Bizarre News

[asandir]

maybe that was the motivation behind all the hard work?

[Panda Tar]

Oh, well.

Now, this is something interesting:


It asks if we use the Internet. It's online only. I suppose we vote NO...when? The question is, of course, incomplete.

[ScarlettP]

Now that's funny!

"Answer yes or no...

Mr. Jones, Have you stopped beating your wife?"

[winterfate]

As for those scientists....hmm...seeing as I'm studying microbiology, I'll need to get a Nobel Prize (two years of extra life is a long time ).

[ThunderTitan]

I'll need to get a Nobel Prize (two years of extra life is a long time ).

Yeah, especialy since you can't move around well anymore and you're taking in more pills then a farmacy.

[winterfate]

I meant two healthy long years...
I would hope I don't become that way in my 60's .

[ThunderTitan]

I meant two healthy long years...
I would hope I don't become that way in my 60's .

Yeah, but i don't like ppl wallowing in selfdelusions. If you're relatively healthy in your 60's you're the exception, not the rule.

[ScarlettP]

There was an interesting artical on the news yesterday. I tried to find a video clip on the net, but the only one I could find would not play on my computer yesterday. Today, it seems to be totally gone. Sad, because it was rather cute.

A fawn (baby deer) got trapped on a pond when it fell through the thin ice. Animal rescue people were having difficulty figuring out how to get it out. A TV crew came out in a Helicopter to see about it. The Rescue people asked the pilot to fly near the animal to see if it would frighten the fawn enough for it to get out by itself and run. Somehow, the little thing DID get out of the water and up on the ice. Then the down draft of the chopper PUSHED the tired fawn all the way across the ice to the edge. The video was adorable of this little deer lying on the ice and sliding along to the edge. Reporter said that when it reached the edge, it got up and ran into the forest.

-------Edit - Found the clip!

http://www3.thestar.com/cgi-bin/star_st ... escue.html

[Thelonious]

I meant two healthy long years...
I would hope I don't become that way in my 60's .

Yeah, but i don't like ppl wallowing in selfdelusions. If you're relatively healthy in your 60's you're the exception, not the rule.

Then my grandpa is one of the greatest exeption of all time. Being 86 and not taking any pills... He does have some problems with one eye and walking isn't as fast as it used to, but he's not demented and even rides his bicycle sometimes.

[ThunderTitan]

See, when you're dealing with 6,5 billion being exceptions isn't all that special.

[Corribus]

If a mushroom can eat a CD, think what it can do to YOU.

Fungus Eats CD

[ThunderTitan]

If a mushroom can eat a CD, think what it can do to YOU.

Fungus Eats CD

If it can eat a wall it can eat anything... knew that from when i was little.

BTW: This article is available in full to Premium plus subscribers

Next time just copy/paste it pls.

[Corribus]

Ah, my apologies. I had forgotten that I was accessing from university IP address. Here, though you will miss the pictures:

Fungus eats CD
Spores bore holes in compact disks, rendering them useless.
by Xavier Bosch

Computers get viruses. Code gets bugs. Now CDs get fungus. Researchers in Spain have discovered a fungus that eats holes in compact discs, corrupting the information stored in them.

After visiting Belize in Central America, Victor Cardenes of Madrid's National Museum of Natural Sciences (MNCN), found one of his CDs discoloured, transparent and unreadable.

The disk's aluminium and polycarbonate layers were riddled with fungus, Cardenes and his colleagues have discovered.

The team has isolated and cultured what they believe to be Geotrichum candidum. Usually, this fungus lives on plants and animals. Occasionally it infects the human respiratory tract. DNA analysis is pending.

Burrowing in like worms from the side of the disk, "the fungus destroyed crucial information pits", says team-member Javier Garcia-Guinea. Pits in a CD's aluminium and polycarbonate sandwich store binary data, which is read by a laser.

Some fungi are known to live on plastics and polymers, but this is the first report of a CD being eaten by a fungus. The researchers believe that the spores probably entered the CD in Belize.

The rarity of this phenomenon suggests that Belize's high temperatures and tropical humidity were crucial. To find out more, the Spanish group has posted an offer on the internet to analyse unreadable CDs from anyone wanting to test their disks for fungal infection. They have also submitted their work to the journal Natur Wissenschaften.

The problem with fungi is that we know far less about them than about bacteria, explains environmental microbiologist Marc Valls of Madrid's National Center. The finding that one has a taste for CDs is "not very surprising" he says, but it offers hope that fungi with similarly unusual proclivities might be exploited for environmental clean-up.

[ThunderTitan]

but it offers hope that fungi with similarly unusual proclivities might be exploited for environmental clean-up.

