Photo Credit: wickenden/flickrWorkers at a Mississippi funeral home say they found a man alive and kicking when they opened a body bag.
Holmes County Coroner Dexter Howard calls it a miracle that 78-year-old Walter Williams is alive.
The coroner was called to Williams’ home in Lexington, a community north of Jackson, where family members believed he had died.
Read more this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Sharon ScobleIt’s hard to imagine a creature more menacing than a great white shark swimming in the surf, but a giant crocodile comes close.
An estimated 12-foot crocodile was spotted cruising in the swells this past week at Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia, prompting officials to close the beach to swimmers and surfers for a day.
It’s unclear what lured the reptile into the surf zone, but the unusual sighting generated quite the spectacle.
Sharon Scoble, a Broome local, captured the images that accompany this report after receiving a call from her son, who spotted the croc while driving to the beach.
Read more this story HERE.
Photo Credit: euthman/flickrFederal health regulators will consider this week whether to green light a provocative new fertilization technique that could eventually create babies from the DNA of three people, with the goal of preventing mothers from passing on debilitating genetic diseases to their children.
The Food and Drug Administration has framed its two-day meeting as a “scientific, technologic and clinical” discussion about how to test the approach in humans. But the technique itself raises a number of ethical questions, including whether the government should sanction the creation of genetically modified humans.
The FDA panel will hear from several prominent critics who oppose any human testing of the approach, arguing that it could be a slippery slope toward “designer babies,” – in which parents customize traits like eye color, height and intelligence.
But the field’s leading U.S. researcher will be on hand to explain and defend his work, which he describes as “gene correction,” rather than “gene modification.”
“We want to replace these mutated genes, which by nature have become pathogenic to humans,” says Dr. Shoukhrat Mitalipov, who will present on Tuesday. “We’re reversing them back to normal, so I don’t understand why you would be opposing that.”
Read more this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Solent News/RexIt’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?
With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.
But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.
And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google’s director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of “the singularity” – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.
But it’s what came next that puts this into context. It’s since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.
Read more this story HERE.
Photo Credit: REUTERS/KRISTINE GINGRASMost people entering crocodile territory keep a wary eye out on water and land, but research suggests they need to look up.
Though the reptiles lack obvious physical features to suggest this is possible, crocodiles in fact climb trees all the way to the crowns, according to University of Tennessee researcher Vladimir Dinets.
Researchers in the climbing study observed crocodiles in Australia, Africa and North America. The study documented crocodiles climbing as high as six feet off the ground. But Dinets said he received anecdotal reports from people who spend time around crocodiles of the reptiles climbing almost 30 feet.
Dinets said crocodiles lack the toe and foot structure that would be expected of a climber. However, smaller and juvenile crocodiles in particular were observed climbing vertically while larger ones tended to climb angled trunks and branches, all of which is a measure of the reptiles’ spectacular agility, he said.
“They just go slowly,” he said. “Eventually they get there.”
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: PICKENS COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICEA South Carolina scofflaw movie renter spent a night in jail this week after police busted her for failing to return a Jennifer Lopez movie she rented nine years ago.
WHNS reports the scenario unfolded after Kayla Michelle Finley went to the Pickens County Jail in the northwestern tip of the state Thursday to report an unspecified crime – but instead got charged with one, herself.
The news station cites Finley’s arrest warrant in writing the 27-year-old woman had rented “Monster-in-Law” – a rom-com pairing Lopez with Jane Fonda that garnered a single star on Rotten Tomatoes – in 2005.
She’d reportedly rented the movie from the now-defunct Dalton Video, and never returned the cassette.
WHNS reports the store’s former owner, P.J. Dalton, had taken the matter to court nine years ago and gotten a judge to issue a warrant.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: AP / California National Primate Research Center A special blend of mother’s milk just for girls? New research shows animal moms are customizing their milk in surprising ways depending on whether they have a boy or a girl.
The studies raise questions for human babies, too – about how to choose the donor milk that’s used for hospitalized preemies, or whether we should explore gender-specific infant formula.
“There’s been this myth that mother’s milk is pretty standard,” said Harvard University evolutionary biologist Katie Hinde, whose research suggests that’s far from true – in monkeys and cows, at least.
Instead, “the biological recipes for sons and daughters may be different,” she told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Friday.
Pediatricians have long stressed that breast milk is best when it comes to baby’s first food. Breast-fed infants are healthier, suffering fewer illnesses such as diarrhea, earaches or pneumonia during the first year of life and less likely to develop asthma or obesity later on.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Fox News Could U.S. soldiers soon become real-life “Iron Men?”
The military is reportedly working on a high-tech tactical assault light operations suit, or TALUS, that would employ a form of armor that can shift from a liquid state to a rock-hard solid shield in milliseconds. This would make soldiers impervious to gunfire.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Science Picture Co./CorbisFortune tellers may soon be out of the job.
Scientists have found a way to accurately predict lifespan in worms – a breakthrough that could one day be used to predict how long a human would live.
The secret, they claim, is in looking at the bursts of activity in mitochondria, a part of the cell which generates its energy.
The findings, reported by in Nature, suggest that an organism’s lifespan is largely predictable in early adulthood.
Meng-Qiu Dong at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing, China, added proteins to nematode worms that light up when they detect damaging in their mitochondria.
Read more from this story HERE.
During a routine traffic stop, a police officer panicked and climbed into the back seat of the car he had just pulled over… because a pack of wolves was racing toward him.
Read more from this story HERE.