Man... front page ads are always a sign that the ship is going down.グリフィス said:http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/05/la.times.faked.page/index.html
Man... front page ads are always a sign that the ship is going down.グリフィス said:http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/05/la.times.faked.page/index.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100315/ap_on_sc/us_sci_antarctica_sea_life said:Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.
That's why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera's cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.
"We were operating on the presumption that nothing's there," said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. "It was a shrimp you'd enjoy having on your plate."
"We were just gaga over it," he said of the 3-inch-long, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it's not a shrimp. It's a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.
The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?
"They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in and they found not one animal but two," said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who joined the NASA team later. "We have no idea what's going on down there."
Scorpio said:I thought this was kind of funny and kind of sad: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8602327.stm
Scorpio said:I thought this was kind of funny and kind of sad: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8602327.stm
Scientists have found the first multicellular animals that apparently live entirely without oxygen. The creatures reside deep in one of the harshest environments on earth: the Mediterranean Ocean's L'Atalante basin, which contains salt brine so dense that it doesn't mix with the oxygen-containing waters above.
Bekul said:http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201004060069
'Maddow takes down Fox-promoted, misleadingly edited California ACORN tapes'
GLENWOOD, Iowa --
An Iowa woman's pet parrot is back on safe ground after spending three days battling the elements while trapped in a tree, Omaha, Neb., TV station KETV reported.
"I left the door open and, um, the bird flew out," Mariah Jensen said.
Jensen's $2,000 scarlet macaw, Jobe, got away on Easter.
"He flew out to a tree and we've been chasing him around for three days now," she said. "He doesn't understand to fly down."
Jensen said she rented an 80-foot-tall crane to get to Jobe, but rain hindered her efforts.
"I managed to get it stuck and we can't get it out now," she said. The crane stayed stuck until late Wednesday.
For a while, it seemed like nothing would work.
"It's hard," Jensen said. "You want to see some type of progress and we've just dug ourselves deeper."
She said her bird went through a lot of wind and rain over the three-day ordeal. Jobe was just out of everyone's reach.
Finally, with a poke and a push, the petrified pet was back in safe hands.
Jensen said Jobe's rescue cost her $1,000, a price she was willing to pay from the beginning.
"It's worth it," she said. "It's worth it."
But Jobe will also have to pay a price. Jensen said she's having his wings clipped so that something like this will never happen again.
"He's grounded," she said.
Albert Einstein, the genius physicist whose theories changed our ideas of how the universe works, died 55 years ago, on April 18, 1955, of heart failure. He was 76. His funeral and cremation were intensely private affairs, and only one photographer managed to capture the events of that extraordinary day: LIFE magazine's Ralph Morse. Armed with his camera and a case of scotch -- to open doors and loosen tongues -- Morse compiled a quietly intense record of an icon's passing.
WASHINGTON — Senior staffers at the Securities and Exchange Commission spent hours surfing pornographic websites on government-issued computers while they were being paid to police the financial system, an agency watchdog says.
The SEC's inspector general conducted 33 probes of employees looking at explicit images in the past five years, according to a memo obtained late Thursday by The Associated Press.
The memo says 31 of those probes occurred in the 2 1/2 years since the financial system teetered and nearly crashed.
It was written by SEC Inspector General David Kotz in response to a request from Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.
The memo was first reported Thursday evening by ABC News. It summarizes findings of past inspector general probes and reports some shocking findings:
_ A senior attorney at the SEC's Washington headquarters spent up to eight hours a day looking at and downloading pornography. When he ran out of hard drive space, he burned the files to CDs or DVDs, which he kept in boxes around his office. He agreed to resign, an earlier watchdog report said.
_ An accountant was blocked more than 16,000 times in a month from visiting websites classified as "Sex" or "Pornography." Yet, he still managed to amass a collection of "very graphic" material on his hard drive by using Google images to bypass the SEC's internal filter, according to an earlier report from the inspector general. The accountant refused to testify in his defense and received a 14-day suspension.
_ Seventeen of the employees were "at a senior level," earning salaries of up to $222,418.
_ The number of cases jumped from two in 2007 to 16 in 2008. The cracks in the financial system emerged in mid-2007 and spread into full-blown panic by the fall of 2008.
California Rep. Darrell Issa, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said it was "disturbing that high-ranking officials within the SEC were spending more time looking at porn than taking action to help stave off the events that put our nation's economy on the brink of collapse."
He said in a statement that SEC officials "were preoccupied with other distractions" when they should have been overseeing the growing problems in the financial system.
An SEC spokesman declined to comment Thursday night.