For special applications, future designs could achieve higher altitudes and top speeds, extended range of up to 300 km and even travel both above and below the water´s surface.I look forward to seeing some new pointless, but kind of fun, exercise like crossing Bass Strait by jet pack, then.
"Tropical fish, who were born to forage among brilliantly coloured coral reefs, belong in the deep blue depths of the sea, not suffering a miserable existence in glass tanks in art galleries so that people can gawp at them."I take it they did not react well, then, to an earlier fish related art controversy:
In 2000, the Chilean artist Marco Evaristti sparked outrage for a work he exhibited at the Trapholt Art Museum in Denmark. The display, entitled Helena, featured 10 blenders containing goldfish. Evaristti said that he wanted people "to do battle with their conscience" so visitors to the exhibition were invited to turn on the blenders. Several of the fish were liquidised which led to the museum director, being charged with, but later acquitted, of animal cruelty.I wouldn't be happy with a goldfish in a blender exhibit either, but perhaps more on the grounds that it is really stupid art.
Chantelle said that Alfie had regularly stayed the night.Hello, parents? Anyone home?
Small wonder that the News of the World has compared the situation to Channel 4 drama Shameless - only with "the total absence of anything remotely funny".Not that I find Shameless funny, though.
Catalonians traditionally celebrate Christmas by placing a caganer, which translates as pooper, in a nativity scene.
People find it fun to try to spot the tiny defecating figures which are supposed to bring prosperity and a good harvest.
Traditionally, caganers would be small bearded men in full Catalan costume but these days, it's more likely to be a celebrity.
I guess you know you've hit the bigtime when you become the model for a Catalan Christmas pooper.
“Things have changed,” Angel Posadas Sandoval, 74, finally confessed, not going into specifics but nonetheless making himself abundantly clear.
He was talking, however obliquely, about the free Viagra the government is giving away to poor men age 60 and above.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Tehran detained literally hundreds of suspected al Qaeda operatives seeking to flee Afghanistan into Iran. Iran repatriated at least 200 of these individuals to the then new government of Hamid Karzai, to Saudi Arabia, and to other countries. The Iranian government documented these actions to the United Nations and the United States in February 2002, including providing copies of each repatriated individual's passport.
But Iran could not repatriate all of the individuals it detained. For example, the Islamic Republic has no diplomatic relations with Egypt, and Iranian diplomats told my colleagues and me that Tehran was not able to send al Qaeda operatives of Egyptian origin back to Egypt.
OK, so the news is bad. (Real estate prices dropping 30% in the space of couple of months, for example.) How does the government there seek to improve things? By banning bad news, of course!:With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.
The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.
Instead of moving toward greater transparency, the emirates seem to be moving in the other direction. A new draft media law would make it a crime to damage the country’s reputation or economy, punishable by fines of up to 1 million dirhams (about $272,000). Some say it is already having a chilling effect on reporting about the crisis.Presumably, they want to ban rumours like this:
Dubai, unlike Abu Dhabi or nearby Qatar and Saudi Arabia, does not have its own oil, and had built its reputation on real estate, finance and tourism. Now, many expatriates here talk about Dubai as though it were a con game all along. Lurid rumors spread quickly: the Palm Jumeira, an artificial island that is one of this city’s trademark developments, is said to be sinking, and when you turn the faucets in the hotels built atop it, only cockroaches come out.It was all built on sand: literally and metaphorically.
In the study, a highly social strain of mice learned to associate a sound played in a specific cage with something negative simply by hearing a mouse in that cage respond with squeaks of distress. A genetically different mouse strain with fewer social tendencies did not learn any connection between the cues and the other mouse's distress, showing that the ability to identify and act on another's emotions may have a genetic basis.I'm mostly curious as to how you tell a strain of mice is "highly social". Do they spend a lot of time having friends over?
But, as the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "Lewis's popularity in America is far greater than any French love of Lewis ... American denial of the American love of Jerry Lewis is pathological."Let's just say that I feel he is now under-appreciated (indeed, probably virtually unknown by a deprived potential audience of children, even though nearly all of his movies are available for around $9 at Big W or K Mart.) Go on - at least get Artists and Models. Even if you are feminist, you can tell your children that Dean Martin was an evil man who should not be touching that woman without her consent.