I can see it now, Fungus Gehenna... where all your trash is disposed of. In a feew millenia Hell woun't be about fire, but fungi.

[ThunderTitan]

RAMAT GAN, Israel — Rachel Cohen was praying at her son’s grave when a call on her mobile phone brought news that she had been awaiting for four years. An Israeli court had cleared the way for her to become a grandmother.

The legal decision is unprecedented because her son, Keivin, who was shot dead by a sniper in Gaza in 2002, never knew the woman who will become the mother of his child. She was selected by a family charity and Private Cohen’s family.

A sample of the 20-year-old soldier’s sperm was taken after his death. His parents, who left Iran for Israel when Keivin was 5, petitioned a family court in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv, “to fulfill his desire to start a family” even though Private Cohen had never made an official request for such a judicial step.

Cohen said that she was acting as her son would have wished. “Every time I go to his grave and touch his cold tombstone I tell myself how wonderful it would be to hold a warm child in my arms instead,” she said. “For Keivin it was his soul’s desire to have children.”

Cohen said that she was guided in her decision by her dead son. “An hour after being told he had been killed I took his picture and started talking to him. I asked him, ‘Where are all the children you wanted?’ then looked at the picture and heard him saying, ‘Mum, it’s not too late. There is something you can take from me’.

“Then it came to me — ‘Your sperm, that’s what you want me to take from you’. Right there, I asked the officers who came to visit to make sure his sperm be kept.”

The family was assisted in its campaign by New Family, an Israeli NGO that described the ruling as a dramatic development for those who wish to make a “biological will”. A year later the family approached a medical sperm bank seeking permission to use it for insemination. When the request was turned down New Family began a legal action that concluded successfully for the family this week. There was a problem for a while in that the Attorney-General said that the only person who could ask permission for this was a spouse. Private Cohen wasn’t married and he had not prepared a biological will, but the family had testimony, including video recordings, in which he expressed his desire to have children.

Irit Rosenblum, of New Family, said: “The parents felt it was their mission to fulfill his wish. They had to go through psychological tests and then the next hurdle was to find a mother. It took a year and a half but we found one.

“There is a legally drafted contract between the mother and Keivin’s parents guaranteeing that their only responsibility is to be the grandparents of the child when he or she is born.”

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,244404,00.html

I can see it now: "My daddy died 4 years before i was born and i have no ideea who mommy is... life's been great".

[asandir]

that's a bit odd, but then so is this whole crazy world we all live in

Batman's Joker gets Dutch ID
A man from the western Dutch town of Hellevoetsluis convinced local authorities to issue him an identity card with a picture that shows him as "The Joker", Dutch news agency ANP reports.

"The Joker", played by Jack Nicholson in the movie version of Batman, is probably the best known enemy of the fictional superhero.

The 35-year-old man also managed to apply for a driver's licence picturing him with the cartoon character's trademark white skin and dark hat.

ANP says the man is working in the security sector and had wanted to show that current rules for identity papers were insufficient.

[Omega_Destroyer]

That reminds me of a story from awhile back about a soldier changing his legal name to Optimus Prime.

[asandir]

bet people were scared of him

Tassie devil ranks in world's worst sounds
The sound of a tasmanian devil has featured in a list of the world's most horrible sounds.

Over 1.1 million votes were analysed by Professor Trevor Cox of the University of Salford in the UK.

Voting took place via Internet site sound101.org.

Coming in at number 11 out of 34 sounds was the tasmanian devil, which was considered a more horrible sound than the dentist's drill.

Vomiting topped the list, followed by microphone feedback, with babies crying and a "horrible scraping sound" tying for third place.

Fingernails down a blackboard, considered an awful sound by many people, came in at 16th.

Professor Cox says he is driven by a scientific curiosity about why people shudder at certain sounds and not others.

"We are pre-programmed to be repulsed by horrible things such as vomiting, as it is fundamental to staying alive to avoid nasty stuff but, interestingly, the voting patterns from the sound did not match expectation for a pure 'disgust' reaction," he said.

"Similarly, the sound of fingernails down a blackboard has been compared to the warning cries of monkeys - again, something that humans might instinctively respond to because of our ancestry.

"So we examined whether the voting patterns for the scraping sounds were consistent with an evolved response.

"But only for the worst scraping sound were the results consistent with the hypothesis of an evolved response."

Professor Cox is now planning a similar experiment to rate the most pleasant sound in the world.

how is this important?

[Omega_Destroyer]

It eliminates the need to guess what the worst sound in the world is...

[asandir]

I guess .... think of how many hours are wasted by that .... ....