Meth Addict Gouged out Eyes and Ate Them

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An ice addict in [an Australian] hospital emergency department gouged out his own eyeballs and ate them, a Federal Liberal MP has revealed.

The horrific story was revealed yesterday at an Ice Summit on the Central Coast organized by the Express Advocate to address the epidemic in the region.

Dobell Federal Liberal MP Karen McNamara relayed the story as she opened the summit before a packed auditorium this morning.

“There is nothing at all recreational about this drug,” Ms McNamara said . . .

A spokeswoman for Ms McNamara later said the incident occurred at John Hunter Hospital at Newcastle [Australia] and that she was in the room when the story was related to Ms McNamara by a frontline emergency services officer who wished to remain anonymous. (Read more from “Meth Addict Gouged out Eyes and Ate Them” HERE)

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11-Year-Old Graduating With 3 Degrees From U.S. College

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Photo Credit: Twitter An 11-year-old boy receiving three degrees became the youngest graduate at American River College this year, by far.

Tanishq Abraham graduated from high school at age 10, and now has his sights set on a medical degree. He told KCRA he wasn’t intimidated by taking classes with students twice his age.

“Even on the first time I came to a college class, I wasn’t really nervous, so, this isn’t much of a big thing to me,” Abraham said.

Abraham graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA, which didn’t come as a surprise to his mother.

“Even in kindergarten he was pretty ahead, two years ahead, and just went from there,” she said. (Read more from “11-Year-Old Graduating With 3 Degrees From American River College” HERE)

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Woman Found Pushing Dead Son in Swing at Park

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Photo Credit: WUSA9 A Maryland mother was found pushing her dead three-year-old child in a swing at a park Friday morning, according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.

Officers responded to Wills Memorial Park located at 500 St. Mary’s Avenue around 6:55 a.m. for the report of a woman who had been pushing a child in a swing for an unusually long period of time.

The 24-year-old mother and her son may have been at the park since the day before, officials said. When officers got to the park, they found the woman pushing the three-year-old in a swing at the playground. Officers noticed right away that the boy was dead. (Read more from “Woman Found Pushing Dead Son in Swing at Park” HERE)

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World’s Oldest Person to Turn 116

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The woman declared by gerontology experts to be the oldest person in the world is turning 116 Saturday.

Jeralean Talley was born in Montrose, Ga., on May 23, 1899. She’s been in Michigan since 1935. Relatives say she remains active and aware of what’s going on around her.

Talley was named world’s oldest person in April after the death of Gertrude Weaver,who passed away at the age of 116. Weaver died just five days after 117-year-old Misao Okawa died in Japan . . .

Talley has been consistent in her answer as to what she’s lived so long.

“It’s all in the good Lord’s hands,” she said. “There’s nothing I can do about it.” (Read more from “World’s Oldest Person to Turn 116” HERE)

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MMA Fighter Captures, Hog-Ties Bank Robber [+video]

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Photo Credit: PCSOA bank robber in Pinellas County learned the hard way that crime never pays, when his attempted robbery was foiled by a local MMA instructor and business owner.

Eric Haritakis, nicknamed the ‘Ginja Ninja’ by friends for his red hair and swift moves, was at the Grow Financial Federal Credit Union on Friday to make a deposit for his health food delivery company, Zen Body Foods, when a man robbed one of the tellers. . .

Surveillance video from a neighboring UPS Store showed Haritakis sprinting after the suspect. Haritakis chased the man, later identified as 31-year-old Michael Jon Neubecker, around the side of the building.

FOX 13 News

“I don’t really know what I was thinking at that time. I just kind of went for it. I figured if he had a weapon, he probably would have pulled it out at that point,” Haritakis continued. . .

“I see the guy bringing a guy back with his hands behind his back and almost carrying him,” said Kristin Drexler, an employee at UPS. “I was just amazed at how down-to-earth [Haritakis] was. He was just so nonchalant about the fact that he just chased down a bank robber.” (Read more from “MMA Fighter Captures, Hog-Ties Bank Robber” HERE)

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Study: Video Games Increase Risk of Mental Illness

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Photo Credit: The Telegraph Millions of boys could be at increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other mental illnesses in later life through playing action video games such as Call of Duty or Assassin’s Creed, according to new research.

Scientists say players navigate the screen using a key area of the brain called the caudate nucleus, which leads to loss of grey matter in the hippocampus.

Previous studies have shown reduced volume in the hippocampus, which controls memory, learning and emotion, is associated with neurological and psychological disorders including dementia and depression.

The Canadian team said if action gamers have less grey matter, as people who rely on the caudate nucleus normally do, then they may be more prone to mental illness.

In the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, they tested 26 players and 33 non players who wore skull caps recording their brainwaves and eye movements as they negotiated a virtual maze decorated with trees and mountains from which they had to retrieve objects. (Read more from “Study: Video Games Increase Risk of Mental Illness” HERE)

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Creepy Ads Use Litterbugs’ DNA to Shame Them Publicly

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Photo Credit: Wired Next time you’re about to toss a cigarette butt on the ground, consider this freaky fact: It takes less than a nanogram (or less than one billionth of the mass of a penny) of your dried saliva for scientists to construct a digital portrait that bears an uncanny resemblance to your very own face. For proof look to Hong Kong, where a recent ad campaign takes advantage of phenotyping, the prediction of physical appearance based on bits of DNA, to publicly shame people who have littered.

