Just in time for Celine Dion's comeback!

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Wed Sep 29, 12:00 pm ET
Swanky new Vegas hotel

Man Dies Of Caffeine Overdose
Updated: Friday, 29 Oct 2010, 11:42 AM EDT
Published : Friday, 29 Oct 2010, 9:43 AM EDT

By NewsCore

A British man died after poisoning himself with two spoonfuls of caffeine powder bought over the internet, local media reported Friday.

Michael Lee Bedford, 23, from Mansfield, central England, was at a party in April when he swallowed caffeine powder that a friend bought online for

Company is first to return spacecraft from orbit
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer Marcia Dunn, Ap Aerospace Writer

34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive!

It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something ... alive.

Thankfully this story doesn't end with the destruction of the human race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.

"It was actually a very big surprise to me," said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating - or living - nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

"It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert's advisor at the time.

Lowenstein said new research indicates this process occurs in modern saline lakes, further backing up Schubert's astounding discovery, which was first revealed about a year ago. The new findings, along with details of Schubert's work, are published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today, the publication of the Geological Society of America.

Schubert, now an assistant researcher at the University of Hawaii, said the bacteria - a salt-loving sort still found on Earth today - were shrunken and small, and suspended in a kind of hibernation state.

"They're alive, but they're not using any energy to swim around, they're not reproducing," Schubert told OurAmazingPlanet. "They're not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves."

The key to the microbes' millennia-long survival may be their fellow captives - algae, of a group called Dunaliella.

"The most exciting part to me was when we were able to identify the Dunaliella cells in there," Schubert said, "because there were hints that could be a food source."

With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention (hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic ecosystems.

Other elderly bacteria?

Schubert and Lowenstein are not the first to uncover organisms that are astonishingly long-lived. About a decade ago, there were claims of discoveries of 250-million-year-old bacteria. The results weren't reproduced, and remain controversial.

Schubert, however, was able to reproduce his results. Not only did he grow the same organisms again in his own lab, he sent crystals to another lab, which then got the same results.

"So this wasn't something that was just a contaminant from our lab," Schubert said.

Survival strategy

The next step for researchers is to figure out how the microbes, suspended in a starvation-survival mode for so many thousands of years, managed to stay viable.

"We're not sure what's going on," Lowenstein said. "They need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time."

Schubert said the microbes took about two-and-a-half months to "wake up" out of their survival state before they started to reproduce, behavior that has been previously documented in bacteria, and a strategy that certainly makes sense.

"It's 34,000 years old and it has a kid," Schubert said. And ironically, once that happens, the new bacteria are, of course, entirely modern.

Of the 900 crystal samples Schubert tested, only five produced living bacteria. However, Schubert said, microbes are picky. Most organisms can't be cultured in the lab, so there could be many living microbes that just didn't like their new home enough to reproduce.

Still, wasn't it exciting to discover what could be one of the oldest living organisms on the planet?

"It worked out very well," Schubert said.

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If they can last that long...what must be lurking under Primo's couch??

Cheers . Regards the Mars article, you may enjoy this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9J7HgnxK10&hd=1

Takes a few minutes for him to get going, but it's worth it imo.

Singing Penis Insect Proves Size Does Matter

The loudest creature on Earth -- relative to its body size -- is the tiny bug, called by various names: water boatman, Micronecta scholtzi and most important: the Singing Penis. First Posted: 06/30/11 03:51 PM ET Updated: 06/30/11 03:54 PM ET

Courtship never sounded so sweet -- at least in the insect kingdom. It appears that a tiny bug known as the singing penis (also, water boatman, or Micronecta scholtzi) -- is the loudest creature on Earth, relative to its body size and the way in which it uses its penis.

BBC Nature News reports that French and Scottish scientists have determined that the male variety of the 2mm freshwater insect "sings" so loud -- at almost 100 decibels -- it's like sitting in the front row of a concert hall while a loud orchestra plays.

Here's where the penis comes into play: the male bug attempts to beguile a prospective mate by rubbing its penis against its abdomen -- something called "stridulation," which insects do all the time when they rub body parts together to produce sounds.

The scientific team was caught off guard at the volume of the insects, which are found all over Europe.

"We were very surprised. We first thought the sound was coming from larger aquatic species," said James Windmill of the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

"When we identified without any doubt the sound source, we spent a lot of time making absolutely sure that our recordings of the sounds were calibrated correctly," he said.

Their findings, published in the science journal PLoS One, indicate the bewitching song of the insect designated M. scholtzi can be compared to the sound of a passing freight train.

Despite the tiny dimensions of the insects, their penis is apparently what gives them their deafening roar.

"If you scale the sound level they produce against their body size," explained Windmill, "Micronecta scholtzi are the loudest animals on Earth."

http://weirdnews.aol.com/2011/06/30/singing-penis-insect-size-matters_n_887778.html#s301085&title=Insect_with_Singing

Search is on for missing 'floating island'
A search is under way for a giant inflatable 'floating island' that went missing from a music festival.

'Is Land' is made of durable polyurethane with foliage d

Peter Lindberg:UFO found on The Baltic Sea floor?
Written By COSMOS TV ONLINE on Sunday, July 31, 2011 | 11:04 PM

An ocean exploration team led by Swedish researcher Peter Lindberg has found what some are suggesting is a crashed flying saucer.
Lindberg's team, which has had success in the past recovering sunken ships and cargo, was using sonar to look for the century-old wreck of a ship that went down carrying several cases of a super-rare champagne. Instead, the team discovered what it claims is a mysterious round object that might (or might not) be extraterrestrial.

