Lindsay Lohan looking hot (again) 
Lindsay Lohan at the premiere of Cloverfield. Rehab really works!
There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that's a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs.
But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you want to avoid at all costs.
From: Japan, obviously.
Why you must fear it:
It's the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that'll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive?
Think you can outrun it? It can fly 50 miles in a day. It'd be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like "Don't worry, they only live on top of really tall mountains where nobody wants to live," but no, they live all over the goddamned place, including outside Tokyo.
Forty people die like that every year, each of them horribly.
More scary shit:
Here's how the Japanese hornet treats other insects (and would presumably treat us, if we were small enough). An adult hornet will fly miles to find some squishy shit to feed to its children. Often times, it finds its food in, say, a hive inhabited by thousands of bees.
What to do? Well, Vespa japonica sprays the nest with some of the acid/pheromone and brings in reinforcements, usually consisting of 30 or so fellow hornets. They then descend upon the beehive like an unholy plague of hell-born death engines and proceed to make this world a scary goddamned place. This is maybe 30 wasps against 30,000 bees and the 30,000 bees do not stand a chance.
Behold the hornets systematically seize them with huge, wicked jaws and literally fucking cut them apart, one by one by one by fucking one. In three hours, there are piles of limbs and heads and just fucking bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bee's children. Who will then be eaten.
Nature is fucking hardcore.
From:
Rainforests from Nicaragua to Paraguay
Why you must fear it:
It's a full inch long, it lives in trees and thus can and will fall on you to scare you away from its hive--the one you didn't know was there, because it's in a fucking tree. Before it does this, it shrieks at you. This ant, you see, can shriek.
It's called a Bullet Ant because its 'unusually severe' sting feels like getting shot. On the Schmidt Sting Index, Bullet Ants rate as the number one most try-not-to-shit-out-your-spine painful in the entirety of the Kingdom Arthropoda.
Also--and we do feel the need to stress this--they fucking shriek at you before they attack.
More scary shit:
Are you the sort of person who likes to think of yourself as tough? A "badass," perhaps? "Hard," as they say?
Some of the indigenous peoples of the area use Bullet Ants as part of this initiation-to-manhood ceremony that they do. You know the kind we mean, with us it's like, a big party and your relatives give you money and everyone loves you and is so proud of you? Yeah with them, it's these special leaf sleeves with hundreds of bullet ants woven into them, stingers-inwards. They put them on and are immediately stung to holy fucking bejeezus by, and this is important, hundreds of Bullet Ants woven into the sleeves, stingers-inward.
The goal is to leave them on for 10 minutes, after which their arms are stiff, useless lengths of twisting agony, their bodies wracked with uncontrollable spasms for days. And in order to be actually pass the ordeal and become a man, they have to do it 20 fucking times.
From:
South and Central America, the American Southwest
Why you must fear it:
You know how you can spot one of these? You can't. There is no physical way to determine the difference between an Africanized bee and a common European bee. None whatsoever.
You can, however, easily tell the difference based on their behavior. Regular bees will give you about nine seconds of being too close to the hive before deciding you're a threat and then attacking you. So it's pretty easy to just walk past them without any screams. And if you do get them after you, they'll consider you to be 'chased off' after about 300 feet.
Africanized bees do not roll this way. They give you half a second of being too close before they decide it is time to completely fuck your shit up and empty the entire hive--tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of angry, angry bees. When you run, flailing and crying and soiling yourself while screaming "JESUS CHRIST I'M COVERED IN BEES," they will chase you for over half a mile.
More scary shit:
Africanized bees owe their existence to science. Warwick E. Kerr created them in Brazil during the 1950s by crossing a European bee with an African bee. He wanted a bee that could live in the jungle. He got a bee that swarms by the hundreds of millions, is insanely territorial, mindlessly aggressive, has killed anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand people. And, can live in the jungle.
And after they escaped and swarmed northward, it turned out they were a-OK with deserts, too. They'll be in Montana by 2010.
From:
The Amazon Basin. There's other subfamilies living in Asia and Africa, but these are the most notorious.
Why you must fear it:
By now, you will not be surprised to hear that these ants are, in fact, fucking huge, with the soldiers reaching a half inch in length. You will also not be surprised to learn that they have massive, powerful, machete-like jaws half the length of the soldiers themselves. They're notorious for dismantling any living thing in their path, regardless of size. They're also completely blind, which for some reason makes the whole thing worse.
They're called 'Army' ants because their entire colony, comprising up to and over one million insects, is a 100 percent mobile battalion. They don't make permanent hives like other ants, no, they bivouac down in single locations just long enough for the queen to shit out thousands of eggs, while the soldiers spread out in wide fans daily in search of food ("food" here, means "anything moving"). Then the eggs hatch and they enter the dreaded swarm phase of their existence.
