Weather (or Not)

Hot on the heels of devastating tropical storms and hurricanes, The Weather Channel is planning to start naming winter storms in the same manner.  We'll see...

Their hope to market and draw attention to the current nor'easter just squashed by the National Weather Service, the government agency in charge of all naming storms and hurricanes.  Straight from the NWS , flexing their weather muscle:

That's a category 5 smackdown.  Here's the only place it looks like you'll be seeing those names being used for the storms.

Magnetic Reconnection

 Inspired by Raquel...

Lava Vs. Ice

Perpetual Ocean

The Brinicle

Airquakes

If the ground moves, better check the sky.

Geologists have set up monitoring stations in earthquake zones connected to satellites registering upper atmosphere and ionosphere data during an earthquake, and are noticing a correlation.

In the days before the March 11th Tohoku earthquake in Japan, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake. At the same time, satellite observations showed an increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, peaking in the hours before the quake. Non-scientist translation: the atmosphere was heating up.

The phenomenon would also lend credence to the observations of bright orange sunsets or dense air before earthquakes - what people sometimes call "earthquake weather"

Money Does Grow On Trees

In several wooded areas around the United Kingdom, folks have been stopping for decades (or longer) to hammer small denominations of coins into the trees for luck and the hope to cure their ills.

Tsunami Translated Means "Wave Of Cars And Buses"

Bee Careful, Or Practice Safe Pollination

Eleven species of wild pollinators in the United States have turned up carrying some of the viruses known to menace domestic honeybees.  My God, could they be passing the virus through pollen?  And worse, should the public be alarmed by the indiscriminate pollenating lifestyle of these bees?

Sure, it's a quiet news week after Christmas, but c'mon, it is a little interesting to hear people talk about "native pollinators" or honeybee viruses potentially transmitted via flower pollen? Now, the hope that viral diseases in honeybees will stay restricted to honeybees has disappeared:

A pattern showed up in the survey that fits that unpleasant scenario. Researchers tested for five viruses in pollinating insects and in their pollen hauls near apiaries in Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois. Israeli acute parasitic virus showed up in wild pollinators near honeybee installations carrying the disease but not near apiaries without the virus. In domestic honeybees, such viruses rank as one of the possible contributors to the still-mysterious malady known as colony collapse disorder that abruptly wipes out a hive’s workforce

Surveys show that wild bumblebees numbers are dwindling, and these viruses could pose a major threat.  Such problems as deformed-wing virus and sacbrood virus are ending up in pollen carried by foraging bees that weren’t infected themselves.  Yes, there is a bumblebee zero out there somewhere! These healthy, foraging insects carrying virus-laden pollen are part of their evidence that pollen by itself can transmit viral infections.

Ant Death Spiral

The Ant Room talks about how this behavior happens:

This is one of my favorite things about ants -- the ant death spiral. Actually, it's a circular mill, first described in army ants by Schneirla (1944). A circle of army ants, each one following the ant in front, becomes locked into a circular mill. They will continue to circle each other until they all die. How crazy is that? Sometimes they escape, though. Beebe (1921) described a circular mill he witnessed in Guyana. It measured 1200 feet in circumference and had a 2.5 hour circuit time per ant. The mill persisted for two days, "with ever increasing numbers of dead bodies littering the route as exhaustion took its toll, but eventually a few workers straggled from the trail thus breaking the cycle, and the raid marched off into the forest."

The Sky Is Falling All Night Long

The Perseid Meteor Shower against the backdrop of the Milky Way, as seen from Joshua Tree National Park between August 12 and August 15, 2010.

Infrared Trees

Sniffler

It has been argued that good smells are in the nose of the sniffer, but a scientific study using a robotic "eNose" proves that pleasant smells are predictably universal. Still, your farts only smell good to you.

A group of Israeli neurobiologists were able to rank smells by pleasantness, by testing dozens of smells on people in Israel and Ethiopia in order to determine whether these good smells were universal or culturally specific.

"We tuned an eNose to human odor pleasantness estimates," they wrote. "We then used the eNose to predict the pleasantness of novel odorants, and tested these predictions in naïve subjects who had not participated in the tuning procedure. We found that our apparatus generated odorant pleasantness ratings with above 80% similarity to average human ratings, and with above 90% accuracy at discriminating between categorically pleasant or unpleasant odorants. Similar results were obtained in two cultures, native Israeli and native Ethiopian, without retuning of the apparatus."

