Woman's cellphone swallowed by crocodile ringing

Here's something strange that shows how sturdy some Nokia phones can be. There can be crocodile resistant!

A crocodile named Gena at an aquarium in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine swallowed the mobile phone nearly a month back when a visitor, Rimma Golovko trying to photograph the reptile dropped it in the water, according to several media reports.

The zoo authorities did not believe the woman that the 14-year-old toothy reptile ate her Nokia phone until they called it and heard it ringing inside the croc's stomach.

An aquarium employee Alexandra was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “The phone started ringing and the sound was coming from inside our Gena's stomach, and we understood s[he] wasn't lying."
Surprisingly, the device survived the amphibious reptile's teeth and acids in stomach.

Despite being the leader of the group, Gena has not been playing with other fellow African crocodiles. Apparently he is depressed and in pain after swallowing the device.

Croc in pain?

Though the phone has not been damaged, Gena has been unwell. Since the incident, the crocodile has refused to eat food, and has become silent.

The doctors have tried feeding him live quail, which was injected with vitamins and a laxative, but Gena did not eat it.

Alexandra added, "His behavior has changed. He moves very little and swims much less than he used to.”
Despite being the leader of the group, Gena has not been playing with other fellow African crocodiles. Apparently he is depressed and in pain after swallowing the device.

According to Eduard Manukyan, aquarium's representative, the crocodile's condition has been worsening day by day.

Gena may undergo operation

If the croc continues refusing to eat, he will be taken for an X-ray next week.
Currently, the authorities are trying to warm up the air and water to speed up Gena's digestion.

Removing the cellphone through operation will be the last resort, as a surgery in reptiles usually take around three weeks to heal. Also, the move can prove dangerous both for the Gena and the vets.
Dnipropetrovsk chief veterinarian Oleksandr Shushlenko stated that whether the crocodile will undergo surgery or not will depend on where the celephone is located.

He added, "We don't have much experience working with such large animals."

The zoo administrators stated, “We have ordered special transport to bring Gena to the vet.
"We pray only that he survived the operation. We are so worried about him.”

Meanwhile Golovko is only worried about her cellphone and wants to get it back, as it has her contacts and memorable photographs.

Night owls vs. morning people: Who's smarter?

New York – Recent evidence shows that people who thrive at night have higher IQs. Early risers beg to differ
Are you the type who stays up late to finish your work, or do you get up early to make a fresh start on the day? If it's the former, you may be pleased to learn new research has found that those with higher IQs tend to be nocturnal night-owls. But if it's the latter, you might have good reason to distrust the claim. Here's an instant guide:

Is there solid science behind this finding?

Sleep researchers tend to divide people into two groups, explains zoologist Robert Alison in the Winnipeg Free Press, based on whether they exhibit "morningness" or "eveningness." A recent study claims that eveningness is an evolutionary advancement that marks out "more intelligent individuals," while "those with lower IQs tend to restrict their activities primarily to daytime."

How can that be?

Researchers from the London School of Economics say that human beings used to all be day-oriented, and that eveningness is an "evolutionarily novel preference" made by people with "a higher level of cognitive complexity." Basically, smart people evolve to stay up later.

I want to get more intelligent. Can I just start staying up late?

It isn't that simple. Several studies have shown that your sleep preferences are at least 50 percent genetic, and that your chronotype — that is, the time of day you are at your physical and mental peak — changes with your age. Generally speaking, "eveningness" peaks in the late teens and early 20s.

Are there any downsides to "eveningness"?

Night owls tend to be less reliable, more emotionally unstable, and more likely to have problems with addictions and eating disorders, according to a 2008 study by psychologist Marina Giamnietro. They are also more likely to drink alcohol and smoke, says Dutch psychiatrist Walter van den Broek at his Dr. Shock blog. Another study found that undergrad "evening types" had lower GPAs than those who awake early in the morning.

Is there any advantage to being a morning person?

Early risers tend to be more conscientious, persistent, and apt to cooperate, says van den Broek, a self-described morning person. They also "cope better with academic requirements and receive better grades." And when you think about it, adds Ace Burpee in the Winnipeg Free Press, "there are no sayings about late birds getting some sort of way better tasting worm."

