[via nytimes.com]
The short video made its way around China’s Web in early 2006, passed on through file sharing and recommended in chat rooms. It opens with a middle-aged Asian woman dressed in a leopard-print blouse, knee-length black skirt, stockings and silver stilettos standing next to a riverbank. She smiles, holding a small brown and white kitten in her hands. She gently places the cat on the tiled pavement and proceeds to stomp it to death with the sharp point of her high heel.
[via sciencedaily.com]
ESA’s Herschel Space Observatory has revealed the chemical fingerprints of potential life-enabling organic molecules in the Orion Nebula, a nearby stellar nursery in our Milky Way galaxy. This detailed spectrum — obtained with the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared (HIFI), one of Herschel’s three innovative instruments — demonstrates the gold mine of information that Herschel-HIFI will provide on how organic molecules form in space.
Several German Institutes contributed essential parts to the HIFI instrument: the Universität zu Kölkn and the Max-Planck-Institute für Radioastronmie, Bonn, und für Sonnensystemforschung, Lindau.
[via nytimes.com]
It occurred to Anne Mitchell as she was writing the letter that she might lose her job, which is why she chose not to sign it. But it was beyond her conception that she would be indicted and threatened with 10 years in prison for doing what she knew a nurse must: inform state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.
Anne Mitchell, left, and Vickilyn Galle, right, wrote the letter to regulators that drew felony charges.
Nasa’s new planet-hunting telescope has discovered its first five worlds beyond our Solar System.
Numerous planets have been found before by other telescopes, such as Hubble, but the sole mission of the Kepler observatory – launched last year – has been to find potential ‘Earths’ elsewhere in our galaxy.
Unfortunately life is unlikely to survive on the new planets as they are thought to generate hellish heat. Estimated temperatures of the worlds range from 1,200 to 1,650 degrees Celsius, hotter than molten lava.
[via consumerist.com]
Photo by Lovingier Photography
Mike isn’t comfortable handing his ID to just anyone who asks. While buying some cold medicine at Target, he maneuvered his way into getting the clerk to back off on his driver’s license-scanning demands.
He writes:
I had an experience at Target today that I thought you might want to share with Consumerist readers.
[via news.sky.com]
Israeli Arab and Jewish chefs have served up a world record for cooking hummus in the name of Middle East peace.
The Lebanese broke the hummus-making record in October last year
More than fifty cooks from both sides of Israel’s religious divide filled a seven-metre-wide satellite dish with four tonnes of the dip.
The chefs mashed up the monster mix of chickpeas, sesame paste, olive oil, lemon juice and garlic to make twice as much as when the record was set last October.
The Guinness world record idea was originally cooked up by Lebanese chefs who claimed the record last year.
[via oratedocast.blogspot.com]
Even though the jury is still out on whether this is technically the start of the new decade or not, we are simply going to ignore all that and just like the mainstream media do whatever the hell we want to. Since everyone and their mother have summed up the last decade in hundreds of nauseating ways, we thought that we would channel the dead spirit of nostradamus (and the people who were pretty darn sure that Iraq had WMD’s) and just like them, based on absolutely nothing, come with predictions which might or might not be true. Who really knows or cares because isn’t everything printed on the internets the gospel truth?