The findings suggest that, unlike in sight and hearing, there is a systematic predictable link between stimulus structure and stimulus pleasantness in the realm of smell.

They added, "We could predict whether a person who we never tested before would like the odorant, and this prediction was consistent across Israeli and Ethiopian cultural backgrounds. We argue that this difference was not a reflection of better hardware, or better algorithms, but rather a reflection of a fundamental biological property of the sense of smell."

According to the test subjects, these were the best smells:

1. lime (fruit)
2. grapefruit (fruit)
3. bergamot (similar to an orange in scent)
4. orange (fruit)
5. peppermint

Rounding out the top 10 were freesia (flower), amyl acetate (a molecule that smells like apples and bananas), cassia (similar to cinnamon), mimosa (flowering tree), and fir (tree). The worst? The researchers say the smells consistently ranked the worst included "either carboxylic acids or amines [and] cyclohexanol." These would probably produce sharp, vinegary smells. Among the lowest-ranked of the so-called "pleasant" smells were musk and patchouli, though I don't know who finds hippie pleasant smelling.

Weekend In-Law(s)

Scarlett's parentals are in LA for a few days, and that means we'll be brunching and dining and entertaining for the weekend. So let's get into it already, because I have plans...

Best of the week: Is it good for your health to see someone coughing, sneezing and blowing their nose? Recent studies suggests that the answer might be yes.

Researchers asked young adults to watch a 10-minute slide show containing a series of unpleasant photographs. Some of these participants looked at pictures of people who looked obviously sick in some way (people with pox and rashes, people coughing and sneezing and blowing mucus out of their noses). The participants gave blood samples both before and after each slideshow.

Next the researchers exposed these blood samples to a bacterial infection, and measured the extent to which white blood cells produced interleukin-6 (IL-6). IL-6 is a proinflammatory cytokine that white blood cells make when they detect microbial intruders. More IL-6 indicates a more aggressive immune response to infection. By measuring IL-6 before and after the slide show, the researchers were able to determine whether seeing pictures of disease-y people actually stimulated the immune system to fight infection more aggressively. And it did.

Interesting, but thus far watching adult movies doesn't boost your love making abilities.

Plus: I'm all for PC and not an Apple person at all. So with the hype around the maxi-iPhone iPad, it didn't take long to get past the gloss to really see the drawbacks for such an expensive toy.

It's awkward You can't carry it on your hip like a phone, so it presents the same portability issues as any laptop - you'll need a case of some sort to protect it and carry the power cable. Even around the house, there's no simple way to carry the iPad. It's too thin, heavy, slippery and expensive to put under your arm. Several of our testers were seen carrying it like a dinner tray, as a butler would, to go from the kitchen table to the couch. Portability, shmortability.

It's heavy To be sure, at 1.5 pounds and with all this functionality, the iPad is an impressive feat of engineering. But it's simply not light enough (a Kindle ebook reader is about 10 ounces) and that heft adds to the awkwardness. Holding the iPad in one hand for more than a few minutes to watch a movie or read an ebook results in tired wrists. Even holding it with two hands to read an ebook is tiring. Reading an ebook on a smartphone is ergonomically much more practical.

It's slippery You can ignore the awkward size and weight, but the iPad is also slippery, and its aluminum back is ever-so-slightly slightly concave. You feel as though it'd slip right out if you try to hold it under your arm. And on the kitchen counter, it slides and twirls as you try to type or swipe the screen (required for navigating). It needs rubber feet, but of course then it won't be near as cool. Or the added purchase of a stand (which is probably exactly how they ment the manufacture).

Screen glare The iPad has the same glossy screen as Apple's Macbook Pro laptops and iMac desktops. So unless you're reading in a very dim room, the glare will be noticeable and can be distracting. Even in the shade outdoors, the glare can be really annoying.

Reading in the sun (or lack thereof) If you want to take your iPad along for an outing at the beach, forget about it. The screen looks washed out and is almost impossible to view in bright sunlight. The Kindle's non-glossy e-ink display fares much better outdoors than the iPad's screen.

Fingerprints Once you've used the iPad for a few minutes, among the most glaring shortcomings (besides the screen glare) are the fingerprints on the screen. With a smartphone, you can wipe the screen on your shirt or pants. The iPad is too big for that. We're wondering what exactly to clean it with and where we'll keep the cleaning supplies.