Which am I?

If you're unsure, this test will tell you where you fit on the morningness-eveningness spectrum.

Sources: Winnipeg Free Press (2), Disinformation, Dr. Shock, ScienceDaily
View this article on TheWeek.com

Going, going, GONE! Pigeon shuns chance of great escape after being scooped up by hungry pelican in London park

When a pigeon was gobbled up by a greedy pelican, it looked like instant game over for the little bird.
But when the predator unexpectedly opened up his huge beak again, the pigeon was given a chance to save himself and fly away.

Confusingly, however, the dopey bird instead chose to simply sit in the beak taking in the view - and missed his only opportunity to escape.
Not surprisingly, he was eaten up

Photographer Paul Mansfield, 44, captured the remarkable scene while on a day trip to London with his family.
The pigeon had been pecking at crumbs in St James' Park, Westminster, when he was targeted by the pelican.
Mr Mansfield said: 'I noticed a small crowd gathered at the side of a lake that was 'oohing' and 'arghing'.
'On closer inspection I could see what all the fuss was about.
'On the grassy bank a pelican had managed to gobble up a pigeon.'


Mr Mansfield, from Brighton, East Sussex, added: 'The crowd was willing it to escape, with shouts of "Come on, you can do it!".'
'During one such moment the pigeon stood inside the peak, head peering out, with its body silhouetted on the pelican's pouch
.
There was another big gulp and you could see the pigeon slide further down the pouch.

'Then another and it was gone. There were gasps of disbelief from many in the crowd.'

Unbelievably the same pelican then gulped another bird nearby and the whole process started again.

Mr Mansfield said: 'I had seen enough and headed for more pleasant vistas along the South Bank.'

Cicada

Cicadas are probably best known for their buzzing and clicking noises, which can be amplified by multitudes of insects into an overpowering hum.

Males produce this species-specific noise with vibrating membranes on their abdomens. The sounds vary widely and some species are more musical than others. Though cicada noises may sound alike to humans, the insects use different calls to express alarm or attract mates.

Cicadas are also famous for their penchant for disappearing entirely for many years, only to reappear in force at a regular interval. There are some 3,000 cicada species, but only some share this behavior (the 17-year cicada is an example).

Others are called annuals because, although individuals have multi-year lifecycles, some adults appear every year. The dog day cicada, for example, emerges each year in mid-summer.

When young cicada nymphs hatch from their eggs, they dig themselves into the ground to suck the liquids of plant roots. They spend several early life stages in these underground burrows before surfacing as adults. The process varies in length but often takes a number of years.

Periodical cicadas do not create destructive plagues, as some locusts do, though tens or hundreds of thousands of insects may crowd into a single acre. Large swarms can overwhelm and damage young trees by feeding and laying eggs, but older trees usually escape without serious damage.

Cicadas are members of the order Homoptera and are physically distinguished by their stout bodies, broad heads, clear-membrane wings, and large compound eyes.

The insect's amazing lifestyle has been a source of fascination since ancient times. Several cultures, such as the ancient Chinese, regarded these insects as powerful symbols of rebirth.

"Lost" Languages to Be Resurrected by Computers?

New program can translate ancient Biblical script.

Tim Hornyak
for National Geographic News


A new computer program has quickly deciphered a written language last used in Biblical times—possibly opening the door to "resurrecting" ancient texts that are no longer understood, scientists announced last week.

Created by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program automatically translates written Ugaritic, which consists of dots and wedge-shaped stylus marks on clay tablets. The script was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria.

Written examples of this "lost language" were discovered by archaeologists excavating the port city of Ugarit in the late 1920s. It took until 1932 for language specialists to decode the writing. Since then, the script has helped shed light on ancient Israelite culture and Biblical texts.

 
Using no more computing power than that of a high-end laptop, the new program compared symbol and word frequencies and patterns in Ugaritic with those of a known language, in this case, the closely related Hebrew.

Through repeated analysis, the program linked letters and words to map nearly all Ugaritic symbols to their Hebrew equivalents in a matter of hours.

