moonbuggy

`George Michael was arrested in London on drug charges after being found slumped at the wheel of his car, a British tabloid newspaper reported.

A passer-by contacted police after spotting the 42-year-old pop star in his car in central London on Saturday night, the Sun newspaper reported in Monday’s editions.

Michael was arrested on suspicion of possessing drugs before being bailed out to return to a police station next month, The Sun said. The report said he was checked by paramedics but did not need hospital treatment.’

`Object of this fun puzzle game is to get all of the globs off the screen by pumping certain ones up and taking the rest out. You start with 10 drops in your tank. Use YOUR MOUSE to click on the blobs so that they grow until they burst. Create combos to earn more drops. How many levels can you clear. Mike Foce made it to 30th level. Can anyone beat that? Have fun!’

Not as easy as it seems.

`A mouse immune cell that plays dual roles as both assassin and messenger, normally the job of two separate cells, has been discovered by an international team of researchers. The discovery has triggered a race among scientists to find a human equivalent of the multitasking cell, which could one day be a target for therapies that seek out and destroy cancer.

“In the same way that intelligence and law enforcement agencies can face deadly threats together instead of separately, this one cell combines the ability to kill foreign pathogens and distribute information about that experience,” says Drew Pardoll, M.D., Ph.D., the Seraph Professor of Oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.’

‘A US soldier who raped a Nigerian woman in Italy has been given a lighter sentence because the court deemed his tour of duty in Iraq made him less sensitive to the suffering of others.

According to an Italian court document, James Michael Brown, a 27-year-old paratrooper from Oregon stationed in northern Italy, was sentenced to five years and eight months for rape in February 2004.

Brown beat and handcuffed the woman, a Nigerian resident in the town of Vicenza. He raped her vaginally and anally and left her to wander the streets naked in search of help.’

`A large “mothership,” closely resembling the U.S. Air Force’s historic XB-70 supersonic bomber, carries the orbital component conformally under its fuselage, accelerating to supersonic speeds at high altitude before dropping the spaceplane. The orbiter’s engines fire and boost the vehicle into space. If mission requirements dictate, the spaceplane can either reach low Earth orbit or remain suborbital. [..]

Exactly what missions the Blackstar system may have been designed for and built to accomplish are as yet unconfirmed, but U.S. Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) officers and contractors have been toying with similar spaceplane-operational concepts for years. Besides reconnaissance, they call for inserting small satellites into orbit, and either retrieving or servicing other spacecraft. Conceivably, such a vehicle could serve as an anti-satellite or space-to-ground weapons-delivery platform, as well.’

‘Israeli scientists have devised a computer that can perform 330 trillion operations per second, more than 100,000 times the speed of the fastest PC. The secret: It runs on DNA.

A year ago, researchers from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, unveiled a programmable molecular computing machine composed of enzymes and DNA molecules instead of silicon microchips. Now the team has gone one step further. In the new device, the single DNA molecule that provides the computer with the input data also provides all the necessary fuel.’

Followup to Molecular Computer Runs a Billion Simultaneous Programs, kinda.

`A team of thieves that broke into an abandoned missile silo not far from the Russian city of Kostroma in search of nonferrous metals was shocked to find the shaft packed with Soviet money bills, Regnum news agency reported on Tuesday.

The incident would have remained secret, had the wind not blown hundreds of banknotes all over the countryside.’

`Residents in Shoreditch, East London, will become the first to test a new advance in broadband technology when they switch on a new set-top box that combines the functions of a television and computer. [..]

Most commercially-available broadband connections operate at a speed of 2 megabits per second (2Mb/s), but the Shoreditch project can access internet images and content at a speed of up to 2 billions of bits per second (2Gb/s).’

`Straight out of a toilet and into your bed . The new Pee & Poo toys are cute, cuddly and a little controversial. Designer Emma Megitt launched her unique friends at the Future Designer Days Expo this year. The first batch of Pee & Poo toys hit Sweden and where sold out quicker than you can say Abba. The controversy surrounding a line of toys representing human waste has created great publicity for Megitt and has launched her name into the designer world spotlight. Originally sold separately Pee & Poo now come in a duo pack. So you get both bodily functions covered in the one box.’