No multitasking The iPad runs the same operating system as the iPhone, and as a result has all of the iPhone's limitations. The most obvious of these is the inability to multitask - or do multiple things simultaneously. The iPad can't run more than one app at a time (with the exception of a few Apple apps, such as iPod, the iPad's music playing app). While this is may be acceptable in a smartphone, it's a major handicap in a device that Apple expects people to spend hours at a time on.

The browser is limited The iPad also uses the same limited Safari browser that's found on the iPhone. While much fuss has been made about the iPad's inability to play Flash video, there are other things it can't do as well. For example, Safari on iPad can't be used to create Google Documents, only to view them.

The virtual keyboard stinks While the virtual keyboard on the iPad is much larger than the iPhone, it's still awkward to type on glass. Even those who've used tiny, cramped netbook keyboards will be disappointed by the lack of real keys and likely reduced to one-finger typing. The iPad can be paired with a physical keyboard, but even this is awkward, because the actions normally done with a mouse or a trackpad on a desktop or laptop have to be done with your finger on the iPad.

No USB port The lack of even one USB port - the universal means of connecting just about everything these days - means you can't connect the device to a printer or other computer peripherals, such as an external hard drive. The iPad can be connected to cameras, but it requires the purchase of a separate accessory from Apple.

iPhone-only apps look horrible Apple boasts that many of the 150,000 apps already available on the iPhone will also work on the iPad. What the company doesn't tell you is that when enlarged to fit on the iPad's screen, these iPhone apps look horrible, with images and text very pixelated. For this reason, many people will opt to buy apps that are made specifically for the iPad, which tend to be more expensive than their iPhone counterparts.

The price is too high $499 is just the beginning for a low-memory model that will fill up too quickly for anyone with a big music library and/or an appetite for video. Toss in some memory and a 2-year, $280 "we'll replace it even if you drop it" warranty at Best Buy, and you're out $1,000. Though given the iPad's weight, awkwardness and slipperiness, the warranty is probably one of the best features.

It doesn't replace anything The iPad will not replace your smartphone. Unless you can't type, it won't replace your laptop. If you love books, you could find a better e-reader. Exactly what need does the iPad fill?

Also: The top US naval officer has vowed to stop people lighting up in submarines, where the confined atmosphere has serious passive smoking implications. Wait, they actually still allowed smoking in subs?

"We are going to stop smoking on submarines," Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead told a recent meeting of senior submariners. Roughead? That's funny. Navy spokesman Lieutenant Commander Mark Jones confirmed a ban could be in the pipeline. "We are currently looking at changing the policy, but we have not changed the policy."

At present, smoking on US submarines is up to the commanding officer's discretion and there are designated areas on many vessels where the crew are allowed to smoke. "That atmosphere moves around the submarine. You don't smell it but the damaging things from the smoke are still present," Roughead said. Roughead? Still funny.

A Pentagon study last year carried out by the American Institute of Medicine revealed that soldiers smoke a lot more on average than civilians and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had seen a spike in smoking. The last official figures for the US military, in 2005, showed that almost one third of personnel in the armed forces, 32%, smoke as opposed to just one in five of the American population as a whole.

Up to 40% of US submariners smoke, making it all the more important to look into a ban for the overall health of American sailors.

Best picture of the week:

executing the pick and roll

Best bonus links:

• How To Defeat A Chain Lock With Rubber Bands - Pretty cool. Hopefully they'll figure out how to defeat a chastity belt with a rubber band next.

• US Comedian's Attack On Pacquiao Angers Philippines - The Ace-man knows a little something about boxing, and a lot about pissing people off by not pulling punches to be politically correct. Naturally a Muslim country would freak out.

• Will An AIDS Pill A Day Keep The Virus Away - But if you have to leave something on your teacher's desk, they'll probably prefer an apple.

• Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey Split / Jenny McCarthy Body Count - Now that she's single, pershaps she'll spend more time looking for a mate than opening her mouth about science and things she knows nothing about. And that is why there's a terrific site dedicated to making her look like the idiot lunatic she is.

• Herb Brooks Kid Tells Fenway He’s Sick Of The Yankees - Too bad this kid peaked at five years old, though it's adorable to watch a kid who probably needs a nightlight get all fired up.

• Palin, Obama Spar From A Distance Over Nuke Policy - If you're too ignorant to be able to spell nuclear, you shouldn't be allowed to vocalize your thoughts on it...Ms. Palin.

• Astronomers Solve Enigma Of Eclipsing Star - Now they can all retire, or become astologers. Or catch up on episodes of Nova.

• British Doctors Use Inert Gas To Save Baby - They burped him until he was inert. Or something.

