News & Not News Megathread

IncantatioN said:

New Bacterial Life-Form Discovered in NASA and ESA Spacecraft Clean Rooms

http://news.yahoo.com/bacterial-life-form-discovered-nasa-esa-spacecraft-clean-120000358.html

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the air is stringently filtered, the floors are cleansed with certified cleaning agents, and surfaces are wiped with alcohol and hydrogen peroxide, then heated to temperatures high enough to kill almost any living thing.

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Walter said:

We should kill it now.

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IncantatioN said:

http://news.yahoo.com/bacterial-life-form-discovered-nasa-esa-spacecraft-clean-120000358.html

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Although many spores died, some survived, proving that certain bugs could successfully hitchhike to Mars. The most damaging effects came from the ultraviolet radiation the spores experienced outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. To survive, “either they have to hide or come up with an ingenious mechanism of repairing the DNA damage,” says Vaishampayan, who worked on the PROTECT experiment.

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Iowa police kill son whose father only wanted to ‘teach him a lesson.

Police in Ames, Iowa began pursuing 19-year-old Tyler Comstock after his father, James, reported the van he was driving as stolen. By the time the chase ended, Tyler was dead, shot six times by Ames police officer Adam McPherson.

But the van wasn’t stolen, according to James Comstock, it was borrowed by his son, who wanted to buy cigarettes.

“He took off with my truck. I call the police, and they kill him,” James Comstock told The Des Moines Register. “It was over a damn pack of cigarettes. I wouldn’t buy him none.”


Police chased Tyler Comstock onto the Iowa State University campus and set up a blockade that resulted in Comstock ramming Officer McPherson’s vehicle. McPherson ordered Comstock to shut off his truck, and when he refused to comply, McPherson shot at him six times.

The Iowa medical examiner’s office says he was killed by two gunshot wounds to the chest.

Comstock’s family is livid over what they believe is an overreaction by the police, whose own dispatchers were pleading with officers to “back off” in their pursuit.

Tyler Comstock’s step-grandfather, Gary Shepley, told The Register that the police are “trained to handle these situations. And if they panic before they even know what’s going on, then ask yourself: What if it was your child?”

“So he didn’t shut the damn truck off, so let’s fire six rounds at him?” he asked. “We’re confused, and we don’t understand.”

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Scorpio said:

While it's easy to say that killing the driver was ridiculous, and the article plays it like the cops here are satan incarnate, I think they were reasonably justified in their actions considering the number of lives that were put at risk.

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http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/11/garland_cop_shoots_41_times.php said:

Garland Cop Charged With Manslaughter After Firing on Chase Suspect 41 Times​

At first, the official story of what happened in the early morning hours of August 31, 2012, was that 25-year-old Michael Vincent Allen had led police on a high-speed chase through Garland and Mesquite before being herded into a cul de sac. In a last-ditch attempt to escape, he rammed a Garland PD squad car. The cop inside, fearing for his life, opened fire, killing Allen.

Within two weeks, the narrative had been revised. Vincent hadn't rammed the cop; the cop had rammed him. The "multiple rounds" the officer had fired became 41, with two pauses to reload.

The officer, a seven-year Garland PD veteran named Patrick Tuter, was placed on administrative leave and ultimately fired after an internal affairs investigation concluded the he'd violated the department's use-of-force and pursuit policies. Tuter had initiated the chase after discovering that Allen was wanted for drug possession, assault and evading arrest, and Tuter was the only cop on scene to fire his weapon.

On Monday, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Tuter today for manslaughter. The Dallas Morning News' Tanya Eiserer reports that it's the first time in 17 years that Dallas County has indicted an officer in a fatal police shooting. In the previous case, a Grand Prairie police officer was acquitted on a murder charge for killing a mentally ill man who lunged at another officer with a knife.

If convicted, Tuter faces up to 20 years in prison. A wrongful death lawsuit filed against Tuter is pending in federal court.

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One reason Marisol Valles Garcia did not have much competition for the police chief job could be that her predecessor's head was left in front of the station a few days after he was kidnapped.

Another reason could be that a fifth of the population of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, a dusty, sun-baked town on Mexico's border with Texas, has fled a wave of killings and burnings that have made this one of the most violent places on Earth.

It may also have been related to the fact that drug cartels tend to give police officers a choice of "plomo o plata", lead or silver, death or corruption – which is not much of a choice: if you take the plata, a rival cartel will likely fill you with plomo.