Much like the word "killer," nature takes words like "dreaded" and "swarm" very, very seriously. They carefully pick up their larvae and go on the move, a near-solid mass of insect death and horror moving steadily and swiftly along the jungle floor, flaying alive and disassembling every living thing too stupid, slow or asleep to get the living fuck out of the way. There is no talk of painful stingers or ballistic acid here, no, this is terror of a far more primordial nature--the kind that simply flows over you by the hundreds of thousands and rips you apart with massive, unbelievably powerful jaws, utterly and literally blind to size and species, considering everything in their path to be a threat to the continuation of their colony.
There are reports of animals the size of horses being overwhelmed and shredded by them. Go stand next to a horse and then think about what that means for you.
More scary shit:
Army Ants are masters of wholly-organic, living architecture. For the good of the colony, the ants will use their own living bodies to build any conceivable structure necessary, latching on to each other foot-to-foot to create protective walls and ceilings against the ravages of the weather, bridges to cross otherwise impassable spans, whatever happens to be needed. (Can they form themselves into a crude catapult mechanism and launch themselves at prey? Not yet.)
There is no other living thing in the entire world that does this.
And, they're blind.
Now, time for the disclaimer. If you are squeamish or have a weak stomach or value your sanity in any way, you may want to bail out now.
Okay, here goes...
From:
Most species found in Central and South America, some species found all over the world
Why you must fear it:
Oh boy. Ohhhhh boy. Okay, Bot flies.
They each have a different and elaborate reproductive cycle, all of which end with a fat, half-inch maggot embedded in living flesh. Feeding.
Horse Stomach Bots, for example, lay their eggs in grass. Horses eat the grass. And the eggs. Which hatch in the heat of the horse's mouth. Upon which they chew through the horse's tongue and burrow, through the horse, into its belly. Where they meet up and dig honeycombs into the horse's stomach. And get fat. When they're ready to be flies, they just let go and get pooped out of the system.
The Human Bot Fly lays its eggs on a horsefly or a mosquito, something that will attempt to land on a human. This carrier finds a human and lands on him or her. The eggs rub off onto the human, whose body heat hatches the eggs. The larvae drop onto the skin and burrow right the fuck in. Where they live. Under your skin. Eating.
Here's video of them removing one. DO NOT FUCKING WATCH THIS. Fuck, we don't even know why we linked it.
More scary shit:
Here is the best part. The larvae can grow anywhere in your body, it just depends on where the eggs wind up. Which could end up with you having a fat wormy thing in your tear duct. Or your brain. We know, because that's happened.
A Human Bot Fly larvae, burrowing into your brain. Eating your thoughts.
All this learning and fear remind you of high school? Head over to our video countdown of the 7 Scariest Teachers on YouTube. Or check out the blog, where Michael Swaim will tell you why you should be scared of the government too, and comes up with an awesome name for a rock band in the process.
An interesting aside to those admiring the 2009 Ford F-150 pickup at the 2008 Detroit Auto Show: Look for what is not there rather than the many admirable features that are. The lack of a gas cap, although a less noticeable innovation, is a change that will spread to the entire Ford lineup.
Ford already offers capless gas tanks on the 2008 Ford Explorer and has announced the option for the 2009 Flex and Lincoln MKS. Ford says it will make capless refueling systems standard across the entire lineup. Why? "People just don't like the cap," said F-150 chief engineer Matt O'Leary, quoted by the Associated Press today.
Ford first went capless on the 2003 Ford GT, inspired by the company's racing efforts. In addition to preventing inadvertent cap loss at the gas station, the change will help protect the environment by removing the risk that gas fumes will escape from under a loosely screwed-on gas cap, Ford says.
The Ford system, called EasyFuel, works by spring-loaded tabs that open when a fuel nozzle is inserted into the tank and close automatically when it is removed. It was introduced on the new Mondeo in the U.K. in November and is also standard on the newly launched Europe-market Focus. A useful feature for that diesel-using part of the world is the system's "misfueling inhibitor" for diesel vehicles — a sealed filler pipe insert that only allows the diesel's larger nozzle entry into the filler pipe and locks out the smaller gasoline nozzle.
What this means to you: One less hassle when refueling? That sounds like a great idea. — Laura Sky Brown, Correspondent
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Cut stones (top) and masonry walls (bottom) recently discovered in southern Peru could be the ruins of the legendary "lost city" of Paititi, according to the mayor of the town where the site were found. Archaeologists are being sent to the site to investigate the claim. | |
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NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks tumbled Thursday, extending the 2008 selloff on recession worries following comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a big quarterly loss by Merrill Lynch and weak readings on the housing and manufacturing sectors.
