Wow! Monster Hurricane on Saturn Spied by NASA Spacecraft

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Photo Credit: NASASpectacular new images from a NASA spacecraft orbiting Saturn have captured the most detailed views ever of an enormous hurricane churning around the ringed planet’s north pole.

The stunning new images and video of the Saturn hurricane, which were taken by NASA’s Cassini probe, show that the storm’s eye is 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) wide — about 20 times bigger than typical hurricane eyes on Earth. And the Saturn maelstrom is more powerful than its Earth counterparts, with winds at its outer edge whipping around at 330 mph (530 km/h).

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” Cassini imaging team member Andrew Ingersoll, of Caltech in Pasadena, said in a statement. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

Saturn’s hurricane swirls inside a mysterious, six-sided vortex. Unlike hurricanes on Earth, which tend to drift northward as our planet rotates, the Saturn storm and its hexagonal vortex have been camped out at the north pole for a while.

“The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that’s likely why it’s stuck at the pole,” Kunio Sayanagi, a Cassini imaging team associate at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., said in a statement.

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Lawsuit Exposes NYC Church's Two Billion Dollar Assets

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Photo Credit: Michael NagleThere has never been any doubt that Trinity Church is wealthy. But the extent of its wealth has long been a mystery; guessed at by many, known by few.

Now, however, after a lawsuit filed by a disenchanted parishioner, the church has offered an estimate of the value of its assets: more than $2 billion.

The Episcopal parish, known as Trinity Wall Street, traces its holdings to a gift of 215 acres of prime Manhattan farmland donated in 1705 by Queen Anne of England. Since then, the church has parlayed that gift into a rich portfolio of office buildings, stock investments and, soon, mixed-use residential development.

The parish’s good fortune has become an issue in the historic congregation, which has been racked by infighting in recent years over whether the church should be spending more money to help the poor and spread the faith, in New York and around the world. Differences over the parish’s mission and direction last year led nearly half the 22-member vestry — an august collection of corporate executives and philanthropists — to resign or be pushed out, after at least seven of them asked, unsuccessfully, that the rector himself step down.

Over the years, the church has sold or given away much of the original 215 acres from Queen Anne, but it has 14 acres, including 5.5 million square feet of commercial real estate.

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South Carolina Woman Accused of Using Ambulance as Taxi – at Least 100 Times

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Photo Credit: extranoiseA South Carolina woman was arrested after authorities discovered she called 911 at least 100 times in the past seven years to get rides into Charleston, the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office says.

Audrey Ferguson, 51, allegedly faked illnesses and would immediately sign out of area hospitals upon arrival, telling doctors she was fine, WCSC reports.

“She’ll have a vague medical complaint; for instance, abdominal pain,” Dorchester County EMS Director Doug Warren said. “She has medical complaints that are legitimate, and so until she’s been evaluated and determined not to be sick, we have to assume she is.”

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Family Makes Unexpected Find in Can of Green Beans (+video)

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Photo Credit: ABC When checking the St. Joseph County Health Department complaint reports, what turned up in some foods at local stores was surprising. The most disturbing case concerns a can of green beans – and what one family found inside will keep them from ever eating canned green beans again.

“We eat a lot of green beans, we do, we did. Nobody wants anymore now,” said Gloria Chubb of South Bend.

Chubb, a retired nurse’s aide, is disgusted by what she served up at the dinner table. “It was meatloaf, mashed potatoes, gravy and green beans,” said Chubb.

It was what was in the can of Meijer green beans that made them both lose their appetite.

“My son put some on his plate and said, ‘What is that?’ I thought maybe it was a piece of moldy bacon or something– because they have bacon in them sometimes,” said Chubb. “I and I took it out of there and it wasn’t moldy bacon, it was a toad with parts of his little legs all in the green beans. Other than that he was fully intact.”

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Last Words: Texas Con Calls Lethal Injection 'Awesome'

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Photo Credit: Sarah G…[Convicted murderer Richard] Cobb, 29, spent a decade on death row for the murder of Kenneth Vandever, a man whom he abducted and later killed in a convenience store robbery 11 years ago. Cobb abducted Vandever, then 37, and two other women whom he shot with a shotgun and left for dead. The women survived to call police, but Vandever died…

As the first injection entered his bloodstream, Cobb lifted his head from the gurney on which he was tied down, and craned his neck to stare at the warden who stood behind him.

