eturbonews - A tourist took photographs of a shark attacking a seal close to the beach on the Cape Cod National Seashore, the park's chief ranger said today.Bob Grant said the attack happened late Friday afternoon off a remote stretch of beach just north of the halfway point between two lifeguarded beaches, Race Point and Head of the Meadow. The two beaches are about four miles apart.
He said the woman, Terese M. Carena, a tourist from Arizona, was sitting with her husband and other family members looking at the water when they noticed a seal suddenly pulled under. Then, realizing what was going on, she began snapping pictures.
"It was definitely an attack," Grant said.
A state expert confirmed that the sighting was of a great white shark.
A number of shark sightings have been reported this summer off the Cape. The Chatham area appears to be a particular hotspot. A five-mile stretch of beach there was closed in late July.
Grant said warning signs had been posted near where the shark had attacked the seal and officials were warning people to use caution in the area.
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Earth's Helium Reserves Run Out In 25 Years
dailymail - It is more commonly known as the gas that fills cheap party balloons and makes your voice squeak if you inhale it.
But helium is actually a precious resource that is being squandered with Earth's reserves of it due to run out within 25 to 30 years, experts have warned.
Earth’s resources of helium are being depleted at an astonishing rate, an effect which will spell disaster for hospitals which use it to cool MRI scanners.
The world's biggest store of helium - the most commonly used inert gas - lies in a disused airfield in Amarillo, Texas, and is being sold off far too cheaply.
But in 1996, the US government passed a law which states that the facility - the US National Helium Reserve - must be completely sold off by 2015 to recoup the price of installing it.
This means that the helium, a non-renewable gas, is being quickly sold off at increasingly cheap prices, making it uneconomical to recycle.
Nasa uses the gas to clean its rockets of fuel while liquid helium is used to cool nuclear reactors and space telescopes.
Nobel laureate Robert Richardson, a professor of physics at Cornell University in New York, told New Scientist magazine that once our helium reserves are gone there will be no way of replacing it.
He also warned that although some substitutes can be found for some applications where helium is used, it will be impossible to use a different material for MRI scanners
He told the magazine: There are some substitutes, but it can't be replaced for cryogenics, where liquid helium cools superconducting magnets for MRI scanners.
What helium is used for
'There is no other substance which has a lower boiling point than helium. It is also used in the manufacture of fibre optics and liquid crystal displays.
'The use of helium in cryogenics is self-contained, in that the helium is recycled. The same could be done in other industries if helium was expensive enough that manufacturers thought recovering it was worthwhile.'
Helium is formed through the slow radioactive decay of rocks on Earth and nearly all of our reserves have been formed as a by-product of the extraction of natural gas.
The only way to obtain more helium would be to capture it from the decay of tritium - a radioactive hydrogen isotope, which the U.S. stopped making n 1988.
The US stores around 80 per cent of the world's helium and so its decision to let it go at an extremely low price has a massive knock-on affect on its market.
But Professor Richardson said that low price of helium meant that it was being ‘squandered’ rather than being treated as a precious resource.
He said: 'The problem is that these supplies will run out in a mere 25 years, and the US government has a policy of selling helium at a ridiculously low price.'
And he said that the only way to deal with the problem would be for the free market in helium to prevail.
He said this will mean that a helium balloon of the kind used at children’s parties would cost $100 in the future as the price soared.
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On Second Thought...I'll Stick With The Soylent Green
popularmechanics - It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: giant sheets of grayish meat grown on factory racks for human consumption. But it's for real. Using pig stem cells, scientists have been growing lab meat for years, and it could be hitting deli counters sooner than you think.
Early attempts produced less-than-enticing results. Then, in 2001, scientists at New York's Touro College won funding from NASA to improve in vitro farming. Hoping to serve something, well, beefier than kelp on moon bases and Mars colonies, the scientists successfully grew goldfish muscle in a nutrient broth. And, in 2003, a group of hungry artists from the University of Western Australia grew kidney bean-size steaks from biopsied frogs and prenatal sheep cells. Cooked in herbs and flambéed for eight brave dinner guests, the slimy frog steaks came attached to small strips of fabric -- the growth scaffolding. Half the tasters spit out their historic dinner. (Perhaps more significant, half didn't.)