The program also correctly identified Ugaritic and Hebrew words with shared roots 60 percent of the time. Shared roots are when words in different languages spring from the same source, such as the French homme and Spanish hombre, which share the Latin root for "man."

Led by computer science professor Regina Barzilay, the team may be the first to show that a computer approach to dead scripts can be effective, despite claims that machines lack the necessary intuition.


"Traditionally, decipherment has been viewed as a sort of scholarly detective game, and computers weren't thought to be of much use," Barzilay said.

"Our aim is to bring to bear the full power of modern machine learning and statistics to this problem."
Not Always a "Rosetta Stone"

The next step should be to see whether the program can help crack the handful of ancient scripts that remain largely incomprehensible.

Etruscan, for example, is a script that was used in northern and central Italy around 700 B.C. but was displaced by Latin by about A.D. 100. Few written examples of Etruscan survive, and the language has no known relations, so it continues to baffle archaeologists.

"In the case [of Ugaritic], you're dealing with a small and simple writing system, and there are closely related languages," noted Richard Sproat, an Oregon Health and Science University computational linguist who was not involved in the new work.

"It's not always going to be the case that there are closely related languages that one can use" for Rosetta Stone-like comparisons.

But study leader Barzilay thinks the decoding program can overcome this hurdle by scanning multiple languages at once and taking contextual information into account—improvements that could uncover unexpected similarities or links to known languages.

A paper describing the new computer program was presented last week at the 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Uppsala, Sweden. 

Two New "Walking" Batfish Species Found

New bottom-dwellers live in path of Gulf oil spill.

Two new species of bottom-dwelling "walking" fish have been found in the Gulf of Mexico—right in the path of the Gulf oil spill, experts say.

Small enough to fit in a person's palm, members of the two species of pancake batfish might already be threatened by the ongoing Deepwater Horizon spill and the oil-dispersing chemicals being used in its cleanup, experts say.

The new fish are so named because they are flat and can use their stout, arm-like fins to shamble along the seafloor with a stilted gait, reminiscent of a walking bat.

Once thought to be part of a known, widespread species, the batfish are actually three separate species, according to a recent physical reexamination of museum specimens. The species discoveries—to be described in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Fish Biology—were made before the Gulf oil spill began on April 20.
One of the new species, H. intermedius, is found only in the Gulf of Mexico (see map), including parts—such as coastal Louisiana—that are already heavily affected by the oil spill.

The other new batfish, H. bispinosus, lives along the northeastern Gulf coast, as well as along the eastern coasts of Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Oil has begun to dirty the western coast of Florida in recent weeks. 

"If we are still finding new species of fishes in the Gulf, imagine how much diversity ... is out there that we do not know about," study co-author John Sparks, a fish biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, said in a statement.

Toxic Oil Poses Many Threats to Batfish 

There are several ways the oil could harm the newfound fish.

For one, floating slicks of oil may be killing the pancake batfishes' plankton food supply.

Adult pancake batfish on the seafloor could be immediately harmed by oil gushing from the broken wellhead.
And the toxic crude may also kill off the fishes' eggs and larvae, which travel on the ocean's surface, said study co-author Prosanta Chakrabarty, a fish biologist at Louisiana State University.

What's more, chemical dispersants used to break up the oil into smaller droplets for easier digestion by microbes may be toxic to the fish, he said.

As a drastic measure to contain the disaster, cleanup crews have been applying dispersants underwater directly at the source of spill. However, it's unknown how—or even if—dispersants applied at depths biodegrade in the same way that they do at the surface.

Dispersed Oil's Impact on Fish Unknown

It's also unclear whether the right kinds of microbes exist in deep ocean to digest the oil once it's broken up by dispersants, Chakrabarty pointed out.

"How the oil breaks down and how it's affecting the fish is totally unknown. This shouldn't have been done without a study beforehand," he added.


"I'm afraid that next year when there's no oil on the surface, people will forget about it.

"People are going to say everything's fine in the Gulf," he said, "when in fact terrible things are still going on below the surface."

Jam said to be made from Princess Di's hair

The royal hair? Jam made from what its maker claims is one of Princess Diana's hairs is up for sale at an art exhibition in London.