‘A white powdery substance has local people asking what it is and where did it come from.

Last Friday, the rain and snow came down with a powdery yucky substance. [..]

The dust is being blamed for a power outage in Idaho Falls on Monday evening. The power was out in the area of Sunnyside and Woodruff.

Power workers says the dirt created an arc across the insulators. It acts like a groundwire and shorted out the power. The power crews rerouted the power, but Tuesday morning, they’ll have to fix the insulators.’

`Half of all malfunctioning products returned to stores by consumers are in full working order, but customers can’t figure out how to operate the devices, a scientist said on Monday.

Product complaints and returns are often caused by poor design, but companies frequently dismiss them as “nuisance calls”, Elke den Ouden found in her thesis at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the south of the Netherlands.’

‘A court commissioner has signed off on an unusual restraining order against celebutante Paris Hilton, ordering her to stay at least 100 yards away from an event producer who claimed she threatened him — unless they’re at a party together.

Brian Quintana was granted the three-year restraining order against Hilton last month after he testified that the celebutante harassed and threatened him after their friendship soured.’

‘Why is there a sawed-off shotgun on the International Space Station? To fight Alien invaders? In case of war on Earth so the Cosmonauts can kill the US Astronauts? NO.

Read the following paragraph and you will see that Russians take the Wolf problem very seriously:

“In 1965, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 1,200 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That’s when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft. It took Russian search crews more than two hours to locate the spacecraft and another two hours for helicopters to get support crews to the landing site.”‘

`I think everyone needs one. They have several uses. The obvious reason is to call your lover. Male or female, either come and get it, or bring it here. Call an exotic dancer to your table. Get the bartenders attention to get another drink, blow it at idiot drivers, give it to your best friend, give one to everyone at a bachelor or bachelorette party and then hit the town blowing your whistle. The uses are endless, I’m sure you can think of some. Mostly they are fun and I am the only person in the world making them. You can collect them, each one is different.’

`A British man on trial for murdering four people tried to bite himself to death as a fitting end to his killing spree, an Old Bailey jury was told.

A consultant psychiatrist said Daniel Gonzalez tried to repeatedly bite through arteries in his arms while at Broadmoor high security hospital in an attempt to commit suicide because he believed he had not done enough after killing four victims.

“I have never seen anyone bite themselves with the ferocity that he did,” Edward Petch said.’

`It is not an intelligence-boosting formula likely to impress an Oxbridge don: watching Countdown, playing Sudoku, remembering telephone numbers and taking a shower with your eyes closed.

Yet doing ‘brain exercises’ such as these can make us all up to 40 per cent cleverer within seven days, according to research by a BBC programme this week.

The tests conducted for Get Smarter in a Week appear to bear out the growing belief among scientists that making simple changes to our lifestyle can lead to significant improvements in how well our brains function.’

`An extraordinary family who walk on all fours are being hailed as the breakthrough discovery which could shed light on the moment Man first stood upright.

Scientists believe that the five brothers and sisters found in Turkey could hold unique insights into human evolution.

The Kurdish siblings, aged between 18 and 34 and from the rural south, ‘bear crawl’ on their feet and palms.

Study of the five has shown the astonishing behaviour is not a hoax and they are largely unable to walk otherwise.’

‘A radical Islamic group is infiltrating Australian mosques, distributing inflammatory pamphlets urging Muslims to rise up against Australian troops in Iraq and support the insurgency.

Hizb ut-Tahrir is telling local Muslims that coalition forces in Iraq are responsible for the mosque bombing in Samarra last month that left the nation on the brink of civil war.

The group – a hardline political faction banned in Britain, Germany and other countries — is using Friday prayer meetings, traditionally compulsory for all Muslims, to distribute flyers inciting hatred against the West.’

`A group of boys who posed as a 15-year-old girl for an Internet prank ended up helping police arrest a 48-year-old man who tried to meet the fictitious teenager for sex, authorities said.

The five boys had created a fake profile of a girl on MySpace.com — a social networking Web site — to cheer up a friend who had recently broken up with his girlfriend.

But soon, a man began sending messages to the “girl” and their conversations began to have sexual overtones, said Fontana police Sgt. William Megenney.’

