Is This Actually Illegal?

And another old one I have just come across.. If mating with a hedgehog is questinably legal, what about driving backwards?

Friday, October 06, 2006
Scott William Poulton, an Australian man in his early 20s, was arrested for driving backwards on an empty highway in the Outback. Police were heading out onto the road when they saw a car coming towards them. They aimed their radar gun to check it out but were not astonished when they saw the car was approaching at a mere 56 km/hour (35 mph). They stopped the car when they realized it was "going the wrong way." The driver told them his transmission had "stuffed up" and the only gear he could use was reverse. So he did ... for about 20 km in an attempt to make it to the closest town.

Police gave the man a breathalyser to determine sobriety which he, of course, passed. The driver was charged with reckless driving and driving while under suspension. It is unfortunate his license was suspended but I wonder what he had done wrong otherwise. Is it illegal to drive in reverse? If so, why are manufacturers allowed to put an illegal gear into a car?

For the record, this occurred on the Great Eastern Highway. The man was driving eastward. The cops were driving westward. Aren't the cops the ones who were going the wrong way?

Man Lacerates Penis with Hedgehog

This is actually old news, but I never heard about it. And you just can't make this stuff up!
Friday, October 20, 2006


A Serbian man needed emergency surgery after he had sex with a hedgehog on a witchdoctor's advice. Zoran Nikolovic, 35, from Belgrade, says the witchdoctor told him it would cure his premature ejaculation. The witchdoctor also guaranteed discretion and confidentiality. Unfortunately for Zoran the local hospital didn't! He ended up in an operating theatre after the hedgehog's needles left his penis severely lacerated.
A hospital spokesman said: "The animal was apparently unhurt and the patient came off much worse from the encounter. We have managed to repair the damage to his penis."

I guess it goes to show that witchdoctors still hold a lot of power in some places of the world...

Bill Gates Digs Algae

Bill Gates' Cascades Investments has backed algal biofuel maker Sapphire Energy, bringing the total amount raised by the startup to over $100 million. The San Diego, Calif., company is one of a slew of startups developing processes for harvesting fuels from algae. In May, the one-year-old company said it had raised over $50 million from Arch Venture Partners, the Wellcome Trust and Venrock.

Sapphire CEO Jason Pyle told the Wall Street Journal Wednesday that the company plans to build a production plant capable of generating 10,000 barrels of algal oil a day. Biofuel is not a new field of investment for Cascade, which put money in Pacific Ethanol, a public company in Sacramento, Calif. But the investment firm sold all of its shares in Pacific earlier this year after the company reported losses and suspended construction of a planned ethanol plant . Pacific Ethanol said it was on track to complete a new plant last month even as it posted further losses.

From Mainstreet.

Rubber ducks and Global warming

Rubber ducks are being used to help scientists understand global warming and melting glaciers.

Nasa researchers have dropped 90 ducks into holes in Greenland's fastest moving glacier, the Jakobshavn Glacier in Baffin Bay, between Greenland and Canada. The toys have each been labelled with the words "science experiment" and "reward" in three languages, along with an e-mail address. If they are found scientists will be able to track how the water moves through the ice and provide information about the movement of glaciers. Scientists are still unsure about why glaciers speed up in summer and head towards the sea.

One theory is that the summer sun melts ice on top of the glacier's surface, creating pools that flow into tubular holes in the glacier called moulins. These moulins carry some water to the bottom of the glacier, where it acts as a lubricant to speed the movement of ice toward the coast.

The Jakobshavn Glacier is believed to be the source of the iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912 and is important to researchers because it discharges nearly 7 per cent of all the ice coming off Greenland.

Alberto Behar of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California said none of the ducks had been reported yet.

"We haven't heard back but it may take some time until somebody actually finds it and decides to send us an e-mail that they have found it," he said. "These are places that are quite remote so there aren't people walking around."

"Octosquid" found off Hawaii

In 2007 a curious cephalopod creature that appeared to be half octopus, half squid was found in waters at Keahole Point in Hawaii. Local biologists thought that it could possibly be a new species.
The creature is believed to have been sucked up in a deep seawater pipeline at the Natural Energy Laboratory Hawaii Authority at Keahole. This pipeline pumps colde water up from 3,000 feet below sea level, and occassional deep-sea marine life gets caught in a filter in the line. Workers who discovered the creature call it an "octosquid" because it has the body of a squid and the tentacles of an octopus.
The octosquid stayed alive for three days once it was found by researchers. It was then shipped to the University of Hawaii Manoa campus for evaluation.
Sadly, it turned out that the creature was simply a rare species of squid which had lost two tentacles!

Beaver in Devon

For a great picture of a beaver in Devon see UK Safari's picture of the month.
Ben Lee took this photo using a Nikon D80 at Escot Park in Devon.
A pair of beavers were introduced there as part of a carefully monitored experiment. Recently the beavers set about making a house a home by adding the ultimate must-have feature in every beaver habitat – a dam. It's probably the first beaver dam to be built in the south west for 800 years.

Ancient trees recorded in mines

By Jonathan Amos
Science reporter, BBC News, Liverpool

Spectacular fossil forests have been found in the coal mines of Illinois by a US-UK team of researchers. The group reported one discovery last year, but has since identified a further five examples. The ancient vegetation - now turned to rock - is visible in the ceilings of mines covering thousands of hectares.

These were among the first forests to evolve on the planet, Dr Howard Falcon-Lang told the British Association Science Festival in Liverpool.

"These are the largest fossil forests found anywhere in the world at any point in geological time," he told reporters.
"It is quite extraordinary to find a fossil landscape preserved over such a vast area; and we are talking about an area the size of Bristol." The forests grew just a few million years apart some 300 million years ago; and are now stacked one on top of another. It appears the ancient land experienced repeated periods of subsidence and flooding which buried the forests in a vertical sequence. They have since become visible because of the extensive mining operations in the border area between the states of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky.


Scientists look up to see what would have been the forest floor

Once the coal seams have been removed (what were, essentially, the compacted soils of the forests), it is possible to go into the tunnels and look up at what would have been lying on the forest floors.

"It's a really exciting experience to drive down into these mines; it's pitch black," the Bristol University research said. "It's kind of an odd view looking at a forest bottom-up. You can actually see upright tree stumps that are pointed vertically up above your head with the roots coming down; and adjacent to those tree stumps you see all the litter. "We found 30m-long trunks that had fallen with their crowns perfectly preserved."



Some of the preservation is exquisite

The researchers believe their study of these ancient forests could give hints to how modern rainforests might react in a warmer world. The six forests straddle a period in Earth history 306 million years ago that saw a rapid shift from an icehouse climate with big polar ice caps to a greenhouse climate in which the ice caps would have melted.

"The fascinating thing we've discovered is that the rainforests dramatically collapse approximately coincident with the greenhouse warming," explained Dr Falcon-Lang. "Long-lived forests dominated by giant club moss trees almost overnight (in a geological sense) are replaced by rather weedy fern vegetation." The next stage of the research is to try to refine the timings of events all those years ago, and work out the exact environmental conditions that existed. The thresholds that triggered the ancient collapse can then be compared with modern circumstances.