We knew this was something serious, something far beyond what we had ever seen before. The conditions were absolutely extreme. The winds were hurricane strength.A nightmarish situation.
We proceeded into Marysville. This was a little tourist town of 1500 people surrounded by mountain ash forest, tree ferns and waterfalls. It was a town built around that environment. It had a commercial centre, guesthouses, all the trappings of tourism
We got to Marysville and day turned to night. There were burning embers and pieces of bark landing and starting numerous spot fires. Our intentions were to put out the spot fires, find houses and save them. That's what we are trained for: to save life and property. ...
it became clear very quickly that the scope of the fire was beyond what we were capable of. The apparent conditions were so extreme that everything was impossible. No form of active fire fighting was possible.
Our training told us that we had a resonsibility to save our own crew and it was obvious that was what we needed to do.
We made our way back to the anchor point at the oval. It was a typical country oval - a patch of clear ground. We had to sit it out. There was 30 minutes of intense stuff and we sat there for four or five hours as the town burned around us. There were houses burning everywhere we looked.
It was very confusing. A lot of residents were attempting to leave. It was pandemonium. People were pleading with us to help them free friends and family who were trapped in their houses.
Determined chants of "Death to America" rang out in city after city in Iran Tuesday, even as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a mass rally in Tehran that Iran was "ready" to talk to its arch-enemy if the US showed "real change."Hint: it probably starts with the letter "I".Speaking as Iranians marked the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, Mr. Ahmadinejad declared Iran to be "officially … a real and genuine superpower," and that the "shadow of threat has been removed forever" from the Islamic Republic.
"From now on, which power in the world can be found that has the courage to threaten the Iranian nation?" Ahmadinejad asked to cheers.
Despite the nod toward dialogue, the message from state-run TV was unrelenting. The afternoon news broadcast on IRIB Channel 1 devoted 25 minutes to scenes of Tehran and huge rallies across the country, with primary emphasis in every city on the "Death to America" chant.
Apparently when the Coalition introduces a market reform it is ‘economic fundamentalism’, but when Labor implements a market reform it is ‘economic modernisation’.
It's a wonder Bob Brown and the Greens here are not arguing along similar lines for a big redeployment of the next stimulus package into energy issues (other than mere insulation.)At American Solutions, there is an American Energy, Jobs and Prosperity plan being built that will turn American energy assets (including clean coal, ethanol, more production of oil and natural gas, new technologies from hydrogen to wind and solar and a vastly expanded nuclear-power program, as well as a dramatic modernization of the electric grid and an expansion of conservation) into money that stays here at home.
The next building boom ought to be in America instead of the Middle East, and the future of American energy consumption should be built on paying Americans rather than paying Venezuela, Iran, Russia or any other unreliable foreign country. OPEC's efforts to cut production and raise prices should remind us that the time to invest in new energy resources is now, before the next crisis.
There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua, the official news agency, featured a photo from another tragedy: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the morning, CCTV's brief bulletins about the blaze omitted footage of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.The concept of "openness" in that country has a bit of a way to go.Even before the flames had been extinguished early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, but by the evening, news of the fire was accessible via the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.
The network's unusual public apology and the media's skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a sensitive news event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.
Maybe, this asteroid will be the target of the world's first attempt to nudge one out of harm's way.AN ASTEROID that had initially been deemed harmless has turned out to have a slim chance of hitting Earth in 160 years. While that might seem a distant threat, there's far less time available to deflect it off course.
Asteroid 1999 RQ36 was discovered a decade ago, but it was not considered particularly worrisome since it has no chance of striking Earth in the next 100 years - the time frame astronomers routinely use to assess potential threats.
Now, new calculations show a 1 in 1400 chance that it will strike Earth between 2169 and 2199, according to Andrea Milani of the University of Pisa in Italy and colleagues (www.arxiv.org/abs/0901.3631).