Bernanke told Congress that the economic outlook has worsened and that lawmakers should enact a fiscal stimulus plan soon. Also hurting markets: morning reports showing slumping new home construction and a big drop in the Philly Fed - a key regional manufacturing reading.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost 307 points, seeing its worst one-day point loss since Nov. 7, and leaving the blue-chip barometer at a 10-month low. The broader S&P 500 (INX) index lost 2.9 percent, and fell to its lowest point in 14 months. The Nasdaq composite fell 2 percent and hit a 10-month low.
The Russell 2000 (RUT.X) small-cap index lost 2.8 percent and hit a more than 17-month low. The Russell 2000 has now fallen over 20 percent from its all-time high reached in July of last year. The decline is the technical definition of a bear market.
After the close Thursday, IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) reported higher quarterly sales and earnings that topped estimates. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Fortune 500) reported a quarterly loss - narrower than analysts had expected - on higher revenue.
Also after the close Thursday, Washington Mutual (WM, Fortune 500) reported a wider quarterly loss that missed estimates, due in part to the weakening value of its mortgage portfolio. Separately, the company is being sued for appraisal fraud.
In other news, the New York Stock Exchange said it was buying rival American Stock Exchange.
Bernanke, testifying before the House Budget Committee Thursday, said that the government should act quickly to put together a fiscal stimulus plan to help consumers amid rising recession fears.
He said any plan needs to be put into effect in the next 12 months to be helpful and should be temporary, to avoid the risk of juicing the economy too much beyond the short term and not cause a big jump in the budget deficit.
President Bush also said Thursday that an economic stimulus package is needed to help the economy in the short term and that the package will be outlined on Friday. TheWall Street Journal reported that Bush has also opted to delay his campaign to extend the recent tax cuts until after an emergency stimulus package has been negotiated with Congress.
Traders are betting that the Fed will cut the fed funds rate, a key short-term interest rate that affects consumer loans, by at least a half-percentage point, at its next policy meeting that ends Jan. 30.
But one of the fears roiling stocks has been that Fed action is not enough to help the market fight off a recession in the wake of the credit and housing market crises.
"I think the market is trying to understand the parameters of what we are dealing with and how long it will take to come through this," said Beth Dater, chief investment officer at AG Asset Management.
Investors are trying to figure out if the help needed is primarily monetary or a combination of fiscal and monetary policy, she said, and if that help is going to come quickly enough.
"While the consensus has paid lip service to a slowing economy for the last year or so, the speed with which the [negative] news has come in recently has really gotten to investors," she said.
Year-to-date, the Dow is down over 8 percent, the S&P 500 is down over 9 percent and the Nasdaq has lost roughly 11.5 percent.
Since peaking in October, the Dow has lost 14 percent, the S&P 500 has lost nearly 15 percent and the Nasdaq has lost 16.5 percent.
Stocks likely have further to go on the downside before any meaningful recovery is attempted.
"There are still a whole lot of sellers crowded into the market right now, and if we get another big bout of bad news, we could end up seeing stocks lose another 10 percent," said Chris Johnson, chief investment officer at Johnson Research Group.
Merrill Lynch (MER, Fortune 500) reported a nearly $10 billion quarterly loss and said it took an $11.5 billion writedown during the quarter related to bad mortgage bets. (Full story)
Merrill shares tumbled 10.2 percent and dragged on the broader bank sector.
Bond insurers fell after ratings agency Moody's said it may cut Ambec Financial (ABK)'s financial-strength rating, a big blow for the company. Moody's said that Ambec's plan to raise cash may not be good enough considering the $5.4 billion in losses it reported in its portfolio of mortgage debt insurance. Ambec shares plunged 52 percent in active New York Stock Exchange trading.
However, declines were broad based, with all 30 of the Dow components tumbling, led by AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), Alcoa (AA, Fortune 500), Citigroup (C, Fortune 500), General Electric (GE, Fortune 500), DuPont (DD, Fortune 500) and Walt Disney (DIS, Fortune 500).
Dow component Merck (MRK, Fortune 500) and partner Schering-Plough (SGP, Fortune 500) both continued to slump on disappointing results in a clinical trial of their cholesterol drug Vytorin.
Market breadth was negative. On the New York Stock Exchange, losers topped winners by more than five to one on volume of 2.17 billion shares. On the Nasdaq, decliners beat advancers by more than three to one on volume of 2.83 billion shares.
