Tuesday, November 6, 2012

A long-range motorcycle, powered by nothing but air

 

Why bother dealing with gas, or even electricity? This bike zooms along at over 80 miles an hour using nothing but a scuba tank.
 
Electric motorbikes are slowly gaining acceptance, even among some diehard gear-heads. But electricity isn’t the only means of powering alternative two-wheelers; good old, plain air is also a viable, and sustainable, possibility.
Propelled by compressed air, the O2 Pursuit can go 100 kilometers on a single tank, and up to 140 kilometers per hour (87 mph), according to Dean Benstead, the graduate of RMIT University, in Melbourne, who designed it.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Chinese doctors remove large dildo from a man's intestines...


 

 
 
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Doctors remove dildo from man's intestines
Doctors remove large dildo from man's intestines
     
A Chinese man had to seek medical help to remove a sex toy lodged in his intestines for five days, according to a state media report that said such cases were on the rise amid loosening attitudes towards sex.
Doctors at Shanghai's Zhongshan Hospital removed the 23cm dildo from the 30-year-old man's intestines using an endoscope, a hospital spokesman and a government-backed newspaper said.
"If we did not remove the dildo in time, the man could have gone into critical condition," said doctor Yao Liqing, quoted by the Shanghai Daily newspaper.
"Doctors were astonished to see such a big item taken out of the patient's body," he added.
He said the object had blocked the man's large intestine and caused tissue damage, and doctors were contemplating surgery if the procedure had failed.
Shops selling sex toys and contraceptives are common in Chinese cities, as greater sexual freedom and a consumer culture take hold in the communist-ruled country.
The Shanghai Daily said medical professionals were warning people to follow manufacturers' instructions for using sex toys and not utilise them in "unintended" ways.
"People must use sex toys properly and avoid ones that are too big as they can hurt people," Yao said.
"There have been three similar cases so far this year," he added, although the report did not make clear whether Yao was referring only to cases at his hospital.
"In the previous two or three years, we only had one such case," he said.
A hospital spokesman confirmed the case to AFP, saying doctors performed the procedure on Saturday, but declined to comment further.


Sunday, October 7, 2012

Sony suspends defective tablet...


 
 
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Sony Xperia S
MORE XPERIENCE NEEDED: Sony has suspended sales of its Xperia S tablets, citing a water-proofing defecct.
 
Sony said it has halted sales of its Xperia tablet PCs, a month after its launch, after discovering gaps between the screen and the case that make some of the machines susceptible to water damage.
The problem with the tablet, which is supposed to be water resistant, is the result of a manufacturing flaw at the Chinese plant where it is fabricated, said Sony spokeswoman Noriko Shoji. Sony has not yet decided when it will resume sales, she added.
Sony began selling its latest Android tablet on September 7 in the United States followed by launches in Japan, Europe and elsewhere. So far it has shipped around 100,000 of the devices. The company said it will fix any of the tablets sold and expects the cost of the recall to have no significant impact on earnings.
The latest tablet from Sony, which like its smartphone has been branded Xperia in a bid to unify its mobile devices under one name, joins a crowded market for tablets that is still dominated by Apple's iPad. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, with its rival Android machine, leads the pack of Apple challengers.
Sony will offer repairs in regions where the device is available, including the U.S., Canada, Europe, Oceania and Taiwan, Shoji said.
 
Acknowledgements:  - Reuters

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Nazis stolen statue's cosmic link...

 

The thousand year-old ancient Buddhist statue was thought to be carved by a rare class of iron meteorite. Photo / AFP
The thousand year-old ancient Buddhist statue was thought to be carved by a rare class of iron meteorite. Photo / AFP
A thousand-year-old Buddhist statue taken from Tibet in 1938 by an SS team seeking the roots of Hitler’s Aryan doctrine was carved from a meteorite, scientists have reported.
In a paper published in an academic journal, German and Austrian researchers recount an extraordinary tale where archaeology, the Third Reich and cosmic treasure are intertwined like an Indiana Jones movie.
Called the Iron Man because of the high content of iron in its rock, the 24-centimetre-high statue was brought to Germany by an expedition led by Ernst Schaefer, a zoologist and ethnologist.
Backed by SS chief Heinrich Himmler and heading a team whose members are all believed to have been SS, Schaefer roamed Tibet in 1938-9 to search for the origins of Aryanism, the notion of racial superiority that underpinned Nazism.
Weighing 10.6 kilos, the statue features the Buddhist god Vaisravana seated, with the palm of his right hand outstretched and pointing downwards.
Chemical analysis shows that the rock from which it was carved came from a meteorite.
Read more:http://www.nzherald.co.nz/space/news/article.cfm?c_id=325&objectid=10836813

 
 

Monday, September 24, 2012

How did that eel get there?