• 10 Acclaimed Authors Who Wrote Only One Novel - Already, Scartoe and I have surpassed this since there's two seasons of His Words - Not Mine.

• Drive It Like It’s Hot - Grand Theft Auto, the reality.

• HP Preps Its Would-Be iPad Killer, The Slate - Innovation breeds competition. And less worship of iEverything.

• Max Q Live: In Space No One Can Hear You Sing - Theere is a band that has been around for years that's made up entirely of astronauts.

• AG Says Haim Obtained 550 Pills Before Death - He needed to take them so he'd be able to watch his performance in that shitty Lost Boys sequel.

• Team Releases 6 Players For Beating Up Their Coach - Normally, that's how hockey players in Slavic countrys make the team.

• Dead Man Denied Seat On Plane - And worse yet, he was being charged extra for being the carry-on.

• Fuckyouyork.com - Yes, that's a website. And that's pretty much what it has to say.

• Nepal's Living Goddess Eyes Banking Career - Either being a human deity is completely blown out of proportion, or banking is severely underated.

Worst of the week: Pajiba has the bad news...

Two more remakes in development to discuss today. Both are ’80s films (oh, OK. One was in 1990). But they present an interesting contrast between the two kinds of remakes we hate the most: 1) remakes of movies that we love that could never be duplicated; and 2) remakes of crappy movies for completely inexplicable reasons.

We’ll start with the molestation of your childhood memories remake: Columbia Pictures and Imagine Entertainment (oh, Ron Howard, how could you?) are developing a remake of Real Genius. Yes, that one. The Val Kilmer movie that everyone over the age of 30 loves. Except Communists and trash humpers. It’s about the youngest kid to be accepted into a program for geniuses who teams up with his roommates to develop a high-powered laser, which is stolen by the military and used as a weapon. But, of course, it was so much more than about that. In 1985 it was a satire. In 2010, no one knows what the hell a satire is or what it even means. The second take on the script is now out to writers, and soon, the “Mythbusters” guys may have to find a new movie to pattern their lives after.

Jesus. It just won’t be the same without the ’80s soundtrack. Also, the original made $13 million at the box office. Why would they remake this movie? (Note: This is not the sequel that was rumored years ago. This is a remake. Val Kilmer’s participation is unknown.)

The other film? House Party...yeah, who cares? Trying to improve upon Real Genius or bother to remake it is like writing a sequel to the Bible - totally unnecessary and a horrible idea. It's my favorite film and the thought of redoing it Fuck this new abomination completely.

Plus: Academics - that that term may be called into question - at the University of Hertfordshire are organising a conference about vampires and their corner of literature.

Dr. (really?) Sam George explained. "I wanted to...prove that you can study popular literature in a serious way." His call for papers led to more than 100 academics from disciplines including film, literature and cultural studies sending in abstracts; 70 have been selected to talk at the two-day conference. Planned lectures range from "Sullied Blood, Semen, and Skin: Vampires and the Spectre of Miscegenation" to "Who Ordered the Hamburger with Aids?: Blood Anxiety in True Blood".

And in a bid to make the most of that, George is launching, in September, what seems to be the world's first master's degree in vampire literature. "I've fielded a huge number of inquiries from people all over the world who are interested in studying vampires, zombies and the undead at a higher level," she says. "I had the idea of offering the master's as a direct follow-up from the conference. I thought it was crucial to have a way of extending this burst of awareness." The best papers from the conference will be collected in a book, which will become a textbook for the MA students.

Wow, that is a whole new level of retarded. Oh, who cares...there's already a real Masters you can get in real literature. But that does require oyu read decent books.

Also: Wikileaks obtained and decrypted video that shows US occupying forces in an Apache helicopter intentionally firing on a dozen civilians in Baghdad, including journalists working for the Reuters news organization: 22-year-old Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, and his driver, Saeed Chmagh, 40.

The video is accompanied by audio of the pilots' radio dialogue. Reuters had been attempting to obtain the video under Freedom of Information Act requests since the incident occurred in July, 2007, but the Pentagon blocked all requests. Reuters news editor-in-chief David Schlesinger says the video is "graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result". Wikileaks director Julian Assange said Wikileaks had to break military encryption on the file to view it, and will not reveal how or from whom the file was obtained. The transcript (and audio) seem to show the air crew lying about encountering a firefight. When they finish shooting, they laugh at the dead.

Looks like we're still not quite winning the hearts and minds of those people...

