Clouds that look like breasts

Few will have seen a sky like it. Yet this extraordinary-looking cloud formation wasn't photographed in exotic climes, but in St Albans, Hertfordshire, on a recent August evening. What is it and how did it form?



The bobbly clouds that make this image so startling are called mammatus clouds - a name derived from the Latin word for breast. They hang under the main body of other clouds.

"There is one prerequisite for a mammatus formation - a big thunderstorm - because they form on the back edge of retreating storms," says BBC broadcast meteorologist Peter Gibbs.

In storms, air moves in rapid "up draughts" and "down draughts" and mammatus clouds are essentially pockets of air and water droplets which have descended in downward draughts, he says. ... Mammatus formations can be seen on any type of cloud but look most dramatic on the cumulonimbus thunderclouds seen here, he says.

They will usually last no more than five to 10 minutes. - bbc

Ah, so that's what breasts look like. I was wondering.

Satellites track Mexico kidnap victims with chips

Affluent Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.

Kidnapping jumped almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2007 in Mexico, according to official statistics. Mexico ranks with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions.

The recent kidnapping and murder of Fernando Marti, 14, the son of a well-known businessman, sparked an outcry in a country already hardened to crime.

More people, including a growing number of middle-class Mexicans, are seeking out the tiny chip designed by Xega, a Mexican security firm whose sales jumped 13 percent this year. The company said it had more than 2,000 clients.

Detractors say the chip is little more than a gadget that serves no real security purpose.

The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients' bodies with a syringe. A transmitter in the chip then sends radio signals to a larger device carried by the client with a global positioning system in it, Xega says. A satellite can then pinpoint the location of a person in distress.

Cristina, 28, who did not want to give her last name, was implanted along with seven other members of her family last year as a "preventive measure." "It's not like we are wealthy people, but they'll kidnap you for a watch. ... Everyone is living in fear," she said. The chips cost $4,000 plus an annual fee of $2,200. - yahoo

Movie idea: Micro chip company hiring local thugs to kidnap people to increase sales and reach political goal of being able to track everyone at all times.

Sphinx statues found in Egypt

Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed four small statues of the Sphinx, the mythological figure of a lion with a human head, the Higher Council of Antiquities said on Friday.

The headless sandstone statues were found on a road linking the ancient temples of Luxor and Karnak in southern Egypt, antiquities supremo Zahi Hawass said in a statement.

They were unearthed in an area once occupied by a police station that was demolished as part of a project to rescue artifacts, Hawass said.

The statues date from the reign of King Nekhtnebef who founded the 30th Pharaonic dynasty (363-380 BC), Hawass added.

The same team of archaeologists also found a sandstone block engraved with the name of Queen Cleopatra. - yahoo

Has anyone found a picture of them?

Nigerian faces death for 86 wives

Nigeria's Islamic authority has told the man who has 86 wives to choose only four and repent within three days or else he will be sentenced to death.

The Jamatu Nasril Islam (JNI) passed their verdict on Mohammed Bello Abubakar, 84, according to Sharia law.

This comes two weeks after the Nigerian press and the BBC reported on the case.

Talking to the media then, Mr Abubakar challenged Muslim scholars, saying there is no punishment stated in the Koran for having more than four wives.

However, Mr Abubakar advised other men not to follow his example and marry 86 women. - bbc

Wow. I need to get me one of those hats.

Taller, shorter, hairier

China is today gloating over another world record that places it firmly in the big league .... or tall league, to be exact.

If the avalanche of Olympic gold medals weren't enough, the front page of today's official English-language China Daily trumpets the news that Inner Mongolian goat herder Bao Xishun has regained the title as the world's tallest living man after the holder of the record, Ukrainian Leonid Stadnyk, refused to submit to an official measurement.

Guinness World Records (GWR) released a statement overnight announcing that Bao - who measures 2.36 metres (7 feet 9.5 inches) - won on a technicality after Stadnyk refused to submit to being measured by GWR officials.