Today, scientists funded by companies such as Stegeman, a Dutch sausage giant, are fine-tuning the process. It takes just two weeks to turn pig stem cells, or myoblasts, into muscle fibers. "It's a scalable process," says Jason Matheny of New Harvest, a meat substitute research group. "It would take the same amount of time to make a kilogram or a ton of meat." One technical challenge: Muscle tissue that has never been flexed is a gooey mass, unlike the grained texture of meat from an animal that once lived. The solution is to stretch the tissue mechanically, growing cells on a scaffold that expands and contracts. This would allow factories to tone the flaccid flesh with a controlled workout.
Lab-grown meat isn't an easy sell, but there could be benefits. Designer meat would theoretically be free of hormones, antibiotics, and the threat of mad cow disease or bird flu. Omega-3 fatty acids and vitamins could be blasted into the mixture (see illustration above) or dispersed through veins. Revolting? You bet, but have you ever visited a sausage factory? Currently costing around $100,000 per kilogram, a choice cut of lab meat makes Kobe beef seem like a bargain. But meat-processing companies hope to start selling affordable factory-grown pork in under a decade. Bon appétit.
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Nine-Day Chinese Traffic Jam Stretches Over 60 Mileschina - Maintenance work, wrecks and broken down cars caused a nine-day traffic jam in China that stretched for more than 60 miles (100 kilometres). The traffic jam, on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway between Beijing and Huai'an, began on August 14 when thousands of Beijing-bound coal and fruit trucks jammed the roadway.
A major cause of the congestion was maintenance work on the nearby National Expressway 110, which had suffered damage from heavy vehicles. The roadworks work forced drivers to use the Beijing-Tibet Expressway instead. Coupled with several minor accidents and broken down cars, traffic has now been stranded on the expressway for the past nine days.
The traffic jam is expected to last for almost a month with maintenance work on the National Expressway 110 not due to be finished until September 13. Drivers were reportedly playing cards to kill time on the roadway.
Residents who live along the roadway were reportedly profiting from the traffic jam, selling food to stranded drivers at inflated prices. "Instant noodles are sold at four times the original price while I wait in the congestion," one driver said. "Not only the congestion annoys me, but also those vendors." About 400 traffic police are on duty by the roadway to maintain law and order.
NOTE: some joker decided to stage a 'Chinese Fire Drill' and gummed up the works...Lon
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Minneapolis Will Pay $165,000 To Zombies
startribune - The Minneapolis city attorney's office has decided to pay seven zombies and their attorney $165,000.
The payout, approved by the City Council on Friday, settles a federal lawsuit the seven filed after they were arrested and jailed for two days for dressing up like zombies in downtown Minneapolis on July 22, 2006, to protest "mindless" consumerism.
When arrested at the intersection of Hennepin Avenue and 6th Street N., most of them had thick white powder and fake blood on their faces and dark makeup around their eyes. They were walking in a stiff, lurching fashion and carrying four bags of sound equipment to amplify music from an iPod when they were arrested by police who said they were carrying equipment that simulated "weapons of mass destruction."
However, they were never charged with any crime.
Although U.S. District Judge Joan Ericksen had dismissed the zombies' lawsuit, it was resurrected in February by a three-judge panel of the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which concluded that police lacked probable cause to arrest the seven, a decision setting the stage for a federal trial this fall. The settlement means there will be no trial.
"I feel great that the city is being held accountable for the actions of their police," said Raphi Rechitsky, 27, of Minneapolis, one of the seven zombies, who said he and his friends were performing street theater when they were arrested. He is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota.
Minneapolis City Attorney Susan L. Segal said it was in the best interests of the city to settle. "We believe the police acted reasonably, but you never know what a jury is going to do with a case," she said.
If a jury had concluded that the seven plaintiffs' constitutional rights had been violated and awarded $50,000 to each, plus defense attorney's fees, "it could have been quite substantial," Segal said.
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/24/2010