And: Glacier National Park has lost two more of its namesake moving icefields to climate change. Soon, it will just be Nation Park.

Warmer temperatures have reduced the number of named glaciers in the northwestern Montana park to 25, and the rest of the glaciers may be gone by the end of the decade.

The latest two to fall below the 25 acre threshold were Miche Wabun and Shepard. Each had shrunk by roughly 55 percent since the mid-1960s. The largest remaining glacier in the park is Harrison Glacier, at about 465 acres. On a local scale, fewer glaciers means less water in streams for fish and a higher risk for forest fires. More broadly, the fate of the glaciers offers a climate barometer, indicating dramatic changes to some ecosystems already under way.

Some glaciers, such as in the Himalayas, could hold out for centuries in a warmer world. But more than 90 percent of glaciers worldwide are in retreat, with major losses already seen across much of Alaska, the Alps, the Andes and numerous other ranges, according to researchers in the United States and Europe. In some areas of the Alps, ski resorts set atop glaciers have taken drastic measures to stave off the decline, such as draping glaciers in plastic sheeting to keep them cooler, or giving them Apple products, which doen't help.

Since about 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended, the trend has been steadily downward. The area of the Rocky Mountains now within Glacier National Park once boasted about 150 glaciers, of which 37 were eventually named. A handful of the park's largest glaciers could survive past 2020 or even 2030, but by that point the ecosystem could already be irreversibly altered. Geological evidence points to the continual presence of glaciers in the area since at least 5000 B.C.

A glacier needs to be 25 acres to qualify for the title. If it shrinks more, it does not always stop moving right away. A smaller mass of ice on a steep slope would continue to grind its way through the mountains, but eventually could disappear completely.

Worst picture of the week:

yellow diamond iPhone headphones...because you're an asshole

Worst bonus links:

• Russia Furious Over Adopted Boy Sent Back From US - They're worried that mail-order brides will be next.

• Eva Longoria Parker: Nicollette Sheridan's Lawsuit Could 'Tarnish The Reputation' Of 'Desperate Housewives' - Uh, what reputation is that? It's a second rate soap opera with a gaggle of harpies skanking around in what should have been called "Bored Useless Rich White Women". Any show that ridiculously has a light plane crash into a Christmas street festival as their cliffhanger episode has a wrecked reputation already.

• Lunch-Only Beer Policy Prompts Carlsberg Strike - Quit your whining. If you want to be wasted no the job, leave the factory and become a truck driver.

• Now 16, Elian Gonzalez Shown At Cuba Youth Meeting - He's been in jail for the last decade, I guess.

• Lindsay Lohan's Dad Engaged To Jon Gosselin's Ex, Couple Planning Baby - It's like the perfect storm of gossip page stories. And a vote for instituting eugenics.

• LAPD Seeks Link Between Restaurant Massacre, 2007 Execution-Style Slaying - Because they can't figure out either case. The two-for-one detective method is really catching on.

• Tiger Says He Expects To Win The Masters - The full headline was "Tiger says he expects to win the Masters and Johnson Pervert of the Year award".

• Kate Gosselin & Kids Return To TV In 'Twist Of Kate' - So clever! Just like that other dumb reality show "Kel On Earth"! I think they should get Apple guru Steve Jobs and put him on a turbine-powered wind farm. Call it "Blow Jobs".

• Is Pronger A Problem? - Yes.

• NTSB Probes Crash That Injured Blink 182 Drummer - Thanks for the urgency. That happened two years ago...

• Demi Moore: Obsessing Over Body Image Will Never Reward Us - Says the woman who spent a quarter of a million dollars on plastic surgery to look young. Shut the fuck up.

• 13-Year-Old To Attempt To Climb Everest - That is a long way to go just to try and be popular.

• Mexico May Cut Millions Of Cellphones To Fight Crime - Up there with their other popular plans, cutting food and plumbing to the poor. Oh, wait...that's jsut because they're the largest thrid world nation on the planet.

• Diablo Cody Is Pregnant! - That's one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. And anyone who says "Thanks for the congrats on my fetus" is clearly unfit for motherhood.

• Lin Yu Chun Can Dance! - The androgynous Whitney Houston sound-alike also shakes his gristle. And the results are disturbing.

• No Fries With That: Fast Food Axed At Afghan Bases - Put your life on the line for a war that you don't want to be fighting, and you can't get a damn cheeseburger? War is hell.