Lindberg explained to local media that his crew discovered, on the 300-foot-deep ocean floor between Finland and Sweden, "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter. You see a lot of weird stuff in this job, but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round."
Adding to the mystery at the bottom of the Gulf of Bothnia, Lindberg said he saw evidence of scars or marks disturbing the environment nearby, suggesting the object somehow moved across the ocean floor to where his team found it.
It's not clear what to make of this report, or the video of the sonar scan that shows the object, but Swedish tabloids and Internet UFO buffs have had a field day. Some suggest the object is a flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin (and the seafloor scars were dug up when it crashed), though of all the things that might create a round sonar signature, that seems to be among the more outlandish. It might be a natural feature formation, or possibly a sunken, round human-made object.

Lindberg's claim that the object "is perfectly round" may or may not be accurate; while it looks round from the information so far, the resolution of the sonar image was not high enough to verify that it is indeed round. And while the lines that appear to be leading to (or from) the feature may suggest some sort of movement, it's also possible they have nothing to do with the object.
Lindberg himself did not suggest that it was of extraterrestrial origin, though he did speculate that it might be a "new Stonehenge."

This is not the first time a sunken object has been presented as the solution to a mystery. Take, for example, the famous underwater mystery of the "Bimini Road," a rock formation in the Caribbean near the Bahamas that resembles a road or wall. Many New Agers and conspiracy theorists claimed that the rocks were too perfectly shaped to be natural, and that they were either made by an unknown civilization or left behind by the lost city of Atlantis. In fact, geologists have identified the blocks as unusually shaped but perfectly natural weathered beach rock.
It's also worth noting that UFOs may not be saucer-shaped. The famous "flying saucer" description of the first UFO has since been revealed as a reporting error.
Lindberg said his team has neither the interest nor the resources for further investigation of the anomaly. Deep ocean research is time-consuming and expensive. If the object were indeed a flying saucer, recovering it could be worth millions or billions of dollars. If it's a natural formation, on the other hand, it would probably be a waste of time and money.

CERN claims faster-than-light particle measured

By FRANK JORDANS and SETH BORENSTEIN
Associated Press
   
GENEVA (AP) -- A fundamental pillar of physics - that nothing can go faster than the speed of light - appears to be smashed by an oddball subatomic particle that has apparently made a giant end run around Albert Einstein's theories.

Scientists at the world's largest physics lab said Thursday they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that according to Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity - the famous E (equals) mc2 equation - just doesn't happen.

"The feeling that most people have is this can't be right, this can't be real," said James Gillies, a spokesman for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, outside the Swiss city of Geneva.

Gillies told The Associated Press that the readings have so astounded researchers that they are asking others to independently verify the measurements before claiming an actual discovery.

"They are inviting the broader physics community to look at what they've done and really scrutinize it in great detail, and ideally for someone elsewhere in the world to repeat the measurements," he said Thursday.

Scientists at the competing Fermilab in Chicago have promised to start such work immediately.

"It's a shock," said Fermilab head theoretician Stephen Parke, who was not part of the research in Geneva. "It's going to cause us problems, no doubt about that - if it's true."

The Chicago team had similar faster-than-light results in 2007, but those came with a giant margin of error that undercut its scientific significance.

Outside scientists expressed skepticism at CERN's claim that the neutrinos - one of the strangest well-known particles in physics - were observed smashing past the cosmic speed barrier of 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second).

University of Maryland physics department chairman Drew Baden called it "a flying carpet," something that was too fantastic to be believable.

CERN says a neutrino beam fired from a particle accelerator near Geneva to a lab 454 miles (730 kilometers) away in Italy traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than the speed of light. Scientists calculated the margin of error at just 10 nanoseconds, making the difference statistically significant. But given the enormous implications of the find, they still spent months checking and rechecking their results to make sure there was no flaws in the experiment.

"We have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement," said Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern, Switzerland, who was involved in the experiment known as OPERA.

The CERN researchers are now looking to the United States and Japan to confirm the results.

A similar neutrino experiment at Fermilab near Chicago would be capable of running the tests, said Stavros Katsanevas, the deputy director of France's National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research. The institute collaborated with Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory for the experiment at CERN.

Katsanevas said help could also come from the T2K experiment in Japan, though that is currently on hold after the country's devastating March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

Scientists agree if the results are confirmed, that it would force a fundamental rethink of the laws of nature.

Einstein's special relativity theory that says energy equals mass times the speed of light squared underlies "pretty much everything in modern physics," said John Ellis, a theoretical physicist at CERN who was not involved in the experiment. "It has worked perfectly up until now."

He cautioned that the neutrino researchers would have to explain why similar results weren't detected before, such as when an exploding star - or supernova - was observed in 1987.

"This would be such a sensational discovery if it were true that one has to treat it extremely carefully," said Ellis.

quicker than a ray of light
quicker than a ray of light
quickerthana rayof li ii i i ii iight

He hits faster than a Neutrino and harder than a supernova.... Iiiiiiiiitttt'sss EINSTEIN!