National Geographic reports on yet another breakthrough in alternative fuels:

The End of Oil? Breakthrough Turns Coal Into Clean Diesel

With the price of oil topping a wallet-busting U.S. $70 a barrel yesterday, the search for alternative fuels keeps heating up.

Last week, scientists announced what may be a new end-run around the oil problem: producing diesel fuel from coal, natural gas, and organic material.

Reporting in the current issue of the Journal Science, researchers say they have developed a way to shuffle the carbon atoms derived from cheap fuel sources like coal to form more desirable combinations, such as ethane gas and diesel fuel.

In their study, scientists scrambled the makeup of hydrocarbons—organic compounds found in fossil fuels—using two chemical processes, one of which earned last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry.

The reaction produced ethane gas and diesel fuel.

The synthetic diesel “is much cleaner burning than conventional diesel, even cleaner burning than gasoline,” said Rutgers University chemist Alan Goldman.

Goldman co-developed the process with Maurice Brookhart, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s a very clever idea,” Robert Bergman, a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Science in an accompanying news report.

“I don’t think this will be an industrial process tomorrow. But conceptually, it is important.”

Read the whole article.

Tags: blog | weblog | opec | politics | oil | energy policy | news

A new pyramid has been found in the City of the Gods

Archaeologists working at Teotihuacan, a long-abandoned settlement about 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Mexico City, have discovered a huge, 1,500-year-old pyramid in Mexico City, according to this National Geographic article:

“All of us who are working at Teotihuacan are extremely interested [in this discovery],” said Ian Robertson, an anthropologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

“It’s kind of rare to get to look at what Teotihuacanos were doing outside [their] capital city.”

The pyramid on the outskirts of Mexico City measures about 500 feet (152 meters) on each side and stands 60 feet (18 meters) tall. It was discovered beneath a site used today for a popular reenactment of the Crucifixion of Christ during Christianity’s Holy Week, the week before Easter, according to news reports.

The pyramid was carved out on a hillside around A.D. 500 and abandoned around A.D. 800. The Teotihuacan culture collapsed at about the same time.

Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun “the new wonder of the world"?

Halfway around the world, Amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic recently announced that he has uncovered another huge pyramid, this time in Visoko, Bosnia!

If Semir is correct, it would be the first pyramid discovered in Europe.

Yesterday, Osmanagic said he and his team unearthed large, cut stone slabs on a side of the hill that form the outer surface of an ancient pyramid.

Archaeologists and other experts began digging at Visoko last week to unearth a step pyramid covered beneath the 2,120-foot hill known as Visocica.

“These are the first uncovered walls of the pyramid,” Semir Osmanagic, a Bosnian archaeologist said of the stone slabs.

“We can see the surface is perfectly flat. This is the crucial material proof that we are talking pyramids,” he said.

Osmanagic estimates that the structure may have been 722 feet high, possibly a third taller than Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza.

The huge stonework discovered Wednesday appeared to be cut in cubes and polished.

“It is so obvious that the top of the blocks, the surface is man-made,” Osmanagic said.

Earlier research on the hill found that it has 45-degree slopes pointing toward the cardinal points and a flat top. Under layers of dirt, a paved entrance plateau, entrances to tunnels and large stone blocks were discoved.

Satellite photographs and thermal imaging also revealed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visoko Valley.

[Source: Associated Press article via ChinaView

News in Science has more on the story:

On the outskirts of the town, Visocica Hill, which Osmanagic refers to as the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun, stands some 220 metres high, with a square base of more than 400 by 400 metres.

Osmanagic says he sees astonishing similarities between the structures and Mexican pyramids dating back to about 200 AD, which also come in pairs, one believed to represent the Sun and the other the Moon.

The excavation work, led by a recently established foundation of local archaeologists and volunteers, will last for 200 days.

The first results would be known in three weeks, Osmanagic says.

The director of the Visoko Historic Heritage museum, Senad Hodovic, says he is no sceptic.

“The pyramids are obviously the work of man. But we need proper and serious analysis to show who built them and when.”

Hodovic says he has spent years urging authorities to support archaeological research on the plateau of the hill, which is recorded in historic annals as the site of a medieval Bosnian town.

He says the shape and monumental size of the structures is not typical for Bosnian constructions of the Middle Ages.