(5meg Windows Media)

`Iran threatened America with “harm and pain” if sanctions were imposed as Tehran was finally referred to the UN Security Council for action over its suspected nuclear weapons programme.

A senior Iranian official warned: “The United States may have the power to cause harm and pain but it is also susceptible to harm and pain. So if the United States wishes to choose that path, let the ball roll.”‘

`Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function. Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function. Providing the strongest evidence yet that human beings are still evolving, researchers have detected some 700 regions of the human genome where genes appear to have been reshaped by natural selection, a principal force of evolution, within the last 5,000 to 15,000 years.

The genes that show this evolutionary change include some responsible for the senses of taste and smell, digestion, bone structure, skin color and brain function.’

`The United States CPSC has initiated criminal legal action against us and other chemical suppliers. In short, the CPSC would like to ban the public from all access to chemicals. This would mean an end to hobbies such as model rocketry, pyrotechnics and of course chemistry. One by one, our freedoms are slowly being taken away from us – this action must be stopped now.

Specifically, the CPSC is focusing on certain chemicals and metals at this time. [..]

This forbids or very severely limits sale of all common oxidizers and many common pyrotechnic fuels to anyone who does not hold a manufacturing license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF). To require everyone who wants to work with common chemicals to hold a BATF “Explosives Manufacturing License”… even though they are not manufacturing explosives, is completely insane.’

`North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il may launch a sneak attack on the world’s pop charts – with the love-song I Am a Front-line Soldier’s Wife.

Kim Jong-Il’s latest attempt to consolidate power has been to authorise a swathe of new love songs to re-invigorate the population and entrench his control of one of the world’s last communist states, according to local reports. [..]

North Korean media outlets have previously labelled the North Korean leader as the world’s greatest golfer, reporting that he scored five holes-in -one and scored 38-under-par in his first game.’

`Intel has created a self-contained watercooling unit that will enable the latest Pentium Extreme Edition chips to hit 5GHz with ease.

The cooler has come out of Intel’s engineering department, which is staffed with a bunch of enthusiasts who have been trying to push the envelope at Intel to try and get the firm to move away from its ‘overclocking is bad, mmmkay’ stance.

The team, led by thermal mechanical engineer Gavin Stanley, spent an awful lot of time looking at current watercooling kits and systems on the market. They all shared several flaws, he told us: that they were complex to assemble, had a short life, consisted of too many different parts and used flimsy tubing.

The goal of his team, he laid out, was to come up with a more robust, reliable and efficient way of watercooling the processor.’

`Scientists in energy-poor Japan said Friday they have found a new source of gasoline — cattle dung.

Sakae Shibusawa, an agriculture engineering professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, said his team has successfully extracted .042 ounces of gasoline from every 3.5 ounces of cow dung by applying high pressure and heat.

“The new technology will be a boon for livestock breeders” to reduce the burden of disposing of large amounts of waste, Shibusawa said. About 551,155 tons of cattle dung are produced each year in Japan, he said.’

`When Cornell physicist Veit Elser attempted to demystify an esoteric imaging problem for biologists, he had no idea his solution would also help subway riders and break room loiterers around the world figure out those challenging, Sudoku puzzles.

While creating an algorithm that could render images of small and delicate biological specimens, Elser inadvertently found a universal solution for the popular Japanese brainteasers.’

`Take one part high-frequency gravitational wave generation, then add in a quantum vacuum field.

Now whip wildly via a gravitomagnetic force in a rotating superconductor while standing by for Alcubierre warp drive in higher dimensional space-time.

So you’re looking for the latest in faster-than-light interstellar travel via traversable wormholes? That’s one theme among many discussed at Space Technology & Applications International Forum (STAIF), a meeting held here Feb. 12-16 that brought together more than 600 experts to thrash out a range of space exploration issues.’

`Conan O’Brien sends Triumph the Insult Comic Dog to visit New York’s Chinatown for Chinese New Year.’

`Vibrators frequently fail, especially with heavy use. But this doesn’t mean you have to give up and buy a new toy every time your vibe malfunctions. We took a few broken vibrators from our test lab and did some troubleshooting to show how you can fix your own sex toys at home with a few simple tools.’

With detailed instructions and pictures. You can’t go wrong.