Stadnyk, who lives with his mother in central Ukraine, is more than 20cm (8 inches) taller than Bao at 2.57 metres (8 feet 5.5 inches), according to a statement from his doctor tendered last year.

It was on that basis that the Ukrainian was listed in the 2008 edition of the Guinness Book of Records. The 2009 edition of the famous record book, however, will hand the honour back to Bao.

While Bao enjoys the publicity that comes with his fame, Stadnyk regards it as a burden. "The world is built for medium-sized people," he told the Reuters news agency. - smh

Elephants have a head for figures

Hmm. Perhaps.. but notice how the experimenter heads for the bucket with fewer apples to remove them. Is the elephant just watching this? Remember Clever Hans!

Von Osten's method was quite elementary. He began by demonstrating counting to Hans, using spoken words in the company of objects. After a time Von Osten dispensed with objects and simply used numerals on a blackboard. Hans concentrated intently on his task, tapping numbers out with his hoof. By the end of his schooling, Hans could tap out correct answers for questions ranging from addition, simple square roots and even the names of people he knew by tapping out letters in a simple code. Hans could also tell the time when asked. A great many investigators, including a special commission of thirteen people of varied background in 1904 led by Carl Stumpf, director of the Berlin Psychological Institute, were absolutely convinced of the startling intelligence of Hans the horse. Even if Von Osten was absent, Hans would still come up with the correct answers.

The Big Disappointment

Stumpf's commission was followed up by a very carefully planned investigation conducted by Oskar Pfungst. Pfungst began his testing of Hans by using numbered flash cards with which Hans was already familiar. Pfungst controlled the situation very carefully: first, Von Osten was allowed to see each number before Hans did - and Hans continued to be very clever. Then Pfungst instructed Von Osten to show Hans the cards without looking at them. Suddenly Hans's answers became random. What happened?

Pfungst concluded that somehow Von Osten, when he knew the answer, was giving it to Hans. This hypothesis was confirmed when Pfungst had Von Osten stand behind Hans and ask him to count. Again, the horse was stumped. Somehow, Hans was figuring out the correct answer by looking at the interrogator.

Next, Pfungst turned to Von Osten and watched the teacher's behaviour. Through careful observation, Pfungst was able to create a sort of dictionary of Von Osten's unconscious physical cues that were being read by Hans. Von Osten, or any other interrogator of Hans, would subtly change posture as Hans's tapping was expected to start and would change again as Hans approached the correct answer. Pfungst gave the final demonstration of the accuracy of his conclusions by cueing Hans to count without speaking, and to provide answers to questions not asked.

Conclusion? Clever Hans was a clever horse, but he was not a mathematician. - bbc

Old man killed himself after oak gets axed

A Croatian pensioner committed suicide after a tree growing in front of his house was cut down to make way for a highway, local media said on Wednesday. The 83-year-old man, Bozidar Secak from Zlatar, in northwest Croatia, shot himself in front of road workers Tuesday shortly after they had cut the tree down, media reported. The oak tree was cut down to allow widening of a nearby highway. The pensioner, who was distraught about the tree being cleared, had earlier threatened local authorities with extreme action in an attempt to save his favorite tree. - rian

I feel truly sorry for this poor man, cutting down his tree was obviously the last drop in his cup of sadness. - comment

Sad. A toast to Bozidar Secak, the real Lorax.

Military reviewing rules on deadly toxin shipments

Military leaders have suspended some activities at biological research laboratories to review safety rules for some of the world's deadliest germs and toxins, including how they are shipped through FedEx and other civilian carriers.

Defense officials said the action is part of a larger review, ordered when a researcher at an Army lab committed suicide last month after being told that he would be charged in the 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people.

Navy and Air Force officials said Thursday that they are temporarily halting shipments of dangerous biological agents to and from their medical and research labs.

They also said that during the review, they won't allow any employees to handle such materials inside their labs unless the employee is enrolled in a special program to do so or monitored by someone who is enrolled.