Visoko, a small town that has been slowly dying from economic decline since Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, is hoping what has been dubbed the “the new wonder of the world” will offer it a brighter future.

Pyramid-mania seems to have caught everyone.

Local souvenir shops selling oriental style coffee pots and plates now offer slippers, ceramic coin-boxes, t-shirts and brandy with pyramid logos.

Tags: architecture | pyramids | news | science | blog | weblog | teotihuacan | archaeology | life

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, has written an opinion piece for The Washington Post that clearly shows why nuclear power plants should be our main source of energy:

…More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions – or nearly 10 percent of global emissions – of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.
…
Today, there are 103 nuclear reactors quietly delivering just 20 percent of America’s electricity. Eighty percent of the people living within 10 miles of these plants approve of them (that’s not including the nuclear workers). Although I don’t live near a nuclear plant, I am now squarely in their camp.
…
That’s not to say that there aren’t real problems – as well as various myths – associated with nuclear energy. Each concern deserves careful consideration:

• Nuclear energy is expensive. It is in fact one of the least expensive energy sources. In 2004, the average cost of producing nuclear energy in the United States was less than two cents per kilowatt-hour, comparable with coal and hydroelectric. Advances in technology will bring the cost down further in the future.

• Nuclear plants are not safe. Although Three Mile Island was a success story, the accident at Chernobyl, 20 years ago this month, was not. But Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. This early model of Soviet reactor had no containment vessel, was an inherently bad design and its operators literally blew it up. The multi-agency U.N. Chernobyl Forum reported last year that 56 deaths could be directly attributed to the accident, most of those from radiation or burns suffered while fighting the fire. Tragic as those deaths were, they pale in comparison to the more than 5,000 coal-mining deaths that occur worldwide every year. No one has died of a radiation-related accident in the history of the U.S. civilian nuclear reactor program. (And although hundreds of uranium mine workers did die from radiation exposure underground in the early years of that industry, that problem was long ago corrected.)

• Nuclear waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. Within 40 years, used fuel has less than one-thousandth of the radioactivity it had when it was removed from the reactor. And it is incorrect to call it waste, because 95 percent of the potential energy is still contained in the used fuel after the first cycle. Now that the United States has removed the ban on recycling used fuel, it will be possible to use that energy and to greatly reduce the amount of waste that needs treatment and disposal. Last month, Japan joined France, Britain and Russia in the nuclear-fuel-recycling business. The United States will not be far behind.

All in all, a good article that explains why we should be relying on clean nuclear power rather than coal-fired plants, so make sure you read the whole thing.

But it comes nearly thirty years too late to do any good. People have been conviced that nuclear power is the bogeyman, thanks mainly to the anti-nuclear hysteria that was drummed up following the Three Mile Island accident:

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story: The concrete containment structure did just what it was designed to do – prevent radiation from escaping into the environment. And although the reactor itself was crippled, there was no injury or death among nuclear workers or nearby residents. Three Mile Island was the only serious accident in the history of nuclear energy generation in the United States, but it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn’t been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.

[Emphasis mine.]

What nobody noticed at the time, though, was that Three Mile Island was in fact a success story

Nobody noticed that Three Mile Island was a success? Hardly! I remember scientists and engineers in the days after the partial core meltdown, who cited the lack of injuries and the fact that no radiation escaped as proof that nuclear plants are safe, even when accidents occur. But the facts didn’t matter to the anti-nuke activists who had their own agenda and refused to accept what the experts were saying. And the mainstream media – always willing to side with environmentalists over industry – promoted that agenda to the hilt.

[But] it was enough to scare us away from further developing the technology: There hasn’t been a nuclear plant ordered up since then.

We haven’t had a plant built since then because of the scare mongering efforts of environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace! And those same groups are preventing us from drilling for oil in ANWR and are also trying to gin up panic over global warming. Why should anyone listen to them now when they’ve been so wrong about nuclear power?

Tags: blog | weblog | energy | politics | nuclear | energy policy | news

It being Tax Day and all, I thought I’d try and cheer you up with this MSM Money article:

Think your taxes are bad?

Every year, you grimace as you sign your return. Imagine what it’s like in Belgium or Hungary, where taxes can take half your pay. Plus: the wackiest taxes on record.

Believe it or not, Americans enjoy some of the lowest income tax rates in the world. Today of all days, it might not seem so.