On the economic front, December housing starts and building permits slumped by a bigger-than-expected margin, yielding the sharpest full-year drop in new home construction in 27 years. (Full story)
The Philadelphia Fed index, a regional manufacturing read, tumbled to a reading of -20.9, versus forecasts for a small drop to -1.5. Any number below zero indicates contraction in the sector.
Separately, weekly jobless claims fell more than expected last week, the government said, helping to cool some worries about a big slowdown in the labor market sparked by the December monthly jobs report.
Treasury prices climbed, lowering the yield on the 10-year note to 3.62 percent from 3.73 percent late Wednesday. Treasury prices and yields move in opposite directions.
In currency trading, the dollar fell versus the yen and euro.
U.S. light crude oil for February delivery fell 74 cents to $90.10 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
COMEX gold for February delivery fell $1.20 to $880.80 an ounce. 
They may seem like such small devices - but cellphones have a surprisingly large environmental footprint, and the whole cellphone charger business is a royal pain in the butt. Every cellphone requires a different type of charger (so excessive amounts of plastic cords and gadgets need to be produced for each type of phone), they suck copious amounts of vampire power when you leave them plugged into the wall, and it is so easy to lose them or forget to charge your phone if you are on the road a lot.
Well, for those of you who hate the pain of cell-phone charging, there is now a promising new technology that could get rid of the messy problem of cellphone chargers once and for all, AND eliminate 30 to 40 percent of the toxic heavy metals that are currently found in cell-phone batteries. New startup M2E (Motion 2 Energy) has developed a technology which converts the kinetic energy from minor movement into an electrical charge to power mobile communication devices: meaning in just a few years, we could all toss out our cellphone chargers and charge up our phones simply by walking around with them during the day!
Kinetic energy generation has been around forever (remember wind-up watches?) and we’ve touched on it here with the handcrank electronics chargers of Freeplay , the Sustainable Dance Club, and the People-Powered Gyms. However what is so new and so promising about M2E is the fact that their microgenerator technology allows even the slightest jostling movement to provide a significant charge. So instead of having to hand-crank your cell phone (which is possible, but doesn’t sound too fun), your phone would simply just need a little minor jostling in your bag or jacket while you walk around to stay fully charged. Sounds a lot easier than having to plug in and recharge every night, right?
It’s not only the environmental impact of this technology that seems so promising, but also simply the convenience of this technology. And if an eco-friendly product actually makes life more convenient for most people, we know it won’t be a hard sell to get people to adopt it. That’s why we can’t wait for this new technology to make its way into mainstream consumer products. Right now M2E’s technology is only being used by the U.S Army to outfit troops on the battlefield. But we think it is only a matter of time before this amazingly useful technology becomes more widely available. Nokia, Motorola and Samsung, please start taking notes now…
If you are interested in this groundbreaking new technology, stay tuned for the Greener Gadgets Conference on February 1st in NYC. M2E’s Director of Business Development, Regan Warner-Rowe will be speaking on a panel about this new technology, along with several other entrepreneurs in mobile renewable energy generation. My lovely sister (and Editor of Earth2tech) Katie Fehrenbacher will be moderating this fascinating discussion, and it is sure to be one of the highlights of the day. If you are in NYC, you should definitely try to make it out.
+ Greener Gadgets Conference
+ Motion 2 Energy
How to UPGRADE from Vista to Windows XP on an Acer laptop My wife recently bought me an Acer Extensa 5620 for Christmas. It's a great little unit with a lot of potential, but the one big flaw was the operating system: it came with Windows Vista. The fast hardware was crippled by the bloated, clumsy OS. I was therefore forced to figure out exactly how to get XP on it, so wrote up a guide to help others. It should apply to different Acer notebooks, and likely has info useful to other brands as well.
It's not as simple at it used to be. Today's laptops are 'meant' for Vista, so trying to install XP often isn't easy. In the case of my 5620, the hard drive wasn't even detected until I researched and changed Bios settings (known as the AHCI issue). I'm SO much happier after ditching Vista, though- when I first got it, a 1GHz Pentium III with XP could have run circles around it!