The Army also said for the first time Thursday that it had halted it shipments from August 8-14 for a similar review of procedures -- and then tightened some.

The Army has six, the Navy five and the Air Force two labs where biomedical research is done to support counterterrorism efforts, research protection for the armed forces and keep track of infectious diseases around the globe. Employees work with a range of dangerous materials such as anthrax and germs that cause avian flu and encephalitis.

All such Navy material "is accounted for, and none has been compromised. A thorough inventory will be a part of this stand-down," said Cmdr. Jeff A. Davis, a Navy spokesman, using the military term for a suspension of activities. - cnn

Prosecutors trying to get obese defendant to court

Prosecutors are trying to decide how to jail and bring to court a nearly half-ton, bedridden woman accused of killing her 2-year-old nephew.

A grand jury on Thursday indicted Mayra Lizbeth Rosales, 27, on one count of first-degree murder and on one count of injury to a child in the death of Eliseo Gonzalez Jr. She previously had been charged with capital murder.

Rosales weighs nearly 1,000 pounds and cannot fit through a door to leave her home, leaving prosecutors wondering how to bring her to court. As of Thursday evening, she was not in custody.

Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Trevino said holding her at the county jail for her trial would be impossible because she needs extensive medical care.

"She would die," said Trevino in Thursday's online edition of The Monitor in McAllen.

The grand jury indicted Rosales after an autopsy confirmed investigators' suspicions that the child died March 18 because he had been struck. Investigators believe the toddler was struck at least twice, crushing his head.

Authorities recommended Rosales' bond be set at $150,000. - ap

A successful face transplant: Pictures

A successful face transplant in a 30-year-old Chinese man who was attacked by the bear in October 2004. SOME MAY FIND THE FOLLOWING IMAGES DISTURBING.

Small plane hits house in Las Vegas; 3 dead

An experimental aircraft crashed into a house and exploded shortly after takeoff Friday, killing the pilot and two people inside the home, authorities said. The pilot of the home-built plane radioed that he was in trouble shortly after taking off from the North Las Vegas Airport, said Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Hawthorne, Calif.

"He said he was unable to gain altitude and was going down," Gregor said.

Firefighters quickly doused an intense fire in the single-family stucco home in a working-class neighborhood southeast of a main runway at the airport. No other homes appeared damaged. The plane appeared to have crashed through the roof over the living room. A deputy fire chief, Kevin Brame, said authorities believe three people lived in the home, but one was not home at the time of the crash.

Neighbor Letizia Gonzalez, 17, said she awoke to a sound "like a bomb." "We came outside and we saw flames coming out of the house. We went to look and it started exploding even more," she said. "They were nice people. It's really sad."

Gonzalez described the residents as a couple and the man's adult son, who kept the yard neat and were friendly to neighbors. The pilot and one resident of the house died in the 6:28 a.m. crash, and another person in the house died after being taken to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Brame said. The names of the dead were not immediately released.

Gregor characterized the rear-propeller Velocity 173 RG aircraft as "experimental" and said it can be built from a kit. FAA records showed the aircraft was certified for flight in 2002, he said, and was owned by a Las Vegas resident. The name of the owner was not released. - ap

The crash caused an intense fire in the single-family home in a neighborhood southeast of a main runway at the airport, but the fire was soon put out by firefighters. - xin

What up, homes? McCain’s bad day at the ranch

... It was a simple question: How many homes do you own? Although polling is not yet available, conventional wisdom would indicate that most Americans can answer that question. An unscientific newsroom poll here at the Monitor backed that conventional wisdom: 100 percent of those polled could answer the question without hesitation. Remember, this was an unscientific poll, however. And the margin for error was 3 percentage points. So technically speaking the results could be 97 percent to 3 percent.

But the answer wasn’t simple for presidential candidate John McCain. ...

Barack Obama’s campaign hit hard and fast. Within minutes of the story going live on the Internet, an email was sent out from the Obama campaign:

“This story about John McCain losing track of how many houses he owns is a telling moment that helps to explain why he still thinks ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ and why he offers just more of the same economic policies that we’ve gotten from President Bush for the last eight years.” ...