If being police chief of Praxedis for a monthly salary of not much more than £400 sounds like a career option from hell, you are not Marisol Valles Garcia, a 20-year-old criminology student who seized the offer and started her new job this week.

For an undergraduate who paints her nails pink and has an infant son to be thrown into the crucible of the drug war has astonished Mexico, but Valles Garcia appears to be sanguine: "I am frightened, I am only human, but you have to learn to trust and to have hope that things can change," she said. "Have faith that we can do something about this security problem. We want to build a place where young people can fulfil their hopes and dreams."

Valles Garcia has yet to make an arrest but has become an instant celebrity and been hailed Mexico's bravest woman. She brushed off the praise. "I don't think age is important," she said. "What is important is what is going on inside. What I feel and what I believe. We were not looking for publicity. I don't know how the information got out."

She heads a force of just 13 agents, nine of them women, with one working patrol car, three automatic rifles and a pistol. The town is small – just 8,000 people after the recent exodus – but it sits in Juárez valley, a strategic route once used by Apaches and Billy the Kid and now a transit point for cartels transporting cocaine, cannabis and other drugs to the US, which is a stone's throw across the Rio Bravo.

The previous police chief, Martin Castro, was abducted in January 2009 and his severed head turned up days later in front of the station, a warning that frightened away most of the force and left the police chief post unfilled for over a year.

The Sinaloa cartel is said to be waging an extermination campaign against the homegrown Juárez cartel in the valley, making it one of the deadliest fronts in a war that has claimed 28,000 lives in the past four years. Earlier this month a new mayor, José-Luis Guerrero, started interviewing candidates for a new community police force. Valles Garcia, a student from Juárez university who is due to finish a criminology degree in December, was working as the police secretary and applied to be a regular police officer. She so impressed the mayor that he offered the top job.

"To those who say we are naive and she doesn't have the experience, we say that the traditional methods have not worked," said Andres Morales, the mayor's chief of staff. "We know that the results will not be immediate. We are thinking of the medium and long term. Of laying the foundations for something better in the future."

Valles Garcia's force will focus on community policing and, in theory, leave the gunbattles to the army and national police. "We are only going to do crime prevention work," she said. "We do not have the means to take them [organised crime] on. Taking on the other stuff is the job of the state and federal authorities." She implied that she would not even report the presence of organised crime in the town.

Appointing a student was not a gimmick, said Morales: "We never imagined the kind of attention it would get, but we are not complaining. It helps us send a positive message to the community."

Valles Garcia has refused bodyguards because they would distance her from the community, imply she was frightened and not do much to protect her anyway.

Leading commentator Héctor Aguilar Camín welcomed the appointment. "People may be frightened and besieged, but they have not surrendered," he said.

Farmer Arturo Gomez said he would give the new chief a chance. "This is a town without law," he said. "It is not likely things will change from one day to the next, but let's see what a woman can do... things can't get any worse."

Fidel Vega, a petrol station employee, added: "Here, everybody is afraid, and anything that can be done to remove that fear would be good. This girl has a desire to get things done."

However, some traditionalists are upset. "Are there are no men in the state of Chihuahua?" asked one blogger.

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IncantatioN said:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/21/mexico-student-police-chief-drug-cartel

"The last police chief was beheaded. Now a 20-year-old student is stepping up. Violent Mexico town pins hopes on undergraduate given £400 a month to take on the deadliest drug cartel"

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Antonius Block said:

I remember this story back in the day... I think the girl quit.

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Research Highlights Possibility of Combination Therapy for Aging

December 12, 2013/Novato, California: What are the limits to longevity? New research in simple animals suggests that combining mutants can lead to radical lifespan extension. Scientists at the Buck Institute combined mutations in two pathways well-known for lifespan extension and report a synergistic five-fold extension of longevity in the nematode C. elegans. The research, done at the Buck Institute and published online in Cell Reports on December 12, 2013, introduces the possibility of combination therapy for aging and the maladies associated with it.

The mutations inhibited key molecules involved in insulin signaling (IIS) and the nutrient signaling pathway Target of Rapamycin (TOR). Lead scientist and Buck faculty Pankaj Kapahi, PhD, said single mutations in TOR (in this case RSKS-1) usually result in a 30 percent lifespan extension, while mutations in IIS (Daf-2) often result in a doubling of lifespan in the worms – added together they would be expected to extend longevity by 130 percent. “Instead, what we have here is a synergistic five-fold increase in lifespan,” Kapahi said. “The two mutations set off a positive feedback loop in specific tissues that amplified lifespan. Basically these worms lived to the human equivalent of 400 to 500 years.”