The preserve, called "occult jam," is part of a surrealist art show at London's Barbican Art Gallery that includes exhibits by Salvador Dali and Rene Margritte. The 5-pound-a-jar ($7.60) jam is both art and food, Sam Bompas, who founded catering company Bompas and Parr, said Sunday.

He said the preserve is made by infusing a tiny speck of the late princess of Wales' hair with gin, which is then combined with milk and sugar to create a product with a taste resembling condensed milk.

The hair was bought on eBay for $10 from a U.S. dealer who collects what he says is celebrity hair and sells it in extremely tiny parts.

The art show's organizers asked his company to come up with a response in food to the exhibition's surrealist theme. Bompas said he decided to make the bizarre product to provoke people into thinking about food marketing and how language enhances the everyday eating experience, he said.

"We thought about it and the most mundane food of all is jam. So we made it a surreal object," he said.

Self-styled "food architects," past projects included a banquet consisting entirely of gelatine molds shaped like architectural landmarks.

In another, they gave audiences at a screening of Peter Greenaway's film "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" scratch-and-sniff cards that evoked smells from key scenes in the movie.

The most famous Sinkholes in the World!!

         

 1-A sinkhole is seen in downtown Guatemala City on May 31. Authorities blamed the heavy rains from tropical storm Agatha as the cause of the crater that swallowed a three-story building, and say they will also be conducting further studies to determine the cause. In April 2007, another giant sinkhole in the same area killed three people.

2-A Los Angeles, Calif., fire engine sinks into a sinkhole while responding to a water-main break in September 2009. None of the firefighters were hurt and it took hours to get the fire engine out of the hole.

3-A sinkhole in Dunedin, Fla., is seen here in April 2007.

4-Workers assess damage done by a sinkhole near Chattanooga, Tenn., on May 18. The sinkhole was about 35 feet deep, 40 feet long, and 18 feet wide.

5-A sinkhole that formed in Spring Hill, Fla., is seen here in April 1998. The hole formed behind the Handy TV store in the morning, causing the back part of the store to fall into the hole.

6-A sinkhole caused by recent rise in Guatemala City is seen here on May 30.

7-The Bimmah Sinkhole, a limestone sinkhole, is seen here between Quaryat and Sur in Oman.

8-Chinese workers inspect a sinkhole in a Beijing street in February.

Invisibility cloaks and how to use them

The "invisibility cloaks" being made in labs today can hide objects when viewed from a wide range of directions and in visible light – both considered implausible developments when the first working invisibility cloak was demonstrated just four years ago. But the technology that makes objects vanish looks set to be more useful for the safety of offshore structures and for unlocking cosmological secrets than for would-be Harry Potter impersonators.

In 2006, John Pendry's team at Imperial College London made the news with a design for a cloak that could steer light around an object to render it invisible. Within months a team led by David Smith of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, had built such a device using exotic "metamaterials" – materials with unusual electromagnetic properties that are not found in nature.

But that first cloak could only hide two-dimensional objects viewed from specific directions – and only if they were "viewed" using one particular microwave frequency. Producing a cloak to hide objects from visible light, which has a wavelength several orders of magnitude smaller than microwaves – let alone cloaking objects when viewed from any direction – seemed a more remote possibility.

Just four years later that's no longer the case. "While full cloaking has not been achieved, it shows promises in the right direction," says Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews, UK.
Carpet trick

Last year, physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, independently built optical-frequency cloaks. These were so-called carpet cloaks, made from silicon, which were placed over the object to be cloaked. The object created a bump in the carpet, but the carpet appears flat when light arriving from a specific direction reflects off the surface.

For now, such technology can cloak only objects with a surface area of a few square micrometres and a few hundred nanometres deep. But "in principle, you can make the [cloaked] object larger and larger", says Thomas Zentgraf, a member of the Berkeley team.

Another limitation of the technology – that it works for specific viewing angles only – is already being overcome. Earlier this year, Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and colleagues demonstrated a version of the technology that could hide an object from view from a wider range of directions, bringing 3D cloaking a step closer. They arranged photonic crystals in a woodpile-like stack, filling the gaps between the crystals with varying amounts of a polymer to control the refractive index of the metamaterial. This changed the refractive index to a differing degree across the metamaterial, allowing it to mask a bump in a gold foil over a wide viewing angle of about 60 degrees.