“When you look at the overall tax burden, the U.S. is quite low,” said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and former director of the office of research for the Internal Revenue Service.

For a family with one wage-earner and two children, only Iceland and Ireland have a lower income tax burden than the U.S., according to the most recent data for 2005.

At the top, Sweden, Turkey, France and Poland impose the biggest tax burdens on families, but in most of those countries families get added social services, such as secure pensions and health care.

Read the whole article.

Tags: news | blog | weblog | taxes | politics | economy | pickpocket | robbery | irs

NASA has an interesting story on a new type of antimatter space drive that would use positrons instead of antiprotons. Positron reactions emit a tiny fraction of the killing gamma rays that are given off by antiproton collisions, so people could safely man such a spaceship without worrying that they’d be glowing in the dark before reaching their destination.

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).

However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.

Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them “positrons".

When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.

Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.

Read the whole article.

Tags: news | blog | weblog | antimatter | discoveries | breakthroughs | science | science | physics

From Reuters via Yahoo! News comes this article:

Experts ponder a future of new sex gizmos, robots

When America’s top sex researchers gathered recently to discuss the next decade in their field, some envisioned a future in which artificial sex partners could cater to every fantasy.

“What is very likely to be present before 2016 would be a multi-sensual experience of virtual sex,” said Julia Heiman, director of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, Bloomington.

“There is a possibility of developing erotic materials for yourself that would allow you to create a partner of certain dimensions and qualities, the partner saying certain things in that interaction, certain things happening in that interaction.”

A field dubbed “teledildonics” already allows people at two remote computers to manipulate electronic devices such as a vibrator at the other end for sexual purposes.
…
Going even a level further, other researchers say in decades to come advanced devices will be able to stimulate the brain to create a sexual experience without manipulating genitalia.

Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the study of artificial intelligence dating back to 1951, said such devices could either trigger an actual physical response from the brain, or have the entire experience take place in the mind with the sensation of sex – but without the mess or risk of sexually transmitted disease.

“It’s bound to happen … and is not as far off as some people think,” Minsky, a professor emeritus at MIT, said of direct brain manipulation. “They are doing things with monkeys but it is not a big world-class industry yet, so that could take 20-30 years.”

“But if the game (industry) people got involved in some underdeveloped country that didn’t have any laws against it, it could all happen twice as fast.”

Some researchers warn that too much fantasy could prove adverse to everyday human interaction.

Read the whole article.

Tags: blog | weblog | sex | life | news

From DenverChannel.com comes this story about Jason Niccum, a commuter in Longmont, Colorado who was “always running late” and decided to do something about it.

He bought an Opticon strobe on eBay for $100 that let him change traffic lights from red to green by jamming the optical sensors atop traffic signals. The plan worked pretty well until March 29 when police got wise to what he was doing and ticketed him $50 for suspicion of interfering with a traffic signal. They also confiscated the strobe, so he’s back to being a mere mortal.

lt’s fun to daydream about having such a device, but what happens if drivers approaching an intersection from different directions all have Opticons and use them at the same time? Green lights for everyone? Could be unpleasant.

Tags: blog | weblog | police | traffic | opticon | odd stories | life | news

You don’t need much more than the headlines:

Tipping Point: Half of America Wants a Hybrid Car – More than half of all Americans say they would seriously consider buying or leasing a fuel-saving hybrid car, according to a new poll. [Monday, April 10, 2006]

Honda May Cut Hybrid Production – Honda Motor Co. (HMC) may cut production of the Honda Accord hybrid because sales have been so slow, Honda Executive Vice President Dick Colliver said Thursday at the New York Auto Show. [Thursday, April 13, 2006]

50% of Americans want hybrid cars, too bad it’s not the 50% who will actually shell out money to buy them.

Tags: blog | weblog | politics | environment| polls

It’s been less than a year since Sam, three-time winner of the Sonoma-Marin Fair’s “World’s Ugliest Dog” competition died, but soon a successor will be chosen to wear his crown.

The Sonoma-Marin Fair is accepting votes for this year’s ugliest dog. My vote went to Lucille Bald, already voted “Orlando’s Ugliest Dog” by the readers of the Orlando Sentinel.

Tags: humor | dogs | news | science | blog | weblog | odd story | life

A 17-year-old boy in Gillette, Wyoming who, while siphoning gasoline from a firefighter’s car, managed to spill much of the fuel on his pants.