 


  •  
    sep24-eel
    A man showed up at an Auckland hospital emergency room last week with an unusual dilemma — an eel was stuck in his bottom.
    The patient informed staff at Auckland City Hospital of his problem and X-rays confirmed his story.
    "The eel was about the size of a sprig of asparagus and the incident is the talk of the place," a hospital source told the New Zealand Herald.
    "Doctors and nurses have come across people with strange objects that they have got stuck where they shouldn't be before, but an eel has to be a first."
    It is unclear how the eel became stuck inside the man but it is believed it was successfully removed.
    Auckland District Health Board spokesman Matt Rogers confirmed the incident had occurred.
    "We can confirm that an adult male presented at Auckland City Hospital this week with an eel inside him," he said.
  • http://huttriverofnz.blog.co.uk

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

The ancient relatives of the modern elephants - Mastodons and Mammoths...



Mastodon vs. Mammoth
 


The Mastodon was a relative of the prehistoric Mammoth, although similar in appearance there was a numerous amount of difference between the two.

Appearance

The mammoth and mastodon are often misconceived to be much larger than what they really are. They are, in fact, very similar in size to the modern day Asian elephant, which grows up to 3 meters high at the shoulder. The coat of a mammoth was similar to that of musk oxen, growing up to 90 centimeters in length. Other physical characteristics of the mammoth included a high-peaked forehead, and a high hump that resulted from their long spines and neck vertebrae and possibly accentuated by fat deposits and thick hair. They had a shorter trunk than the modern day Asian or African elephants that we are used to seeing today.

The Mammoth and The Mastodon

There is a number of different Mammoths and Mastodon species that diverged from the Asian elephant after the latter group split from the African elephant. They are all mammals and belong to a species called Proboscideans. From the Mastodon two Asian and African elephants evolved. Probably the most recognized/symbolic species of the four would be the woolly mammoth, or mammuthus primigenius, this is because of their broad geographic distribution, adaptation to cold environments, and relative abundance during the last ice age.


The mastodon roamed the open spruce woodlands, usually in areas such as valleys and swamps. They inhabited almost all the world living in every continent except for Antarctica and Australia. The oldest known mastodon fossil is about twenty-eight millions years old and are they are thought to have gone extinct eight thousand years ago.

http://skywalker.cochise.edu/wellerr/students/mammoth-mastodon/mastodon.htm

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

New research offers clue to Internet addiction...

 

 
 
 
If your thoughts constantly revolve around surfing the web and you get anxious or depressed when you don’t have access to the online world, you may be suffering from Internet addiction. And new research shows that Internet addiction is tied to a genetic mutation.
Christian Montag and colleagues from the University of Bonn in Germany and the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim compared DNA samples from individuals who had troublesome relationships with the Internet to that of healthy individuals. They found that people with problematic relationships were more often carriers of a genetic mutation that plays a role in nicotine addiction.
“Internet addiction is not a figment of our imagination,” Montag says in a statement. ”Researchers and therapists are increasingly closing in on it. The current data already shows that there are clear indications for genetic causes of Internet addiction.”
Researchers interviewed 843 people about their online habits and found that 132 of the participants showed signs of “problematic behavior in how they handle the online medium.” Using DNA samples, scientists compared the genetic makeup of the two groups and found that the individuals in the problematic group were more likely to carry a mutation on the CHRNA4 gene, which is linked to nicotine addiction.
The study also found that the genetic mutation occurred more frequently in women who displayed problematic Internet behavior.
Researchers think that a mutation on the CHRNA4 gene activates the reward center in the brains of Internet addicts, similar to the way it promotes addictive behavior in nicotine addicts.
The study is in the Journal of Addiction Medicine.
It is important to discuss how to handle possible consequences of Internet use as more and more of our lives revolve around computer electronics and information that is created and managed on the web.
To date, Internet addiction has not been clearly defined in medical terms because it is not as well understood as addiction to other things such as alcohol or sex. The researchers note that more research needs to be done before they can make any conclusions or work on solutions to the problem. Montag says, “If such connections are better understood, this will also result in important indications for better therapies.”
Photo via flickr/Marcin Wichary
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Sunday, September 2, 2012