With an estimated diameter of 560 metres, 1999 RQ36 is more than twice the size of the better-known asteroid Apophis, which has a 1 in 45,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2036 (New Scientist, 12 July 2008, p 12). Both are large enough to unleash devastating tsunamis if they were to smash into the ocean.
Although 1999 RQ36's potential collision is late in the next century, the window of opportunity to deflect it comes much sooner, prior to a series of close approaches to Earth that the asteroid will make between 2060 and 2080.
I could be wrong, I admit, but from the television images and descriptions of events in the media, it sounds rather like twaddle to be blaming poor forest management for the Victorian fires.David Packham, a researcher from Monash University's climatology group who has specialised in bushfires, said governments had abandoned responsibility for the one control they had over wildfires -- the state of the forests that fed the flames.
"Due to terribly ill-informed and pretty well outrageous concepts of conservation, we have failed to manage our fuel and our forests," Mr Packham said. "They have become unhealthy, and dangerous."
UPDATE: I should have guessed. The version in the Cairns Post is quite different:A QUEENSLAND tour guide plunged into a croc-infested mangrove swamp in a desperate bid to save his five-year-old son snatched by a 3m crocodile.
Steve Doble, who owns Daintree Rainforest Rivertrain, flung himself into the waist-deep floodwaters only to find his youngest boy had vanished.
He was alerted by the screams of his older son Ryan, 7, who had to be treated for shock after witnessing the attack.
Jeremy Doble, 5, is missing feared dead after he was taken by the crocodile, believed to be the dominant resident male Goldie, in the swamp behind his family home about 9.15am (AEST).
Locals said the "sweet, gentle-natured" child and his older brother were playing on a boogie board as their father fixed a broken mangrove boardwalk nearby, The Courier-Mail reports.
Mr Doble was working on the boardwalk when Ryan’s screams alerted him to the tragedy. The boys were chasing their pet dog and Jeremy jumped into the flooded creek after the animal. Ryan told police he saw a large croc immediately after his brother vanished.It also says that there were "unconfirmed reports" that the father jumped in after his son.
Fans of religion and alcohol might also enjoy Matsuo-taisha shrine in Arashiyama, Kyoto Prefecture. It's dedicated to the god of sake, and is a place of pilgrimage for sake brewers praying for good fortune. The priests can reportedly outdrink most people, arguing that it's their sacred duty to imbibe.
The film won an astonishing 13 Oscar nominations, just one short of the record set by All About Eve and Titanic. This is mystifying. It is a tedious marathon of smoke and mirrors. In terms of the basic requirements of three-reel drama the film lacks substance, credibility, a decent script and characters you might actually care for. That it should be pitching for the most coveted prizes in cinema is a far stranger fiction than the story itself.Yet, with typical Hollywood star myopia, Kate Winslet was on Leno the other night saying something like "oh it's been such an extraordinary year for fabulous movies, of course I didn't expect to win.." etc.
As for my take, which is just as good as anyone else's at the moment, the package deserved better targeting; much better targeting.It's all very well for Gerry Harvey to say the cash splash failed because he saw no sign of it in his stores. The economy is just a bit bigger than Harvey Norman. The fact is we don't yet have most of the figures for what happened in the economy in December, or even the last three months of last year.
And even when we get the figures it won't be easy to detect what effect various government measures have had on them. For instance, since there are no miracle cures, evidence of the economy's continued decline doesn't prove the measures did no good.
To measure accurately the effect of the measures you have to know something we'll never know: what would have happened in the economy had the authorities not done what they did.
Humans and mice are both good at assessing risk in everyday tasks, according to a study by Rutgers University scientists published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....Seems to me the lesson to take from this is that the banking and investment industry may as well be run by mice. Send them to Wall Street, I say.
The finding leads Gallistel, professor of psychology and co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, to conclude that risk assessment is not basically a high-level conscious activity, but one that is programmed into the brains of animals - mice, humans and many others....
"These animals [the mice] were doing something that, on the face of it, was mathematically complicated," Gallistel said.