"We are optimistic that we can do this [for any viewing angle] in a few years," says Zentgraf.
Waves and event horizons

But even 2D cloaking technology could have real-world uses. Stefan Enoch at the Fresnel Institute in Marseille, France, and colleagues have shown that metamaterials could guide waves around offshore structures, protecting them from storms or tsunamis.

Meanwhile, metamaterials could also shed light on black holes. In 2008, Leonhardt and his team showed how to mimic an event horizon in the lab.

If the medium through which an electromagnetic wave is propagating is moving as fast as the wave itself, the wave is effectively trapped and cannot escape the medium. This has the same effect as a black hole's event horizon, the point of no return for light: an observer outside an event horizon could see nothing inside, as no light can escape the black hole's gravity to cross the horizon to the universe outside.

To mimic this, Leonhardt's team fired laser pulses into a specially fabricated optical fibre. The pulses were designed to modify the fibre's optical properties, so as the laser pulse travelled along the fibre, the change in the fibre's properties moved along it at the same speed. It was as if a virtual fibre was moving at the speed of light, effectively trapping the light

A black hole emits so-called Hawking radiation, and theory says that Leonhardt's team laboratory analogue should do so too, albeit at levels too small to be easily detected yet. Even Harry Potter's cloak wouldn't be capable of that.
References: The two optical frequency cloak papers: University of California, Berkeley study, Cornell University study; Ergin's 3D cloaking study: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1186351; Leonhardt's black hole study: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1153625

Woman jailed for giving baby methadone-soaked dummy

An Edinburgh woman who put methadone on a baby's dummy to stop him crying has been jailed for three years.

Susan Taylor, 29, admitted a charge of culpably and recklessly causing the child to ingest methadone, to the danger of his life in November 2008.

Although Taylor admitted the charge last September, the case could not be reported until Tuesday because her partner was facing trial.

Lynn Cowan, 28, admitted she failed to tell medics the baby had methadone.

At Edinburgh Sheriff Court on Tuesday Cowan appeared from custody and halted a planned trial by admitting that when Taylor told her she had given the little boy methadone, Cowan failed to pass on the information to doctors.

A court heard that the 10-week-old child, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, almost died.

Doctors found "a huge quantity" of the drug, given to addicts to wean them off heroin, in the baby's urine.

They said it was too early to tell whether there might be lasting effects, advocate depute Morag Jack, prosecuting, told the High Court in Edinburgh.

Sheriff Alistair Noble jailed Cowan for a total of 10 months, eight months for a charge brought under the Children and Young Persons Act and two months for missing a previous court date.
The High Court hearing last September was told that the couple, who both have drug problems, regularly looked after the little boy at his home in the Leith area of Edinburgh.

Ms Jack described how they were watching television there when Cowan suddenly realised the baby wasn't breathing.

"His lips were blue and his face was grey", said Ms Jack.

By the time ambulance personnel arrived on the scene the baby was not breathing, apart from a single gasp for air.

The child suffered fits on the way to the city's Royal Hospital for Sick Children and was kept in intensive care, gradually improving over the next 36 hours.

Police were called in when tests revealed methadone was in the baby's system two days later.

When questioned, Taylor admitted rolling the child's dummy around the measuring cup she used to take her daily methadone.

The judge was also told that poisons expert Professor Robin Braithwaite had prepared a report on the case.

He said methadone presented a high risk to children because it tasted sweet. As little as half a teaspoonful could prove fatal.

Ms Jack said: "Professor Braithwaite is of the opinion that without prompt medical intervention the baby would have died"

Defence advocate Susan Duff said Taylor was "distressed" when the baby cried and she was unable to settle him.

The lawyer added: "She in no way intended to cause him any harm

"She loves him. She had no concept of how dangerous feeding methadone to a young baby was."

But Lord Bannatyne told Taylor, formerly from Leith, that she had shown "a high degree of recklessness".

Lord Bannatyne ordered the three year sentence to follow a 26-month sentence Taylor was currently serving for snatching a 66-year-old woman's bag at knife-point.

Source:BBC