, is back in the news after investigators found DNA on a poison-pen letter. The body of Gregory Villemin (4) was found tied up in the Vologne river in Vosges mountains, in October 1984. The next day, a letter arrived at his home claiming responsibility for the murder. The case was wrapped up in 2001 without identifying the murderer. Prosecutors relaunched the probe last December in the light of new DNA testing techniques and the results of a five-month expert analysis were filed with the state prosecutor on Thursday.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Pond power


Driven by fluctuations in oil prices and seduced by the prospect of easing climate change, experts are intensifying efforts to squeeze fuel out of a promising new organism: pond scum. As it turns out, algae - slimy, fast-growing and full of fat - is gaining ground as a potential renewable energy source. Experts say it is intriguing for its ability to gobble up carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, while living happily in places that are not needed for food crops. While no one has found a way to mass produce cheap fuel from algae yet, the race is on. University labs and start-up companies across the country are getting involved.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Parlimentary bite


A prominent opposition lawmaker faces expulsion from Malaysia's Parliament after being convicted on Thursday of biting a policeman at a protest. A Kuala Lumpur magistrate's court sentenced Tian Chua, who is head of strategy for the Pakatan Rakyat opposition alliance, to six months' imprisonment and fined him 3,000 ringgit (880 dollars). Under Malaysian law, an MP will lose his or her seat if sentenced to more than one year in jail or a fine exceeding 2,000 ringgit. The policeman had testified that during a scuffle he punched Tian Chua, and that Chua bit him in retaliation.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Man loses money in UK without being there

IF you ignore e-mails from strangers telling you that you have won a lottery and need to send some money to claim it, you are alert. However, don't let your guard down because a mail from a friend in distress, stuck in a foreign land, requiring money to return home, could well be fake too.
When business associates and friends in the contact list of V K Mohanarangan ,a man living in South India, received mails about his plight, most of them started calling his number, while a kind hearted friend even sent money worth $1000 . The mail said Mohanarangan was in trouble, having lost all valuables and passport, and immediately required $1200, which could be wire transferred to the hotel in UK from where he needed to check out.
On getting calls from people inquiring if everything was okay with him and if he needed help, Mohanarangan, who deals in engineering machine accessories and has an official e-mail id, realized something was amiss.
He looked into the matter and realized that the messages had indeed gone from his id, which apparently had been hacked. Using his techie friends, he found out that the e-mail had been sent from Nigeria. He approached the suburban commissioner of police, S R Jangid, and filed a complaint.
Though similar mail traps have been heard of, this is perhaps the first time in the city that someone has complained to the police about his mail being hacked.

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Crash-test baby


A 6-month-old baby had a miracle escape after his pram rolled onto the tracks and into the path of an oncoming train at a railway station in Melbourne. Security video footage released on Friday shows the baby's mother looking away for a moment as the pram suddenly rolls off the edge of a station platform and onto the tracks at Ashburton station. The mother looks back and panics as she watches the oncoming train hit the pram, dragging it about 130 feet along the track as the desperate driver tried to stop the train. Miraculously, the baby boy survived with only minor injuries, including a bump to his head.

Monday, October 19, 2009

German fake

A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about $19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo Da Vinci and valued at more than $150 million.The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as "La Bella Principessa," was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio -- a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13 1/2-inch-by-10-inch work.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo's "St. Jerome" in the Vatican. Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence, including carbon dating, had art ex perts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the "Mona Lisa."The discovery of the finger print convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery put him at the centre of best-sellers as "The Da Vin ci Code" and "The Lost - Symbol."
Biro examined multispec tral images of the drawing taken by the Lumiere Tech nology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital , scanner to show successive layers of the work so as to not damage the painting.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Eco-shop


A businessman in Berlin has leapt on the "green" bandwagon by offering discounts to clients who can prove they arrived by public transport or bicycle. "Everyone's a winner," explained Regina Goetz, who runs the business in Berlin's Prenzlauer Berg, a district in the former East Berlin.
"It's pretty difficult to park around here. So we came up with the idea of an eco discount of five euros (£4.50) to anyone who leaves the car at home," Ms Goetz. "The crisis has slashed our turnover to half in the last year. But the discount has proved a roaring success," she said.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Alien balloon


A six-year-old Colorado boy feared to have fallen to his death from a homemade helium balloon was found hiding in his garage. Falcon Heene was discovered on Thursday in the garage attic of his family's home in Fort Collins, outside Denver, roughly four hours after his brother told police he had climbed into the experimental craft and taken off. The event set US aviation officials and the Colorado National Guard on alert, rerouted planes around Denver and captivated millions of viewers as US networks followed the progress of the balloon.
At last when authorities reached the baloon, they found no one inside.
The picture shows him sitting on his family's van after the incident

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Baby Genius


Oscar Wrigley, a two-year-old with the same IQ as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has become the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted into Mensa. Assessors at the Gifted Children's Information Centre in Solihull said Oscar, with an IQ of at least 160, is one of the brightest children they have every come across. He has been ranked in the 99.99th percentile of the population and has been ranked off the scale as the Stanford-Binet test cannot measure higher than 160. Oscar's father Joe (29), an IT specialist from Berkshire, said: "He is always asking questions. We knew there was something remarkable about Oscar."

