>Video: Baby elephant getting a first bath

>This is wild.
Video: Baby elephant getting a first bath

>Jury finds longest-serving Republican in the Senate guilty of lying about gifts

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Jurors found Stevens, 84, guilty of willfully filing false financial-disclosure forms that hid such gifts as a $2,695 massage chair, a stained glass window, a sled dog and renovations that doubled the size of his Girdwood home. Those gifts, valued at as much as $250,000 over seven years, came mostly from his former friend Bill Allen, the star prosecution witness in Stevens’ trial and the former owner of Veco Corp.

The oil field-services company was one of Alaska’s largest private employers before Allen, caught up in the federal corruption probe himself, was forced to sell it last year.

… If Hays is right and Stevens is now doomed politically, that gives the Democrats three rock-solid Senate pickups. In Virginia, Mark Warner is cruising to an easy victory for an open seat that a Republican had held (a new Washington Post poll shows him holding onto a whopping 30-percentage-point lead). Similarly, in New Mexico, Tom Udall is far ahead in the race for an open GOP seat.

The party also is counting on two more gains. In Colorado — in the contest to fill still another seat a Republican is giving up — Mark Udall (Tom’s cousin) appears headed for a win. And in New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen is favored to take out incumbent John Sununu (one new poll, though, shows the Republican still within shouting distance).

Democrats will be grossly disappointed if they don’t win all five of these races. And they’ve set their sights on more — a victory by Al Franken over incumbent Norm Coleman in Minnesota, along with triumphs by Democratic challengers over incumbents Liddy Dole in North Carolina and Gordon Smith in Oregon. While hoping for a trifecta, the Democrats will gladly live with two out of these three. …- lat

Yeah, I’m not surprised about the corruption, but I didn’t know Al Franken is running for office. Cool. Here he is on Letterman.

>Physical Strength, Fighting Ability Revealed In Human Faces

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For our ancestors, misjudging the physical strength of a would-be opponent might have resulted in painful –– and potentially deadly –– defeat. Now, a study conducted by a team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara has found that a mechanism exists within the human brain that enables people to determine with uncanny accuracy the fighting ability of men around them by honing in on their upper body strength. What’s more, that assessment can be made even when everything but the men’s faces are obscured from view. … The study consisted of four sections, each of which asked the test subjects to assess the physical strength of individuals based on photographs of their faces, their bodies, or both. Subjects were asked to rank the physical strength or fighting ability of the people in the photographs on a scale of one to seven. When the photographs depicted men whose strength had been measured precisely on weight-lifting machines, the researchers found an almost perfect correlation between perceptions of fighting ability and perceptions of strength. – scidaily

Check out this program (Windows) called FACES 4.0. You can download a demo and create your own mug shots.  See if you can make a guy who would be stronger than this:

Some people think intelligence can also be judged from faces because attractiveness, which is cross-culturally agreed upon, is correlated with intelligence.

>2 Dogs Killed When Hundreds Of Bees Attack

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A swarm of bees that terrorized a Florida neighborhood has killed three dogs and injured a 70-year-old woman. Authorities in Palm Beach County say crews removed 50 pounds of honeycomb from the side of a Riviera Beach home after Friday’s attack. The hive has been contained…. – lvn

“The critter control is hauling away the honeycomb material,” said Riviera Beach Fire Rescue Division Chief Russ Elgin. “We’re given the understanding that once the material is moved and the queen bee is gone, the residual bees will move in or die off.”

It’s good news for the neighborhood, but it’s too late for the Tucker family.The family said the bees killed two of their dogs — 3-year-old Diamond and 2-year-old Turk.”I would say hundreds of them, and I just didn’t know how many because you didn’t see them all,” Shronderlette Davis-Tucker said. “But when they were swarming all over the area, it was something from a horror movie.”The dogs were attacked Friday afternoon, Davis-Tucker said. She said she was inside the house at the time, and then all of a sudden she heard her son yelling.”He ran in and said, ‘Mom, the bees are attacking Diamond,'”
Davis-Tucker said. She said she quickly got Diamond inside and then the bees starting attacking her. “The bees got all on me,” she said. “We ran into the shower because I knew to try the water, so I got her in the shower and we were just getting the bees off.”