At a town hall meeting in Virginia, Obama was on message:

“If you don’t know how many houses you have then it’s not surprising that you might think that the economy was fundamentally strong,” Obama said. “But if you are like me and have one house or you are like the millions of people who are struggling to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective.” - csmonitor

It is always funny to me that the little things are what cause political change. McCain may have a personal money manager who buys and sells homes for him, so he wouldn't know how many he has at any point. The simple fact that he is pro-torture should have ended his chances at being president in a sane world.

Fish Tale Has DNA Hook: Students Find Bad Labels

Many New York sushi restaurants and seafood markets are playing a game of bait and switch, say two high school students turned high-tech sleuths.

In a tale of teenagers, sushi and science, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss, who graduated this year from the Trinity School in Manhattan, took on a freelance science project in which they checked 60 samples of seafood using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the fish New Yorkers buy is what they think they are getting.

They found that one-fourth of the fish samples with identifiable DNA were mislabeled. A piece of sushi sold as the luxury treat white tuna turned out to be Mozambique tilapia, a much cheaper fish that is often raised by farming. Roe supposedly from flying fish was actually from smelt. Seven of nine samples that were called red snapper were mislabeled, and they turned out to be anything from Atlantic cod to Acadian redfish, an endangered species.

What may be most impressive about the experiment is the ease with which the students accomplished it. Although the testing technique is at the forefront of research, the fact that anyone can take advantage of it by sending samples off to a laboratory meant the kind of investigative tools once restricted to Ph.D.’s and crime labs can move into the hands of curious diners and amateur scientists everywhere. ...

They hit 4 restaurants and 10 grocery stores in Manhattan. Once the samples were home, whether in doggie bags or shopping bags, they cut away a small piece and preserved it in alcohol. They sent those off to the University of Guelph in Ontario, where the Barcode of Life Database project began. A graduate student there, Eugene Wong, works on the Fish Barcode of Life (dubbed, inevitably, Fish-BOL) and agreed to do the genetic analysis. He compared the teenagers’ samples with the global library of 30,562 bar codes representing nearly 5,500 fish species. (Commercial labs will also perform the analysis for a fee.)

Three hundred dollars’ worth of meals later, the young researchers had their data back from Guelph: 2 of the 4 restaurants and 6 of the 10 grocery stores had sold mislabeled fish. - nytimes

Video: Feds: Fires Brought Down Building Next to WTC

Sunder noted that the collapse resembled a controlled demolition because, as the thermal expansion caused the failure of three critical internal columns, the collapse started internally and progressed to the exterior, just as in a controlled demolition.

This phenomenon of thermal expansion has not previously caused buildings to collapse. It reveals a potential fire-safety issue for other similar high-rise buildings.

Sunder notes that the problem arises because structural engineers have a job of making sure structural loads are adequate for dealing with conditions such as wind, while architects have the job of making sure fire proofing is specified. What is missing is the connection between these disciplines. No one actually evaluates the response of the structural system during a fire, he says. - sm

Bull feathers. Watch this:



The company doing the clean up of the WTC buildings was "Controlled Demolitions Incorporated."

Obama Says He Has Chosen His No. 2

Aug. 21 -- Sen. Barack Obama announced on Thursday that he has decided on a running mate -- but declined to provide a name, fanning already intense speculation about the choice.

"I've made the selection, and that's all you're going to get," the Democratic presidential candidate teased reporters during a stop at Virginia Favorites Ltd., a peanut and gift shop in Emporia.

The Obama campaign also joined with the campaign of Sen. John McCain in announcing that the two candidates will appear in three debates: on Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss.; on Oct. 7 in Nashville; and on Oct. 15 in Hempstead, N.Y. A vice presidential debate is scheduled for Oct. 2 in St. Louis.