He then used a lighter to see how wet his pants were.

After the flames had been doused, young Prometheus was taken to the hospital with second- and third-degree burns on his legs.

Police have charged the boy and his friend with larceny because Wyoming does not have a law against stupidity.

[Source: Boston.com News.]

Tags: humor | darwin award | evolution | blog | weblog

Well, not the whole missing link, just his thigh bone, some bits of jaw bone, and a few teeth. But! According to this National Geographic article:

Fossil Find Is Missing Link in Human Evolution, Scientists Say

When the famous skeleton of an early human ancestor known as Lucy was discovered in Africa in the 1970s, scientists asked: Where did she come from?

Now, fossils found in the same region are providing solid answers, researchers have announced.

Lucy is a 3.5-foot-tall (1.1-meter-tall) adult skeleton that belongs to an early human ancestor, or hominid, known as Australopithecus afarensis.

The species lived between 3 million and 3.6 million years ago and is widely considered an ancestor of modern humans.

The new fossils are from the most primitive species of Australopithecus, known as Australopithecus anamensis. The remains date to about 4.1 million years ago, according to Tim White, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

White co-directed the team that discovered the new fossils in Ethiopia in a region of the Afar desert known as the Middle Awash.

The team says the newly discovered fossils are a no-longer-missing link between early and later forms of Australopithecus and to a more primitive hominid known as Ardipithecus.

“What the new discovery does is very nicely fill this gap between the earliest of the Lucy species at 3.6 million years and the older [human ancestor] ArdipithecusArdipithecus ramidus, which is dated at 4.4 million years,” White said.

I wonder if the Missing Link would enjoy roast duck with mango salsa?

Tags: evolution | health | news | science | blog | weblog | missing link | archaeology | life

From an article at CancerPage.com:

Researchers have found a way to target cancer cells by injecting tiny particles that will attack only the diseased cells while leaving healthy cells unscathed, according to a study released on Monday.

A team of researchers working at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston laced tiny particles with lethal doses of chemotherapy and when injected they targeted cancer cells alone.

The team first conducted experiments on cells growing in laboratory dishes and then on mice bearing human prostate tumors, according to the study, published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In the mice, the tumors shrank dramatically and all of the mice survived the study while the untreated control animals did not.

“A single injection of our nanoparticles completely eradicated the tumors in five of the seven treated animals, and the remaining animals also had a significant tumor reduction, compared to the controls,” said Dr. Omid Farokhzad, assistant professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

While all the parts of this new delivery system are known to be safe, it must still be proven safe for humans. The scientists said that further testing is needed on larger animals, and eventually in humans.

Read the whole article.

Tags: cancer | health | news | biotechnology | blog | weblog | healthcare | nanotech | medical breakthroughs

Iran announced today that they have enriched uranium. The news was accompanied by the bizarre spectacle of Iranian performers holding capsules of the processed uranium hexaflouride. No doubt we’ll soon see Iran’s President Ahmadinejad take off his sandal and bang it on a podium as he threatens to bury the West. He’s already said Israel must be wiped off the map, so anything’s possible.

Obviously we can’t let them develop nukes, which may explain this clever two-pronged bit of one-upmanship from the Bush Administration:

On Saturday, The New Yorker ran Seymour Hersh’s story that revealed the U.S. is studying the option of using nukes against Iran nuclear facilities.

Just as the furor from that was dying down, NASA’s plan to crash a spacecraft onto the Moon (leaving a 17-foot deep crater) hit the headlines yesterday.

Coincidence? I think not.

Somewhere in Iran, strategists who were convincing themselves that the Cowboy Bush isn’t crazy enough to use nukes on them now realize that we don’t have to go all the way to the Moon to drop stuff from orbit.

We used laser-guided 500 to 2000-pound concrete bombs in Iraq and they were ideal for taking out tanks and fortifications sited near civilians because only the target got destroyed.

What if we removed the warheads from a bunch of ICBMs, poured concrete – or depleted uranium (oh the irony!) – into the empty space, and launched those?

A Trident II missile weighs about 65 tons, if it was traveling at terminal velocity when it hit an Iranian bunker, you’d get the equivalent of a 3-kiloton explosion (the Hiroshima explosion was 15 kilotons).