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Dino giants

Footprints of sauropod dinosaurs, the giant herbivores with long necks, was recently found in Plagne near Lyon in France.These footprints are the largest ever found in the world. The dinosaur footprints in Plagne are circular depressions surrounded by a fold of limestone sediment and are very large, up to 1.50 metre in total diameter, suggesting that the animals were larger than 40 tonnes and 25 metres in length. Discovered by Marie-Hel Marcaud and Patrice Landry, the footprints have been authenticated by Jean-Michel Mazin and Pierre Hantzpergue, both of the Paleoenvironnements et Paleobiosph's Laboratory. More digs will be conducted in the next few years.

Monday, October 12, 2009

DNA pigs


Legs of Spain's top Jamon Iberico now come with their own DNA certificate to prove they are the purest as well as the world's most expensive hams. Spain's top producer has enlisted the help of scientists to prove that his pigs are of the purebred Spanish variety and not crossed with lesser British or American breeds. Gourmets from across the globe are eagerly waiting for the hams, which will hit the market next month. Only 100 legs from the "prince of pigs" are available and with a starting price of 1,500 euros (£1,380) each, they have been dubbed by foodies as the "RollsRoyce of Spanish ham".

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Genius baby

Oscar Wrigley, a two-year-old with the same IQ as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, has become the youngest boy in Britain to be accepted into Mensa. Assessors at the Gifted Children's Information Centre in Solihull said Oscar, with an IQ of at least 160, is one of the brightest children they have every come across. He has been ranked in the 99.99th percentile of the population and has been ranked off the scale as the Stanford-Binet test cannot measure higher than 160. Oscar's father Joe (29), an IT specialist from Berkshire, said: "He is always asking questions. We knew there was something remarkable about Oscar."

Korean fireworks


People in Poyongyang, North Korea were witness to a spectacular Fireworks show on friday. The show was held to commemorate the 64th founding anniversary of the Worker's Party in Korea. The party was founded on 9 October 1945.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

Marriage on the cheap

A couple enjoyed a lavish champagne wedding reception for just £51 after the bride bid for the event on eBay.
Colette Palin, 25, and Lee Clark, 34, could not believe their luck when the cut price bid for the reception at the three star Buckatree Hall near Telford, Shrops, was accepted. The hotel put the event up for auction on the website after a last minute cancellation.
Staff laid on a red carpet arrival for the happy couple followed by a champagne reception, a three-course wedding breakfast with wine for 35 guests and an evening buffet for 50 people. The pair were able to start married life without debts from a lavish wedding,

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Nearly half-a-million road accidents a year are caused by women drivers applying make-up behind the wheel, a new survey discloses.
Around one fifth of the female motorists confess they have touched up their mascara on the move ­ equivalent to 3.2 million of Britain's 15 million women drivers. The poll of more than 4,000 drivers by women's motor insurance group Diamond comes a year after the introduction of a new offense of causing death by careless driving, which carries a prison term of up to two years. Previously, careless driving offenses ­ including applying make-up, eating and map-reading ­ were punishable only by a fine.

Saturday, October 03, 2009

Mini-hunter


A five-year-old boy on a hunting trip shot dead a 12 ft, 800-pound alligator in Texas. When Simon Hughes and his rancher father Scott Hughes came across the massive reptile, the boy grabbed his junior sized .410-gauge shotgun and fired at the creature which was 20 times his size and is one of the biggest ever seen in Texas. "I wasn't afraid for a second. Next year, I'm going to kill a bigger alligator," Simon said later. Simon's father had a permit to kill two of the 40 alligators on his 5,000-acre ranch near Houston.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Bee bomb


Specially trained sniffer honey bees are being used in a successful new prototype that is about the size of a hand held vacuum cleaner. Training the bees is simply a matter of bribing them with sugary treats. Trainers expose the bees to the odour, like the smell of explosives, for a few seconds and simultaneously give the bees a sugar syrup reward.
After 4 or 5 exposures the bees associate the odour with the reward.Consequently, if the bees are exposed to an air sample containing the substance, the bees demonstrate the Proboscis Extension Reflex response, that is they stick out their tongue in expectation of food, which the trainers can observe and then they can respond to the threat.