The first presidential debate will focus on foreign policy and national security. The second will have a town hall format with questions coming from the audience and online, and the third will center on the economy and other domestic issues.

Although his advisers would like to wait as long as possible before overshadowing the controversy over McCain's inability to say how many houses he owns, Obama is expected to announce his vice presidential decision by Saturday. His campaign has scheduled a joint appearance in Springfield, Ill., where he announced his presidential bid more than a year and a half earlier. - washpost

Could it be ... Bill Clinton? Technically, yes. ;-)

Two McCain offices evacuated after letter threat

Two offices of John McCain's U.S. presidential campaign, in Colorado and New Hampshire, were evacuated on Thursday, and several staffers were hospitalized, after a threatening letter arrived in the mail containing an unidentified white powder.

But within hours, the letter was traced by authorities to a Colorado jail inmate who has a history of sending threatening mail, and initial tests of the envelope and its contents turned up negative for hazardous materials, the U.S. Secret Service said.

The New Hampshire scare over a second envelope there was later deemed to be an unrelated incident brought about by anxiety over the threatening letter received in Colorado.

McCain, 71, a Republican senator from Arizona and his party's presumed nominee for president, was taking the day off from the campaign, spending the day at his home in Sedona, Arizona. - reuters

Bigfoot Hoax: Tom said he laid hands on it and it was real.

Manfred Huchthausen has the longest proven family tree in the world

A man's relatives from 3000 years ago lived in a cave very close to where he now lives. This was determined by comparing local resident's DNA to DNA extracted from some very well preserved bronze age skulls.

"We wanted to find out whether these genetic patterns were still present in the living population of this area, so we put an advert in the local paper and we asked people to take part in our project - 270 people came forward. We were very surprised that so many wanted to help us.

"The local residents had to give a sample of saliva. We extracted DNA from the saliva and looked for the genetic patterns on the Y chromosome. In the end, we found two men who have a very similar genetic pattern to the prehistoric one, and that genetic pattern is unique," she added.

The analysis showed that most of the bones were from the same family.

"I saw the advert in the paper and I thought it was an interesting idea," said Manfred.

"They took a sample of saliva using cotton wool buds, they put it in a plastic tube and then sealed it. The scientists also had their mouths covered to prevent any mixing of the DNA samples," he said.

"I didn't expect it at all, to end up being the direct descendant of the cavemen. It's amazing, especially as on that particular day I had such a dry mouth, I thought the DNA sample wouldn't work," he said....

And what about Manfred, does he think he looks like his Bronze Age ancestors?

"I definitely think the shape of the head is similar to the caveman, but after 3,000 years and 120 generations, I'm sure personalities have changed," Manfred said. ...

Manfred Huchthausen is planning to organise a Bronze Age feast and party in his village.

Claiming to have the longest proven family tree in the world, he says he is now determined to find out more about his ancestors. - bbc

Black holes 'dodge middle ground'

Middleweight black holes were thought to be hiding in globular clusters

For black holes, there appears to be very little room for mediocrity, astronomers have found.

A study suggests they come in either small or large sizes, but medium-sized ones are very rare or non-existent. A team of astronomers has examined one of the best hiding places for a middleweight black hole, and found that it cannot possibly host one. Details of the research are to be published in the latest issue of the Astrophysical Journal. - bbc

Flying Cars

Because flying cars and roadable aircraft seem to be more of a dream than a reality, many people believe that these things do not exist. The truth is that almost from the moment the Wright Brothers learned to fly, people have been attempting to build such vehicles and some of them have had a fair degree of success. For the reports on these projects, where related websites are available, links to those sites are provided. It is the goal of the editors to present a record that is as complete as possible.

Roadable Times is devoted to recording the successes, the failures, and the many designs that creative people have developed in the effort to build the ultimate man-made machine, the flying car. If you examine these stories you will see that thousands of hours and millions of dollars have been spent on these efforts. Perhaps, someday there will be cars that really will fly. -roadabletimes

I enjoyed browsing through the listing of flying car designs.