Kapahi said the research points to the possibility of using combination therapies for aging, similar to what is done for cancer and HIV. “In the early years, cancer researchers focused on mutations in single genes, but then it became apparent that different mutations in a class of genes were driving the disease process,” he said. “The same thing is likely happening in aging.” Kapahi said this research could help explain why scientists are having a difficult time identifying single genes responsible for the long lives experienced by human centenarians. “It’s quite probable that interactions between genes are critical in those fortunate enough to live very long, healthy lives.”

Former Buck postdoctoral fellow Di Chen, PhD, now an associate professor at the Model Animal Research Center, Nanjing University, China, lead author of the study, said that the positive feedback loop (DAF-16 via the AMPK complex) originated in the germline tissue of worms. The germline is a sequence of reproductive cells that may be passed onto successive generations. “The germline was the key tissue for the synergistic gain in longevity – we think it may be where the interactions between the two mutations are integrated,” Chen said. “The finding has implications for similar synergy between the two pathways in more complex organisms.”

Kapahi said ideally the research would move into mice as a way of determining if the lifespan-extending synergy extends into mammals. “The idea would be to use mice genetically engineered to have suppressed insulin signaling, and then treat them with the drug rapamycin, which is well-known to suppress the TOR pathway.”

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“Imagine you have a nearly live Google Earth, but it isn’t four year old data – you have data that is being refreshed all the time, with videos coming down over interesting areas where interesting events are going on, showing you what is changing, what is going on,” said George Tyc, the Chief Technology Officer at UrtheCast, in an interview with Universe Today earlier this year. “What we really hope to pull off is to change the paradigm, get the everyday person interacting and seeing the data coming down from space to see the Earth and how it is evolving over time in a way that isn’t available right now.”

Last week at the Canadian Space Society Summit, UrtheCast co-founder Wade Larson explained the camera setup will take place in phases, with Phase 1 of the project having two cameras facing the ground, with one having a fixed gaze and the other one featuring maneuverability to points of interest. These should be installed on the station sometime in December 2013, Larson said, with data coming in the first quarter of 2014.

The company’s aim is to make Earth video data more accessible to individuals and schoolchildren, who would log in on UrtheCast’s website, as well as the traditional customers of government and private companies. Additionally, a recent partnership agreement with the UN will see them offer real-time information on dynamic situations such as floods and mass movements of people during humanitarian disasters. They will also be integrating the data with live social media feeds as well as opening up their API for app developers.

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One of the those victims was 29-year-old Jesse Bruce Pinkman, a former methamphetamine dealer from Albuquerque who had recently moved to Boulder to establish a legal marijuana dispensary.
Pinkman was partying with friends when he suffered several seizures and a massive heart attack which ultimately proved to be fatal. Toxicology reports revealed that marijuana was the only drug present in his system.

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TheBranded1 said:

Hoax story from Colorado


http://dailycurrant.com/2014/01/02/marijuana-overdoses-kill-37-in-colorado-on-first-day-of-legalization/

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Vampire_Hunter_Bob said:

France drinks more whiskey than the U.S. of A.
http://knowmore.washingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/the-french-drink-more-whiskey-than-americans-do-weve-failed-as-a-country/

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Hotel Selling Cooked Human Meat Found In Onitsha *Police Arrests 11 With Fresh Human Heads

On Thursday Onitsha police arrested 11 people after they discovered 2 fresh human heads in a hotel (name withheld) very close to the popular Ose-Okwodu market in Anambra state.2 AK47 rifles & other weapons were also discovered in the hotel.

The arrest followed tip-offs from area residents on Thursday morning. The hotel owner, 6 women and 4 men were arrested.

After police got access to the hotel, they made a startling discovery of two human heads wrapped in a cellophane bag, two AK47 rifles, two army caps, 40 rounds of live ammunition and so many cell phones.

“Each time I came to market, because the hotel is very close to the market, I always noticed funny movements in and out of the hotel; dirty people with dirty characters always come into the hotel. So, I was not surprised when the police made this discovery in the early hours of yesterday,” said a vegetable seller in the area.

A Pastor who was among the people who tipped off the police on Thursday said: I went to the hotel early this year, after eating, I was told that a lump of meat was being sold at N700, I was surprised. So I did not know it was human meat that I ate at such expensive price.”

Sept 05, 2013

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