>Farmer left with ‘egg shaped’ head after being trampled by 400lb bull

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Not many people would brave a smile after being trampled by a 30-stone bull. But farmer Hillary Hutchinson is just thankful to be alive suffering horrendous injuries and a misshapen skull following a cattle stampede on his own farm. … The 55-year-old was herding more than 600 cattle across a remote road near his property last August when they suddenly turned on him and trot on his skull.

‘I was with my son, Andrew, and all was fine to begin with but then the cattle  turned back and ran straight at me,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember very much, but what I do know is that  the bull stood on my head. ‘He’s a big fellow, over 400lbs, and he caused a considerable amount of damage,  I am very lucky to have survived.’

Doctors and paramedics from the Great North Air Ambulance flew to the farm and  treated him at the scene before airlifting him to Newcastle Hospital. Mr Hutchinson, 55, endured two lifesaving brain operations and spent more  than three weeks in a coma following the accident. … – dm

Ouch. One 1 “stone” is 40 pounds, so “30 stone” is 420 lbs.

… the stone remains widely used within the British Isles as a means of expressing human body weight. People in these countries normally describe themselves as weighing, for example, “11 stone 4” (11 stone and 4 pounds), rather than “72 kilograms” in most other countries, or “158 pounds” (the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the United States). – wiki

>Preparing the Cover Story for the Theft of the Election

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“Senators Barack Obama and Joseph Biden congratulated the new president and vice-president and pledged their full support for the new Administration.

Most Americans disagree with the Republican aggressive war-like stance on Foreign Policy but many major media pundits attribute the McCain victory to Sarah Palin’s appeal to voters, particularly those disgruntled former supporters of Hillary Clinton.” Some people, however, are vowing to question the election results, due to voting irregularities but little change is expected.

(Oops. We’re a little early with this. The results won’t be announced for another two weeks.) – – unobserver

As seen above…

Two weeks to go and the machine is starting to prepare the narrative for how it is possible that John McCain won the 2008 Presidential election. With every poll showing an Obama lead of anywhere from 10-14 points for the past few weeks, suddenly today the Associated Press announced a new poll that shows the race in a dead heat. Nonsense. With the backdrop of the Kennedy-Palast reporting on how the GOP has already started the systematic theft of the election this poll today is just the coverage they need to pretend that the results of a McCain victory will be legitimate. If McCain does indeed go on to steal the election, no doubt his supporters will point to this bogus poll to refute the other polls.

The talking points have been as inane as the alleged poll results. Primarily, the talking points are that the bump is due to the “strong” showing of McCain in the last debate and the “Joe the Plumber” nonsense has “struck a chord.” You have got to be kidding me. Every post debate poll clearly showed that Barack Obama once again dominated John McCain in the last debate. This was even stronger among undecided voters and independents. There was no strong showing by McCain; he lost and everyone saw him lose. By every count, including Fox News, he lost. Not only that, but he lost all three debates as well as the Vice Presidential debate. Throw in the fact that his recent Ayers attack line and socialist charges were also polled to be losers, the new AP poll simply defies logic…  – opednews

Each side is convinced the poll numbers are fraudulently stacked against their candidate.  There is proven vote fraud from each of the major parties. The issue is who cheats more republicans or democrats.  We know the rich cheat the most on their taxes, and since the rich are more likely to be republican (see below, and this) I’d bet on republicans having the most cheatin’ hearts, but not by much.

In simple numbers of voters, do we have more republicans or democrats? The best I’ve found so far is this graphic which is interesting, but doesn’t answer the question.

The bottom line: Evolution favors the ruthless … but cunning beats obvious cruelty. An iron fist in a velvet glove is the most effective, and this is why McCain is losing the debates and the election. Obama is better a giving the appearance of fairness, togetherness and understanding.

>$150,000 Palin Shopping Spree Legal? Yes, but Barely

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When news broke that Gov. Sarah Palin and her family managed to spend $150,000 of other people’s money on clothes after joining the McCain ticket, many scratched their heads. Is that legal?

Thanks to a loophole in federal law the answer, experts say, is yes.

Handily, the loophole was codified into law by the landmark campaign finance law passed by her ticketmate, Sen. John McCain.

It would be illegal for the McCain-Palin campaign to buy a new wardrobe for Palin and her husband, say campaign finance lawyers contacted by ABCNews.com. But the law is silent on whether such purchases can be made by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

“The party committee has much greater latitude,” said Kenneth Gross, a federal election lawyer. “I think it is permissible for the party committee to make that judgment.”- abc

Big deal. She is in the running to be the vice president of the most powerful nation in the world. In 2001, Clinton raised the salary of a US President to $400,000 per year. — Cripes! Do you realize GW Bush is getting paid $400,000 per year!? — Anyway, it is interesting that the GOP spent over 1/4 the annual salary of the President for clothes for its would be Vice President. From another angle, Vice President Cheney makes $203,000 per year salary. — Cripes! Do you realize Dick Cheney is getting paid $203,000 per year!? — Anyway, a lot of rich companies have already paid a lot for a slice of this upcoming election, and they should get to dress up their candidate a bit, you know, have a little fun.