… Tucker said she spent about $800 trying to save her dogs, but she’s hoping the owner of the property where the beehive was will help with the expense. – wpfb

Sad for the dogs. Dogs and bees have co-existed for a long time. I guess if both are territorial we know the outcome. Most bees will just ignore you unless you are freaking out, or unless they are defending their hive.  If they attack, run. Leave the area quickly. Open the doors and encourage the dogs to run for it.

Don’t stick around and try to get bees off in the shower. Most bees will get themselves off just fine if you just stay out of the shower and instead use the back door.  Most people have one. I don’t really know, because I wasn’t there, of course. Perhaps getting the bees off that way was the all she could do because her back door was blocked up or something. This is the key:

Regular honeybees will chase you about fifty yards. Africanized honeybees may pursue you three times that distance. – wikihow

I speculate that this is why, in schools, back when physical education still mattered to Americans, they used to have something called, “the 50 yard dash” — you only need to get 150 feet away from where the attack started (450 feet if attacked by Africanized bees.) The average human can walk 3 miles per hour. One mile is 5280 feet. That translates to 88 feet per minute, therefore, even if you could not run, you could escape from normal bees in two minutes by walking away.

Most people can run 6 miles per hour, so you’d be out of there in one minute with regular bees.  It takes about 1,100 honeybee stings to kill a human. Africanized bees if you are right up in their nest, will manage to sting you about 200 times in one minute.  Don’t swat at them, don’t freeze up, don’t jump in a pool (they will be waiting for you when you surface), get away from the area.  You will survive.

>Hawaiian Cave Reveals Ancient Secrets

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From the moment we saw it, we knew the place held many great secrets. We had been looking for new fossil sites on the south side of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1992 with our colleagues, Helen F. James and Storrs L. Olson of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., along with their children, Travis and Sydney, and our own, Mara and Alec.

And what we found was a cave – once a Pleistocene dune field, and later a sinkhole with pickling-jar powers – that may be the richest fossil site in the Hawaiian Islands, perhaps in the entire Pacific Island region.

Sixteen years after our discovery, we have excavated seeds, pollen, Polynesian artifacts, thousands of bird and fish bones, and more from this half-acre pile of sediments spanning many millennia. The site has yielded up some of the island’s long-kept secrets, telling of a time when the largest land animals here were flightless waterfowl, such as the turtle-jawed moa nalo (Chelychelynechen quassus). Moreover, it documents the great changes that occurred when first Polynesians, and later Europeans, Americans, and Asians, arrived with boatloads of invasive alien species.

The first boats began arriving roughly a thousand years ago, kicking off the first of three stages of extinction on Kauai. In the first stage, Polynesians probably overhunted the large flightless birds, while introduced rats, chickens, and small pigs disrupted their remaining nests. Later, but before Captain Cook arrived in 1778, the agriculture of a growing Hawaiian population wiped out more species. Finally, Europeans arrived and brought goats and other livestock that finished the job.

In 2000 we learned the long-lost nineteenth-century name of the cave, Makauwahi, thanks to a local archaeologist, William K. “Pila” Kikuchi, who recovered the name from an essay written by a high school student more than a century ago. It means something like “smoke eye.” That may have been in reference to Keahikuni, a mid-nineteenth-century native diviner who read the future in spirals of smoke rising from the sinkhole. – yahoo

>Boy Accidentally Killed by Submachine Gun at Firearms Expo

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With his father and a firearms instructor standing nearby, an 8-year-old Connecticut boy shot himself in the head with a submachine gun yesterday, killing himself in an accident some say should never have happened.

Christopher Bizilj was testing a 9 mm Micro Uzi at the Westfield Sportsman’s Club in Westfield, Mass., as part of the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo, when he shot himself Sunday.

“The firearm instructor prepped the weapon for him, and once it was ready he handed it to the child,” Westfield Police Lt. Hipolito Nunez told ABCNews.com today. Christopher then pulled the trigger, and the gun’s recoil pulled the barrel upward, causing a round to hit him on the right side of his head, according Nunez. He was pronounced dead a short time later at Baystate Medical Center in nearby Springfield.

Massachusetts law allows a child to fire a gun with parental consent, so long as there’s an active permit for the gun and a licensed firearm instructor is supervising. It is unclear whether the gun had a permit or whether the instructor was licensed, but Nunez said Christopher’s father was nearby. … – abcnews

Horrible.