“Wow!” Cobb shouted. “That is great. That is awesome! Thank you, warden! Thank you (expletive) warden!” he said.

Soon after the outburst, “his head fell back on the pillow, and his neck twisted at an odd angle, with his mouth and eyes open,” the AP reported.

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Breakthrough in Quest for Nuclear Fusion

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Photo Credit: Image EditorThe international nuclear fusion project – known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin – is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.

If Iter demonstrates that it is possible to build commercially-viable fusion reactors then it could become the experiment that saved the world in a century threatened by climate change and an expected three-fold increase in global energy demand.

This week the project gained final approval for the design of the most technically challenging component – the fusion reactor’s “blanket” that will handle the super-heated nuclear fuel.

The building site in Cadarache has also passed the crucial stage where some 493 seismic bearings – giant concrete and rubber plinths – have been set into the reactor’s deep foundations to protect against possible earthquakes.

Peering over the edge of the huge seismic isolation pit, it is still possible to see some of these bearings before they are covered with a raft of reinforced concrete that will support the massive fusion machine at the heart of the £13bn [$20 billion] Iter project.

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Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine

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Photo Credit: Emilio LabradorSam Parnia practices resuscitation medicine. In other words, he helps bring people back from the dead — and some return with stories. Their tales could help save lives, and even challenge traditional scientific ideas about the nature of consciousness.

“The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated,” said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school’s resuscitation research program. “It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside.”

Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

It sounds supernatural, and if their memories are accurate and their brains really have stopped, it’s neurologically inexplicable, at least with what’s now known. Parnia, leader of the Human Consciousness Project’s AWARE study, which documents after-death experiences in 25 hospitals across North America and Europe, is studying the phenomenon scientifically.

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Teacher Suspended for Showing Kids Pliers

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Photo Credit: MAURO CATEBA veteran Chicago teacher is suing the school district after he was suspended and charged with possessing tools that school officials said violated their weapons policy.

Doug Bartlett, a second grade teacher at Washington Irving Elementary School, was suspended for four days after administrators determined the tools he used for visual aids endangered students.

In 2011 Bartlett was teaching a mandated course on “tools.” He showed students several tools that he used in his classroom including wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, a box cutter, and a small pocketknife. He explained how the tools were used and kept the items secured in a tool box.

“The visual aids were used in an effort to facilitate student understanding and remembrance of the curriculum,” the lawsuit states. “As he displayed the box cutter and pocketknife, Plaintiff specifically described the proper use of these tools. Neither of these items was made available to the students.”

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Former Reuter's Editor Charged With Hacking Tribune's Computer System

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Photo Credit: Reuters Former Reuters.com Deputy Social Media Editor Matthew Keys pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to federal charges that he aided members of the Anonymous hacking collective.

Keys, 26, on Monday said he was fired by Thomson Reuters (TRI.TO), the parent company of Reuters News.

Keys was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Sacramento on three criminal counts, alleging he entered an Internet chatroom used by members of the hacking collective Anonymous and helped hackers gain access to the computer system of Tribune Co. in December 2010. A story on the Tribune’s Los Angeles Times website was altered by one of those hackers, the indictment said.

The alleged events occurred before he joined Reuters in 2012, the indictment indicated.

Keys was silent during the hearing in federal district court in Sacramento as his lawyer Jay Leiderman entered the plea. A status conference was set for June 12.

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Scientists Find Way to Turn Stem Cells Into Brain Cells

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Photo Credit: US NewsScientists have discovered an antibody that can turn stem cells from a patient’s bone marrow directly into brain cells, a potential breakthrough in the treatment of neurological diseases and injuries.

Richard Lerner, of the Scripps Research Institute in California, says that when a specific antibody is injected into stem cells from bone marrow—which normally turn into white blood cells—the cells can be triggered to turn into brain cells.

“There’s been a lot of research activity where people would like to repair brain and spinal cord injuries,” Lerner says. “With this method, you can go to a person’s own stem cells and turn them into brain cells that can repair nerve injuries.”

Antibodies are Y-shaped proteins that the immune system uses to help identify foreign threats to the body. They bind to foreign invaders in the body in order to alert white blood cells to attack harmful bacteria and viruses. There are millions of known antibodies.

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