Archaeologists unearth 5000 year old third gender caveman

 


:?:Archaeologists unearth 5000 year old third gender caveman, or in these politically correct days of gay marriages etc is that just a cave person? Is it a case of back to the future?
caveman
http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/archaeologists-unearth-5000-year-old-third-gender-caveman

http://huttriverofnz.blog.co.uk

Friday, August 17, 2012

American brothers reunited after 80 years...



Two brothers who were sent to an orphanage and split up as young children have been reunited for the first time 80 years on.
Born in Chicago, Kenneth Corcoran, 82, and Edward Muir, 84, were left at an orphanage with their three siblings in the 1930s after their mother died and their father decided he could not care for them.
The siblings were adopted by different families who changed their names and raised them in different states, local TV station WDAY News reports.
Mr Corcoran's daughter Pam Gregerson, who lives in North Dakota with her father, started the quest to reunite the brothers a few years ago, searching online tirelessly but with no luck.
The search finally came to an end when Ms Gregerson's son Alex intervened a few weeks ago, telling her "mum you need to take a break, just go away, let me play with this".
http://news.msn.co.nz/worldnews/8518249/two-brothers-reunite-after-80-years-apart

Saturday, August 11, 2012

The American Civil War of 2016...

Imagine Tea Party extremists sezing control of a South Carolina town and the Army being sent in to crush the rebellion. This scenario is actually being discussed in professional military circles.





http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/aug/7/the-civil-war-of-2016/

Sunday, August 5, 2012

Has Papua New Guinea proven the monarchy is a useless institution?


 
 

Peter O'Neill (left) and Sir Michael Somare (right).
Peter O'Neill has been sworn in as Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea once again, following elections that were in the main mercifully violence free. With no help or intervention from Papua New Guinea's head of State - Britain's Queen Elizabeth - the constitutional crisis that was threatening to turn violent in December last year (and resulted in a mutiny) has been resolved, in O'Neills favour. We can only hope now that Papua New Guinea can carry on as a stable democracy, but given the way this crisis came about and the underlying reasons for it being unresolved, that seems rather doubtful.

What's interesting about Papua New Guinea from the perspective of the New Zealand republic debate is that Monarchy New Zealand very quickly changed its tune on the country. One month they attacked Papua New Guinea for electing its Governor-General, in a similar way the Republican Movement had proposed as an interim step to a New Zealand republic. The next month they contradicted that position by praising the country for being a monarchy and therefore having the capability to resolve the constitutional crisis. Both claims have now been proven wrong.

The monarchists have proved that they are either incapable of understanding the reasons why some democracies work and others don't (hint: it's got nothing to do with whether a country is a republic or monarchy) or at lying consistently. In fairness their understanding of democracy seems so weak that I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. On the other hand, they seem to realise that ridiculous claims such as "of the top 10 democracies, 7 are monarchies" sticks in the minds of New Zealanders (in fact that's a single measure from a much-disputed study; there's 25 "full democracies" in the world, of which the majority are republics - and moreover the vast majority of people actually live in republican democracies).

http://www.republic.org.nz/blogs/papua-new-guinea-proving-monarchy-useless

Monday, July 30, 2012

Order your illegal weapons online...

Inside the secret online marketplace for illegal weapons...


http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/inside-the-secret-online-marketplace-for-illegal-weapons/12402?tag=nl.e662

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Glasses provide a live language translation...



Talking through your glasses...
Here’s the scene: you’re traveling, and you walk into a little restaurant and the menu is entirely in a language you don’t understand, without pictures. You’ve got a couple of choices. You can leave, and try to find a place with English translations. You can try to hack your way through a conversation with the waiter, who also doesn’t speak your language. Or, you can point randomly at the menu and live with the consequences.
Well, in the future there will be another, better, answer. Live, realtime translation built into your glasses. Enter: Project Glass. British hacker and DIYer Will Powell has built a pair of glasses that can (albeit roughly) project a translation of your conversation onto your glasses. Here’s what it looks like:
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/science-scope/glasses-provide-live-language-translation/13184?tag=nl.e662

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Banjo the prehistoric super-killer unearthed in Victoria, Australia...