We’d just keep dropping missiles until the resulting crater was deeper than the buried facilities. No radiation, no fallout, just lots and lots of sparks.

Tags: blog | weblog | nukes | nuclear | nasa | iran | rockets | space

60 leading international climate change experts have written an open letter to Stephen Harper, Canada’s new Conservative prime minister, urging him to “examine the scientific foundation of the federal government’s climate-change plans. This would be entirely consistent with your recent commitment to conduct a review of the Kyoto Protocol.”

Observational evidence does not support today’s computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada’s climate policies are based. Even if the climate models were realistic, the environmental impact of Canada delaying implementation of Kyoto or other greenhouse-gas reduction schemes, pending completion of consultations, would be insignificant. Directing your government to convene balanced, open hearings as soon as possible would be a most prudent and responsible course of action.

While the confident pronouncements of scientifically unqualified environmental groups may provide for sensational headlines, they are no basis for mature policy formulation. The study of global climate change is, as you have said, an “emerging science,” one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth’s climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.

We appreciate the difficulty any government has formulating sensible science-based policy when the loudest voices always seem to be pushing in the opposite direction. However, by convening open, unbiased consultations, Canadians will be permitted to hear from experts on both sides of the debate in the climate-science community. When the public comes to understand that there is no “consensus” among climate scientists about the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, the government will be in a far better position to develop plans that reflect reality and so benefit both the environment and the economy.

“Climate change is real” is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural “noise.” The new Canadian government’s commitment to reducing air, land and water pollution is commendable, but allocating funds to “stopping climate change” would be irrational. We need to continue intensive research into the real causes of climate change and help our most vulnerable citizens adapt to whatever nature throws at us next.

[Emphasis mine.]

You can review the letter and the list of scientists who signed it here.

Tags: blog | weblog | global warming | science | climate change | junk science

Not that I’m privy to any secrets or such, but since Kiefer Sutherland has just signed a contract for three additional years beyond the current fifth season of “24,” he’s not likely to buy the farm this year.

Unless he’s going to be an ass-kicking ghost for the next three years (can a ghost shoot you in the thigh?).

blog | weblog | 24 | jack bauer | news

The US economy isn’t just producing jobs these days, it’s also producing good jobs. Alongside the ads for jobs handling a cash register or a spatula are these new opportunities:

• In St. Louis, AFB International is enlisting both technicians, paid $30,000 to $40,000, and PhD scientists, offered $80,000 to $100,000, in its quest for the perfect pet food.

• In Delaware, Honeywell plans to hire people at $40,000 to $100,000 to work in a data-storage center.

• In southern California, some of the latest openings involve working on the railroad, for $35,000 to $70,000 a year. Union Pacific plans to add 2,000 employees altogether.

These reports in the past month symbolize a welcome trend during an economic expansion that at first offered only tepid job gains, both in quantity and quality.

This good news about the breadth of job creation comes against a backdrop of labor-market anxiety that has persisted despite the economy’s solid overall footing. Competition from imported goods, the threat of outsourcing services abroad, and a controversial influx of illegal laborers are just some of the forces that make many workers worried about their future.

Creating good jobs - the kinds that can keep American living standards rising - appears likely to remain a challenge. But the current employment picture at least indicates movement in a positive direction.

“We’re creating lots of all kinds of jobs, across many industries, occupations, and pay scales,” says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com. But he adds: “If your skill sets are rusty, or at the low end of the skill range, you’re going to have a tougher time.”

The economy added 211,000 jobs in March, according to a Labor Department report Friday - a solid showing about on par with expectations. The unemployment rate fell a notch, to 4.7 percent.
…
Management and professional occupations are employing 1.2 million more people this month than a year ago - or about 1 in 3 new jobs in America. This is the highest-paying of five broad categories tracked by the Labor Department. Not all of them are CEOs or engineers, but the median paycheck for full-time workers in this category is $937 a week, far above the US median of $651.

The construction industry continues to hammer out more than its share of new jobs. It accounts for about 6.4 percent of US jobs, but has provided 14.4 percent of the past year’s job growth. The quality of construction jobs is mixed - often offering higher hourly pay than the US median but with lower benefits.

Even the manufacturing sector, which has long offered blue-collar workers a measure of middle-class prosperity, appears to be stabilizing after a period of heavy job losses. Despite downsizing in the automotive industry, 175,000 more people are employed in production occupations today than a year ago.