• Vatican: Pope Willing To Meet Sex Abuse Victims - Isn't that what Facebook is for if you want to look them up? Going back for seconds, that's not cool.

F(ly)1

In order to investigate how sperm of two different males compete within the reproductive tract of the female, a researcher at Syracuse University used a fluorescent tag to be able to directly visualize the movement of individual sperm. She engineered male flies whose sperm was loaded with proteins that glow either red or green. By following these glows with a special microscope, video captured the sperm racing around the female’s genital tract at high speed, like miniature race cars.

Watery Suckhole

For hundreds of years, people off the coast of Maine have noted a large whirlpool known as "Old Sow." It's the biggest whirlpool in the western hemisphere, and exhibits a lot of weird behaviors (including making pig noises).

Though said to be named the "Old Sow" whirlpool because it makes sounds like the grunts like a pig, it is more likely that it was actually the "olde sough" or "old drain", according to Atlas Obscura. Pronounced suff, over the years the pronunciation of the Dutch word probably shifted to "sow" (much like the word plough, pronounced pluff, turning to plow) as did the spelling and backstory of its name. (Other smaller nearby whirlpools are now known as "piglets.")

The whirlpool is caused by the enormous tides and bathymetry of the ocean floor in the area, and while it is one of the largest in the world with a diameter of around 250 feet, however the speed of its vortex does not come close to being one of the fastest. The water turbulence, while rarely a danger to larger boats, can be dangerous to man powered craft and exhibits some strange water phenomena, such as standing waves, "boils," "spouts," "troughs," "dishes," and "holes." Yes, technical terms like "holes" require quotes.

Here's a video of Old Sow in action.

Nature's Numbers

A Touch Off

The monster tremor in Chile killed at least 800 people and supposedly moved gigantic masses around the planet. NASA had reported that the catastrophe shifted the Earth’s axis and made a day shorter by a fraction. But now German researchers have said that the claims are completely without basis.

Who are you going to believe - scientists from the most anal, precise nation in the world, or the guys who crashed a dune buggy on Mars.

NASA scientists said on Tuesday that the earthquake moved the Earth’s axis by eight centimetres; Richard Gross used a computer model to come to this conclusion. He also claimed that days will become shorter by 1.26 microseconds.

“Unverifiable,” declared a top German scientist as he put the Earth back on track. Professor Rainer Kind (that's a hardcore name) from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam said: “It is highly doubtful that these calculations are correct. The changes to the Earth’s axis caused by an earthquake would be so tiny that it isn’t measurable and therefore impossible to reliably detect.”

Existing calculations of the movement of the Earth’s axis by past earthquakes are still being debated, the expert added. Professor Karl-Heinz Glassmeier from the Deutschen Geophysikalischen Gesellschaft (you mean, German Geophysical Association?) also criticised the alleged discovery: “NASA can only make the headlines with it. A figure of eight centimetres is absolutely unverifiable.”

The influence of an earthquake on the Earth’s tilt would in any case be extremely low, explained Dr. Mojib Latif from The Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel. He said, “The heavenly bodies around us are mainly responsible for the Earth’s tilt. The gravity of the heavy and big planets in particular determines the gradient of the Earth’s axis. "That can not be changed by an earthquake, even one as powerful as that in Chile.”

Professor Kind added: “It is impossible that there could ever be such a severe earthquake which would observably move the Earth’s axis. That would only be possible through outside influences, for example a meteorite.

Good enough for me. Besides, those Germans sound scary.

At Least It's Not Vegan

In a possible affront to its meat-eating relatives and all humans who have to put up with politically correct whining, one jumping spider prefers to be a vegetarian.

The eight-legged pussy vegetarian, called Bagheera kiplingi, lives in Central America, and is now considered a rarity among the world’s 40,000 or so spider species, most of which are strictly predators that feedg on insects and other animals. B. kiplingi is about the size of a person’s pinky nail, and dines on specialized leaf-tips of acacia shrubs. Essentially, the spider employs hunting strategies to get past guard ants that keep the acacias safe from other herbivores. In return, the ants get a comfy place to live — the plant’s hollow spines — and food in the form of acacia nectar and the shrub’s leaf-tips.

The Bagheera kiplingi spends its entire life on the acacia shrubs, and so must avoid the ants at all times. When hunting, they actively avoid the ants by changing targets when approached by a guard, and using silk droplines as retreat ladders. The spiders also nest primarily on the ends of older acacia leaves, spots the researchers found were least patrolled by ants.

Fires Of Forests