 
Introducing 'Banjo' from prehistoric Australia - (no relation to Banjo Patterson) -Australovenator wintonensis is his official title. Scientists have discovered a frightening weapon used by one of Australia's deadliest prehistoric predators to attack its prey...
Pelagornis-giant-bird-fossil
A bizarre bony-toothed, giant bird fossil, with a 5m wingspan, has been discovered in Victoria.
banjo-dinosaur-claw
The 5-million-year-old giant bony-toothed bird Pelagornis. (Credit: Museum Victoria / Peter Trusler)
BIZARRE GIANT BONY-TOOTHED birds once soared over Australia, palaeontologists have discovered.
The Pelagornis, with a wingspan of 5m, was the largest flying animal to exist on Earth after the extinction of pterosaurs 65 million years ago.
Dated to five million years old, the fossil leg bone discovered in Beaumaris Bay in Melbourne, Victoria, by palaeontologist Erich Fitzgerald from Museum Victoria, gives new insight into the evolution of seabirds in Australia.
"Pelagornis is just one of Victoria's long-lost marine megafauna, which included bus-sized sharks, giant penguins, killer sperm whales and dugongs. Life was larger back then," said Erich in a statement.
Bony-toothed birds
Pelagornis is part of the Pelagornithidae family, a group of ancient birds which sport a tooth-like projection on their beaks. "Bony-toothed birds are enigmatic extinct seabirds with a long history spanning over 50 million years," Erich said. "They were previously known from all continents except Australia...We knew next to nothing about the evolution of seabirds in Australia [and] this finding shows us that there has been a significant change in seabird diversity between five million years ago and now."
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/giant-bony-toothed-bird-fossil-found-in-australia.htm
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/journal/aussie-banjo-dinosaur-had-giant-claw.htm

Thursday, July 5, 2012

What is this aircraft?

Would probably leave this one for dead?



Just what is this aircraft? UFO, top secret, earth derived aircraft?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3OjXTWArrQ&feature=related

Phil Heatley the NZ State slum landlord?


 ]

 

 

Remember Phil Heatley, Opposition spokesperson for housing circa 2008? Remember the self-proclaimed campaigner against Housing New Zealand housing that was not up to standard? Remember the promises he made at that time? Remember his 'outrage' and his 'indignation'?
"Mr Heatley was full of sound and fury back then," says Labour's Housing spokesperson Annette King.
"But the truth's out - his bluster meant nothing, because this is the man who is responsible for drastic cuts to Housing New Zealand's maintenance budget.
"He is the slum landlord.
"If the Minister wants to see an example of his lack of action, I invite him to accompany me to 139 Greys Ave, Auckland Central, which houses an 87-flat HNZ complex.
"I visited it with my colleague Jacinda Ardern on Tuesday. It is an example of the most appalling neglect, not helped by the removal of a housing manager who had an office in the complex- until Housing New Zealand moved to the 'Faster. Fairer. Smarter' phone line service", said Annette King.
"Mr Heatley's policy of neglect has led to uncollected stinking, rotting rubbish, tenants afraid to go out of their flats because of vagrants (who sleep and urinate in stairwells and graffiti walls), dangerous flooring and filthy public areas.
"It is more than five years since the outside was cleaned. Over a 100 tenants share three washing machines, contained in a communal laundry where dangerous wiring is exposed and where their clothes lines are situated.
"The 0800 phone line is so inefficient that a caller, who rang after finding blood splattered around a lift, was told - when he finally got through - that it could be 10 working days before it was cleaned up.
"Good luck to the advocate or tenant who gets through to Mr Heatley. He has refused to meet people in Auckland saying they must come to Wellington. This despite the fact he flies courtesy of the taxpayer while housing advocates have to hold sausage sizzles to raise money for their fares," said Annette King.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Recycling with Australian Blogs...



Marc Dussault

Australian Blogs

http://australianblogs.com.au

I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of anything to do with recycling. Today’s post is a site that recycles computers. I haven’t used them (yet), but that doesn’t mean you can’t give it a go and let me know how it worked out.
T ogether
E veryone
A chieves
M ore

Recycle Electronics, Recycle Computer