Thank you, Mr. President!

blog | weblog | economics | bush administration | politics

From an article at Local6.com

As part of the plan to put robot explorers – and, later, people – on the moon, NASA will crash a spacecraft into the lunar surface in 2008. The explosion should be visible from Earth.

A team announced Monday that an additional mission, known as LCrOSS, has been added to the first planned flight of the long-term lunar project, which will send the Lunar Reconnaisannce Orbiter on a mapping project.

NASA said that the LRO launch vehicle had extra space, so proposals were sought for an extra mission. LCrOSS was chosen from 19 submissions.

In that project, the SUV-sized upper stage that will take the equipment from Earth orbit to the moon will then crash into a crater near the moon’s south pole. A follow-on craft will then be able to analyze the material as it flies through the debris.

Mission managers said they would look for water, water vapor and hydrogen, among other elements and minerals.

The crash should create a 17-foot-deep crater and a plume of debris that reaches more than 30 miles high.

Amateur astronomers should be able to watch the material rise, officials said.

The knowledge from the lunar project is expected to pave the way to a manned flight to Mars someday

Tags: blog | weblog | odd news | LCrOSS | nasa | space travel | science | space

It’s National Cleavage Day once again and time to recognize some little known facts about breasts (or “twins” as Cosmo calls them):

• About two million women in the United States have breast implants, with 250,000 going under the knife each year….The average age of a woman who gets implants is 34, and 90 percent do it after they have had kids. “Most women increase two cup sizes,” says Leroy Young, M.D., chair of the breast surgery committee of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. No, they’re not always happy with the results: Six percent of women who sport a fake set return for a size adjustment or to have them taken out altogether.

• Breasts weigh surprisingly little: a quarter pound each for an A-cup, a half pound for a B-cup, three-quarters of a pound for C, and one pound for a D-cup.

• It’s not the size of your set that determines your cleavage; breast shape and their position on your torso also count. “Two women can have the same cup size, but one woman’s breasts might be fuller in the middle, giving her greater cleavage,” says Dr. Casas. Another woman might be only an A or B, but if her boobs are naturally set close together, she’ll have deeper décolletage. The width of your torso also affects your depth. If your body is narrow below your shoulders, you’ll have an easier time creating a deeper valley between your peaks.

• Like hands, feet and other paired-up body parts, no two breasts are exactly the same size. And though experts aren’t sure why, it’s your left one that usually has the size advantage, says Dr. Swistel. “The left breast tends to have more tissue. Sometimes it’s obvious, but often the difference is so slight, you’d never notice.”

BUPA, the UK health organization offers more titbits:

• There was a lawsuit fought from 1934 to 1942 over rights to the bra, between a German-born designer, Otto Titzling, and a French-born designer, Philippe de Brassiere. Titzling had invented the first bra and although he patented improvements that he made, he did not actually patent the original. Brassiere won the case.

• In the late 1920’s, a Russian immigrant named Ida Rosenthal, was responsible for grouping women into the bust size categories (cup sizes) that we use nowadays and developed bras for every stage of life (puberty to maturity).

Tags: blog | weblog | odd news | humor | cleavage day

Ah, you knew I was kidding! France’s Jacques Chirac folded like the Maginot Line: “Canceling a law on youth employment that fueled nationwide unrest and raising questions about France’s ability to reform rigid labor laws in a globalized world.” [baltimoresun.com]

Unions declared victory, but energized students decided to go ahead with a “day of action” Tuesday to try to knock down other measures – designed to reduce the 22 percent unemployment rate among youths – that are viewed as threatening coveted job protections.

Only in a Socialist country could cutting unemployment be seen as a threat to jobs!

In an announcement that amounted to a humiliating admission of defeat, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said on nationwide TV that the contested measure would be replaced.

If you haven’t been paying attention, Dominique (who happens to be a man, name notwithstanding) tried to reform labor laws so that companies hiring workers under the age of 26 would have the ability to fire those workers in the first two years of employment.

Even such minor changes proved too much to bear for French students who took to the streets in a successful bid to make sure they’ll never have to earn a paycheck. It’s a shameful situation, but that’s what Socialism does to people.