>McMaster University unveils world’s most advanced microscope

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The most advanced and powerful electron microscope on the planet—capable of unprecedented resolution—has been installed in the new Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy at McMaster University. “We are the first university in the world with a microscope of such a high calibre,” says Gianluigi Botton, director of the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy, professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and the project’s leader. “The resolution of the Titan 80-300 Cubed microscope is remarkable, the equivalent of the Hubble Telescope looking at the atomic level instead of at stars and galaxies. With this microscope we can now easily identify atoms, measure their chemical state and even probe the electrons that bind them together.”

Because we are at the very limits of what physics allows us to see, —”even breathing close to a regular microscope could affect the quality of the results,” says Botton—the new microscope is housed in a stable, specially designed facility able to withstand ultralow vibrations, low noise, and minute temperature fluctuations. Operation of the instrument will also be done from a separate room to ensure results of the highest quality.  – physorg

The university said the microscope would be used to help produce lighting that is more efficient and better solar cells, study proteins and drug-delivery materials to target cancers. – newlaunches

What a great new idea.  A super microscope to target cancers. The problem is, this design, like all other electron microscopes, is not able to view living cells. They can still only view killed mounted cells, not actual ongoing processes as was claimed by the Rife microscope which came out at about the same time as the first electron microscope. Still a great new tool… There is no such resolution as “remarkable”. What is the actual resolution? Why is it better than previous electron microscopes? How does it work? Ah, here are some answers:

Keep in mind that 1 nanometer (nm) is the width of three silicon atoms. How does that compare to a human ahir?

Blond hair is probably 15000 to 50000 nanometers in diameter, but black hair is likely to be between 50000 and 180000 nanometers. – nni

A Transmision Electron Microscope typically can resolve (see as two distinct objects) things which are more than 0.2 nm apart. In the year 2000, it was reported that a million-volt field emission transmission electron microscope (FE-TEM) had achieved resolutions of less than 0.05 nm. The Titan can resolve things only 0.136 nm apart based on this image:

The FEI Titan 80-300 is a built-to-order (like most expensive pieces of equipment) combination scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscope that runs at 80keV/300keV respectively.

The illustration below showcases the capabilities of the Titan 80-300. The diagram on the extreme left is the theoretically-accepted structural configuration of the atoms that make up silicon – the semiconductor workhorse of the microelectronics industry. The next three images, from left to right, (taken by successive generations of high-resolution microscopes) show how each image approximates that configuration. In 1985, the microscopes weren’t powerful enough to reveal that there are two atoms next to each other in the structure. By 1998, some microscopes could barely illustrate the two atoms that are close to each other. But the third image in the sequence, taken in 2005 when the first Titan went into operation, reveals that the two adjacent atoms could be “resolved.” The third image indicates the kind of power of magnification and resolution that Carnegie Mellon researcher will have on tap. – cmu

It looks like better filtering rather than higher resolution.  It is amazing to be looking at individual atoms. There is a joke that says, “Perhaps Bigfoot IS blurry.” and that applies to imaging of atoms. As I understand it, when you get down to this level, you are looking at clouds of vibrating probability, not physical objects. Silicon atoms won’t get any sharper with more resolving power.

I spent several years using microscopes at a University and the strange new worlds you can see even at optical resolutions are endlessly amazing.

>Huge Mountain Range Should Not Be There

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The Gamburtsev mountains were discovered by a Soviet expedition using seismic sounding. They were named after Grigoriy A. Gamburtsev (1903-1955), a Russian geophysicist. The BEDMAP consortium; project managed by British Antarctic Survey, produced the best subglacial map of Antarctica to date…

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually “peel away” more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks.

One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it “shouldn’t be there” at all. – livesci

The LiveScience article doesn’t explain why the mountain range should not be there. Sciencepoles has a bit more explanation from Dr Robin Bell:

The fact that there are mountains at all in the middle of the East Antarctic landmass constitutes something of a mystery. It’s really like finding a mountain range in the middle of a beach. There really shouldn’t be mountains there.

• The first hypothesis is that Antarctica is in fact made up of two landmasses that collided 540 million years ago, forming the Gamburtsev in the process, and that the mountains have remained remarkably preserved because somehow their rock composition has impeded erosion.
• The second idea is that the same two pieces of Antarctica collided more recently than we thought, meaning that Antarctica isn’t a stale, old continent as was previously supposed.
• And the third idea is that there may be a volcanic plume (or hot-spot) beneath East Antarctica – in essence a giant volcano beneath the ice sheet which is what has formed the Gamburtsev Mountains.

I’m puzzled by the regularity of the grid pattern of these mountains in the image above. The yellow area under the word “Mountains” looks more artificial than natural.

>New somethings, lying face down, as in submission or adoration grown from single stem cells.

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And there was much rejoicing among the clergy at the news, until the typo was corrected. Then again, new prostates are nothing to sneeze at either. This entry on the Google News page caught my attention because I’ve been hexed by typos myself lately.