7 steps here
Aurora Pot Grower Blazes New Legal Trail by Emil Steiner, Washington Post January 8th, 2008 |
Policing pot in Colorado is about to get a lot more complicated. The kick-in-the-door raids SWAT teams have long employed could now cost cities hundreds of thousands of dollars following two landmark court decisions upholding the state's constitutional protection of medical marijuana. Under the rulings, police departments are required to return any marijuana and paraphernalia taken from state-sanctioned growers, and can be sued by those growers if the crops aren't preserved. The largest case thus far involves Kevin Dickes, who intends to sue the Denver suburb of Aurora for over $360,000 in pot damages. It comes less than a month after a judge ordered the return of an estimated $200,000 of medical marijuana to a couple in Fort Collins. Dickes, a 38-year-old Desert Shield Marine who suffers from debilitating pain after catching grenade shrapnel in the Gulf, says he was treated worse by Colorado police than by anyone in Iraq. In April, 2007 officers raided his home after receiving a tip from a neighbor and, according to his lawyer Robert J. Corry Jr., threw the disabled veteran to the ground, held him at gunpoint and ransacked his home. They found 71 marijuana plants, at least 65 of which they confiscated illegally, and they charged Dickes with felony cultivation. After eight months of legal wrangling, the Arapahoe County district attorney dismissed the charges, determining that Dickes was in fact a certified grower. But, by then, his plants were long dead. Thanks to a referendum passed in 2000, Article XVIII, Section 14 of the Colorado State Constitution stipulates that "any property... used in connection with the medical use of marijuana... shall not be harmed, neglected, injured, or destroyed while in the possession of state or local law enforcement officials." Not being equipped with the growroom or know-how to maintain them, Aurora police simply uprooted the plants and threw them in the evidence room. Det. Shannon Lucy, an Aurora police spokesperson, illustrated her department's cultivation ignorance, explaining that they kept only the leaves, which she called the "only thing of value," not the buds in which most of the active ingredient, THC, resides. After obtaining a court order, Dickes attempted to pick up his property yesterday afternoon from the Aurora police department. According to Corry though, what the police returned was "dry and useless." Of the 71 plants, only an estimated 3 ounces remained, none of which were usable "from a medical perspective." He compared the incident to police seizing a person's car which they believed was stolen, "smashing the windows, pouring sugar in the gas tank, and then returning it," after discovering it wasn't stolen after all. Applying this general principle of law it seems natural to seek compensation and using the DEA standards for marijuana valuation, ($5,200/plant) Dickes will seek $369,200 in lost medicine. Aurora Police Chief Daniel J. Oates, called that sum "absurd" and disputed the quantity of marijuana seized. He claims that at no point during the April 27th raid did Dickes inform police that he had a permit, though he also admitted that officers did not ask if he had one. It was only after Dickes was removed from the scene that a permit was found. "Frustrated" by the negative press over the incident, Chief Oates stressed to me that police immediately stopped their search when a permit was located, and got on the phone with a senior prosecutor who instructed them to leave 6 plants and all the grow equipment. Nonetheless Dickes was held and charged even after the permit was uncovered. Despite the district attorney's dismissal and subsequent court order for return of the marijuana, Oates believes his officers acted correctly and finds the idea of compensating medical marijuana growers to be "absurd." And while refusing to give examples on the record, he further asserted that the "current process for medical marijuana certification could easily be abused by people who want to grow it illegally." If compensation becomes the status quo, he argued "it is going to place more and more departments in a dilemma" that conflicts state and Federal law. Medical marijuana advocates disagree, stating that Colorado police are charged with upholding Colorado law and not federal law. "He is just saying the law is inconvenient," says Corry who also points out that Oxycontin laws can be abused, but that it is still a medicine that is legally prescribed to patients. Colorado voters decided in 2000 to protect patients who use marijuana as medicine, not those who use it recreationally. "Police take an oath to protect the law, you don't get to pick and choose which laws to follow." Dickes plans on filing his suit later this month. If he wins it will be the single biggest payout for the illegal seizure of marijuana, and may open the door for other cash strapped cities to be sued for tactics which elsewhere are a common part of drug enforcement. Whether such a historic payback will motivate police to change their policies for raiding grow houses or motivate Colorado citizens to reexamine their constitution remains to be seen. For now, though, it appears that Centennial State Constitution is a pot farmer's best bud. |
Last updated at 10:37am on 16th January 2008
What would a dog say if it could talk? "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play", according to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks.
The special programme analysed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations.
In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario.
Scroll down for more ...
Computer can tell what kind of situation a dog is in by how it barks
The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences.
The computer correctly identified the different situations 43 per cent of the time. Although it was not a high success rate it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said.
The computer was most accurate in identifying the "fight" and "stranger" contexts, and was least effective at matching the "play" bark.
The results appear in the journal Animal Cognition, and suggest that dogs have acoustically different barks depending on their emotional state.
The researchers also performed a second test, in which the computer identified individual dogs by their bark.
The software correctly identified the dogs 52 per cent of the time, again much better than the human result, suggesting there are individual differences in barks even though humans are not able to recognize them.
The team also plans to compare the barks of different breeds to discover what they have in common.
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