In fact, when you consider France’s confiscatory tax policy, it’s easy to understand why 23 percent (50 percent in some Muslim-heavy suburbs) of French youth would rather stay lotus eaters:

[The] heart of the French problem is a statist-run socialist economy that is massively overtaxed and overregulated. France’s public government sector, for instance, accounts for more than 50 percent of GDP. In other words, private business in France is in the minority.

France’s top personal tax rate is 48 percent, with a VAT tax of nearly 20 percent. So that means French laborers face a combined 68 percent tax rate on consumption and investment. No wonder France has created less than 3 million jobs over the past 20 years, compared to 31 million in the United States. Economic growth in “cowboy capitalist” America has exceeded that of France’s worker paradise by nearly 50 percent.

[Source: Larry Kudlow of National Review Online, via CBS News.]

Jacques and Dominique are missing a très grande opportunity to harness the unemployed Muslim and student youth populations:

1. Have Le Monde print the Mohammed cartoons.
2. Outraged Muslim youths promptly riot, torching every Peugeot in sight.
3. Unemployed students are put to work building new cars.
4. Repeat as needed.
5. Profit!

Tags: blog | weblog | politics | france | surrender | socialism

When we last read about Greg Pringle, he had been stopped by police while driving in an HOV lane because the officer thought Greg’s passenger looked odd.

Minutes later, Greg had been ticketed for driving an unauthorized vehicle in the HOV lane ($115 fine), and the mannequin he was using as a second passenger (so he could ride in the HOV lane) was confiscated as evidence.

Well, Greg has had his day in court and it appears the judge had a decent sense of humor:

Tillie the mannequin got Greg Pringle in trouble with the law, but her life of crime might have saved her own neck.

Consisting of powder blue scrubs and a gray sweatshirt stuffed with newspaper, topped with a Styrofoam head, Tillie sat in the passenger’s seat of Pringle’s car for the better part of a year as he commuted to Denver in a high-occupancy-vehicle lane. The ruse, which he said saved him about 30 minutes each way, came to an end Jan. 26 when Pringle, of Broomfield, Colo., was pulled over by the police and charged with driving illegally in a lane with a one-passenger minimum.

As punishment, a judge ordered Pringle to stand with Tillie for four hours at a busy intersection holding a sign: “HOV lane is not for dummies.” Pringle completed that requirement two weeks ago and also paid a fine of $115.

On Wednesday, Pringle finished the final piece of his sentence, donating the $15,000 that he earned auctioning his former seat-mate on eBay. The money was given to the National Safety Council’s “Alive at 25″ campaign, which promotes safe driving among teenagers.

How often do you read a heartwarming story like that? Justice is served, a perpetrator learns a life lesson, and a mannequin pulls in 15 large for charity.

Read the whole article to find out about Tillie’s new career.

[Update] The article link expired for some reason. No problem, here’s a better one.

Tags: humor | blog | weblog | police | traffic | life

A man in Sydney, Australia who has been hospitalized after trying to incinerate a spider. Yes, it’s happened again!

From an article in The Sydney Morning Herald:

A naked man suffered burns to one-fifth of his body when he tried to set fire to a spider at a nudist resort in the NSW southern highlands.

The 56-year-old Sydney man tried to kill what he thought was a funnel web spider by pouring petrol down the spider’s burrow and igniting it with a match, the NRMA CareFlight service said.

But the fuel exploded and the man was left with burns to 18 per cent of his body, on the upper leg and buttocks.

The incident happened shortly before 1.30pm (AEDT) today at the resort, at the junction of the Wollondilly and Wingecarribee rivers, west of Bowral.

Resort staff treated the man before paramedics arrived to stabilise him.

The man was flown by helicopter to Sydney’s Concord Hospital, where he was in a stable condition on arrival shortly before 4pm (AEST).

Some things just don’t bear thinking about. Playing with gasoline and matches while in my birthday suit definitely qualifies.

The man’s lack of clothing probably contributed to the extent of his burns, the rescue chopper service said.

Gee, ya’ think?

It ought to be comforting to the man to know that his sacrifice has saved other nudists from being bitten by the lethal funnel web spider.

But the Universe doesn’t work that way. Other guest nudists, who evidently know more about spiders than our Darwin Award winner did, said the beastie he tried to torch was most likely a harmless trapdoor spider.

Hey, there’s a spider on your back!

Tags: life | darwin award | evolution | blog | weblog | odd news | spiders