If you walk around the city, you’ll notice portraits of people who look both scarily realistic and yet totally fake. These techno-futuristic most-wanted signs are the work of ad agency Ogilvy for nonprofit Hong Kong Cleanup, which is attempting to curb Hong Kong’s trash problem with the threat of high-tech scarlet lettering. It’s an awful lot like the Stranger Visions project from artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who used a similar technique a couple years back to construct sculptural faces as a way to provoke conversation around what we should be using these biological tools for.

In the case of Hong Kong’s Face Of Litter campaign, the creative team teamed up with Parabon Nanolabs, a company out of Virginia that has developed a method to construct digital portraits from small traces of DNA. Parabon began developing this technology more than five years ago in tandem with the Department of Defense, mostly to use as a tool in criminal investigations.

Parabon’s technique draws on the growing wealth of information we have about the human genome. By analyzing saliva or blood, the company is able to make an educated prediction of what you might look like. Most forensic work uses DNA to create a fingerprint, or a series of data points that will give a two-dimensional look at an individual that can be matched to pre-existing DNA samples. “We’re interested in using DNA as a blueprint,” explains Steven Armentrout, founder of Parabon. “We read the genetic code.” (Read more from “Creepy Ads Use Litterbugs’ DNA to Shame Them Publicly” HERE)

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Arms Control Advocates Rally to Prevent Development of Killer Robots

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6wOS4.AuSt.91The British aircraft manufacturer BAE Systems promotes its Taranis drone with a video that focuses on the dramatic: images of the swept-wing stealth aircraft flitting through the clouds, dramatic background music and thunder, men in chemical suits amid futuristic control rooms.

Its mission is multifaceted, the website claims: conducting sustained surveillance, marking targets, gathering intelligence, deterring adversaries and carrying out strikes in hostile territory.

And, the manufacturer notes, in large type: “Controlled by a human operator.” With a photo of the man who was at the controls as the stealth drone made its inaugural test flight.

In the world of high-tech robotics, the idea that a human operator would be considered a selling point seems anachronistic. But a growing movement of diplomats, arms control campaigners and international humanitarian law experts have begun pressing the United Nations to move now to ban what they fear is the next step in mankind’s pursuit of ways to destroy his fellow man: killer robots that can be programmed in advance to recognize a target, then pull the trigger on their own without any human intervention.

It wouldn’t take much, said Thomas Nash, director of the London-based advocacy group Article 36, to turn the next generation of Taranis aircraft into autonomous killers with the addition of some software. (Read more from “Arms Control Advocates Rally to Prevent Development of Killer Robots” HERE)

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Frequent Tanner Shares Grisly Skin-Cancer Selfie

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Photo Credit: Facebook

Photo Credit: Facebook

Tawny Willoughby grew up in small-town Kentucky, where, she said, it was normal to use a tanning bed four or five times a week.

“I had my own personal tanning bed in my home, and so did a lot of my friends growing up. … Everyone tanned,” Willoughby said. “I didn’t really even think about the future or skin cancer at the time.”

After one of her classmates in nursing school was diagnosed with melanoma, Willoughby made her first dermatology appointment at age 21. Sure enough, she had skin cancer.

Photo Credit: Facebook

Photo Credit: Facebook

Now 27, Willoughby says she has had basal cell carcinoma five times and squamous cell carcinoma once. She goes to the dermatologist every six to 12 months and usually has a cancerous piece of skin removed at each checkup.

She’s become a cautionary tale about the hazards of tanning beds, thanks to a selfie she posted last month on Facebook. The grisly image, taken after one of her cancer treatments, shows her face covered with bloody scabs and blisters. It’s since been shared almost 50,000 times. (Read more from “Frequent Tanner Shares Grisly Skin-Cancer Selfie” HERE)

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A Liberal Studied Conservative Brains and Made a Discovery He Never Expected

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Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Photo Credit: Western Journalism

Generally articles about conservatism vs liberalism basically say that one rules and one drools, depending on who the author voted for in 2012. In this case, it was written by someone at Salon.com, who admitted that this is a problem for the left. We give credit where it’s due here.

He’s also selling a book called “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” because his publisher rejected the original titles, “Arbitrary Liberal Buzzwords that Don’t Really Mean Anything.”

Some choice nuggets:

47 percent of conservative Republicans said they were “very happy,” compared with just 28 percent of liberal Democrats…this result could not simply be attributed to the seemingly obvious cause: differences in income levels between the left and the right. Rather, for every income group in the study, conservative Republicans were happier than Democrats.

One striking finding is that conservatives tend to be less neurotic — or, more emotionally stable — than liberals. It is part of the inherent definition of neuroticism that one is less happy — more fretful, more depressed.

That means they probably make more friends and feel more comfortable in groups and communities. They’re more sociable. Once again, this probably helps confer a subjective sense of greater happiness.

To the author’s credit, he didn’t try to make excuses for this. It was more of just sounding the alarm for his leftist followers to stop being so miserable all the time.

Conservatism vs Liberalism: conservatives can haz cupcakes… and liberals can’t enjoy cupcakes when there’s so much alleged income “inequality.” (See “A Liberal Studied Conservative Brains and Made a Discovery He Never Expected”, originally posted HERE)

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