>Nazis hoped to found empire in Amazonian rainforest

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German scientists took an expedition to a remote region of the Brazilian Amazon on the border with French Guyana to see if they could set up a Nazi outpost in the Amazon. The book, The Guyana Project: A German Adventure on the Amazon, says the Nazis believed they were destined to colonise and settle in parts of the world much like the pioneers of America’s west. On an island on a tributary of the Jari River, author Jens Gluessing found a 9ft-high wooden cross etched with swastikas. The inscription says: “Joseph Greiner died here on 2.1.1936, a death from fever in the service of German Research Work.” Mr Gluessing discovered photographs of the expedition by exploring German and Brazilian archives. He found that Greiner was one of three sent by the SS to explore the region bordering French Guyana with a view to populating it on behalf of the Reich.

The team, using the cover story they were collecting specimens of fauna and wildlife, reported back to their boss Heinrich Himmler on how German soldiers could live in Brazil….

“They alone offer spacious immigration and settlement possibilities for the Nordic peoples.” He added of the Amazon area: “For the more advanced white race it offers outstanding possibilities for exploitation.” It would appear however before the plan was finalised, Himmler lost interest, thus shelving a potential Nazi South American colony. … – telegraph

Some parts of the rumors that Nazi UFOs have been spotted in South America may stem from verifiable facts like this. Here is a video (in Russian) in which Russia supposedly admits there was a Nazi UFO base in Antarctica.  I didn’t see any definite circular winged aircraft in any of the old video footage however. Just stills and illustrations. The supposed base in Antarctica on Google just looks like a swath were they scanned in higher definition rather than an attempt to cover up something. Further discussion here. See what you think:

>Humans made fire 790,000 years ago

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A new study shows that humans had the ability to make fire nearly 790,000 years ago, a skill that helped them migrate from Africa to Europe.

By analysing flints at an archaeological site on the bank of the river Jordan, researchers at Israel’s Hebrew University discovered that early civilizations had learned to light fires, a turning point that allowed them to venture into unknown lands.

A previous study of the site published in 2004 showed that man had been able to control fire — for example transferring it by means of burning branches — in that early time period. But researchers now say that ancient man could actually start fire, rather than relying on natural phenomena such as lightning.

That independence helped promoted migration northward, they say.

The new study, published in a recent edition of Quaternary Science Reviews, mapped 12 archaeological layers at Gesher Benot Yaaqov in northern Israel.

“The new data shows there was a continued, controlled use of fire through many civilizations and that they were not dependent on natural fires,” archaeologist Nira Alperson-Afil said on Sunday.

While they did not find remnants of ancient matches or lighters, Alperson-Afil said the patterns of burnt flint found in the same place throughout 12 civilizations was evidence of fire-making ability, though the methods used were unclear.

And because the site is located in the Jordan valley — a key route between Africa and Europe — it provides evidence of the human migration, she said.

“Once they mastered fire to protect themselves from predators and provide warmth and light, they were secure enough to move into and populate unfamiliar territory,” Alperson-Afil said. – reuters

>Protein Compass Guides Amoebas Toward Their Prey

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Amoebas glide toward their prey with the help of a protein switch that controls a molecular compass, biologists at the University of California, San Diego have discovered.

Their finding, recently detailed in the journal Current Biology, is important because the same molecular switch is shared by humans and other vertebrates to help immune cells locate the sites of infections.

The amoeba Dictyostelium finds bacteria by scent and moves toward its meal by assembling a molecular motor on its leading edge. The active form of a protein called Ras sets off a cascade of signals to start up that motor, but what controlled Ras was unknown.

Richard Firtel, professor of biology along with graduate student Sheng Zhang and postdoctoral fellow Pascale Charest tested seven suspect proteins by disrupting their genes. One called NF1, which matches a human protein, proved critical to chemical navigation.

NF1 turns Ras off. Without this switch mutant amoebas extended false feet called pseudopodia in all directions and wandered aimlessly as Ras flickered on and off at random points on their surfaces. “You have to orient Ras in order to drive your cell in the right direction,” Firtel said.

In contrast, normal amoebas with working versions of NF1 elongate in a single direction and head straight for the most intense concentration of bacterial chemicals, the team reports … – scidaily