Breaking News Thread Version 2.0

[Krandall]

BERLIN (Reuters Life!) – A German pensioner who wanted to seal off the entrance to his cellar ended up bricking himself into it, a police spokesman told Reuters on Thursday.

The senior citizen from Jena told police he only became aware of the mistake once his handiwork was complete, which police described as "pretty stupid" in a statement.

After camping out in the cellar for several days he resolved to free himself by knocking down a wall, but chose to demolish his neighbor's wall rather than the one he had just put up.

The man had been at loggerheads with his neighbors for some time and they informed the police when they heard drilling noises. The police were waiting for the pensioner when he made his great escape and have now launched an enquiry.

[disco]

Christmas off to a bad start for the Peels family   

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7319825.html

9 Houstonians indicted after record PCP seizure

The largest seizure of the narcotic PCP in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration resulted in the arrest of nine Houston residents Wednesday for allegedly conspiring to distribute enough of the powerful psychedelic to get at least 28 million people high, according to expert estimates.

Agents seized a whopping 57 gallons of the drug, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

PCP, or Phencyclidine, is known on the streets as angel dust, super grass, killer weed and rocket fuel.

The seizure of so much PCP could signal the emergence of a huge new market for the drug, which was popular in some areas in the 1970s but keeps a far lower profile than cocaine, marijuana or other illegal substances, authorities said.

[disco]

W T F ! ! !

http://blogs.chron.com/momhouston/2010/12/researchers_find_legalizing_ch.html

Researchers find legalizing child porn may lead to fewer rates of child sex abuse

According to a study headed by Professor Milton Diamond, from the University of Hawaii, in countries where child porn has been legalized the rate of child sex abuse has fallen significantly.

Researchers focused on the Czech Republic, which went from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to a fairly relaxed environment when owning pornographic material became decriminalized in 1989. The study then looked at the number of rape, attempted rape, sexual assault and child sex abuse for 15 years during the ban and 18 years after it was lifted. They found a significant decrease in the number of reported cases of child sex abuse. The press release notes similar findings in Denmark and Japan when child pornography was no longer restricted.

[more in link]

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I'm sure the murder rate would go down too if you legalized it. 

[Spartan]

Umm definitely stupid...and the reason the rates are going down there is they are exporting them from that country now

[Colorado700R]

So........ Hefe is moving to the Czech Republic.....

[Peelz]

So........ Hefe is moving to the Czech Republic.....

no, thats where he came from. 

[rappyfreak]

Check it out:
http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2010/nov/HQ_M10-167_Astrobiology.html
MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-167


NASA Sets News Conference on Astrobiology Discovery; Science Journal Has Embargoed Details Until 2 p.m. EST On Dec. 2


WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

The news conference will be held at the NASA Headquarters auditorium at 300 E St. SW, in Washington. It will be broadcast live on NASA Television and streamed on the agency's website at http://www.nasa.gov.

Participants are:
-     Mary Voytek, director, Astrobiology Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington
-     Felisa Wolfe-Simon, NASA astrobiology research fellow, U.S. Geological Survey, Menlo Park, Calif.
-     Pamela Conrad, astrobiologist, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
-     Steven Benner, distinguished fellow, Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, Gainesville, Fla.
-     James Elser, professor, Arizona State University, Tempe


I hope it's not some lame ass news like they found some more rock formations that could maybe probably kinda look like fossilized unicellular organisms...

[Krandall]

There's lots of speculation based on the speakers, that it's more than that.

[Colorado700R]

Amazon dumped the controversial site WikiLeaks from its computer servers on Wednesday.

But WikiLeaks, which is known for publishing state secrets, apparently has found a new home for its files: A Cold War bunker, inside a Swedish mountain, that's been described as fit for a "James Bond" movie.

A company called Bahnhof is hosting the WikiLeaks site from a literal cave inside White Mountain, near Stockholm, Sweden, according to news reports from Forbes, The Associated Press, and the Norwegian news website VG Nett.

The MIT Technology Review, where we spotted this story, describes the situation this way:

"If Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is trying to turn himself into a Bond villain, he's succeeded: the ongoing distributed denial of service attack against Wikileaks has forced his minions to move the site to a fortified data center encased in a cold war-era, nuke-proof bunker encased in bedrock. Really."

Forbes has further details about the storage site:

"That data center will store Wikileaks' data 30 meters below ground inside a Cold-War-era nuclear bunker carved out of a large rock hill in downtown Stockholm. The server farm has a single entrance and is outfitted by half-meter thick metal doors and backup generators pulled from German submarines --fitting safeguards, perhaps."

There are YouTube videos about the bunker, photos on Flickr, and a page on Bahnhof's website dedicated to the White Mountain site. (You may have to translate that page from Swedish to figure it out, but there are photos there, too).

One video, from a group called Data Center Pulse, describes the center as one of the coolest on earth and "fit for a James Bond villain." A man who describes himself as Bahnhof's CEO in the video says that the inspiration for the center actually was "science fiction and James Bond movies."



Nuke Proof .......O RLY ?

[Colorado700R]

NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical

NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth.

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.

"The definition of life has just expanded," said Ed Weiler, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at the agency's Headquarters in Washington. "As we pursue our efforts to seek signs of life in the solar system, we have to think more broadly, more diversely and consider life as we do not know it."

This finding of an alternative biochemistry makeup will alter biology textbooks and expand the scope of the search for life beyond Earth. The research is published in this week's edition of Science Express.

Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.

Phosphorus is a central component of the energy-carrying molecule in all cells (adenosine triphosphate) and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes. Arsenic, which is chemically similar to phosphorus, is poisonous for most life on Earth. Arsenic disrupts metabolic pathways because chemically it behaves similarly to phosphate.

"We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new -- building parts of itself out of arsenic," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow in residence at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif., and the research team's lead scientist. "If something here on Earth can do something so unexpected, what else can life do that we haven't seen yet?"

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.

The key issue the researchers investigated was when the microbe was grown on arsenic did the arsenic actually became incorporated into the organisms' vital biochemical machinery, such as DNA, proteins and the cell membranes. A variety of sophisticated laboratory techniques was used to determine where the arsenic was incorporated.

The team chose to explore Mono Lake because of its unusual chemistry, especially its high salinity, high alkalinity, and high levels of arsenic. This chemistry is in part a result of Mono Lake's isolation from its sources of fresh water for 50 years.

The results of this study will inform ongoing research in many areas, including the study of Earth's evolution, organic chemistry, biogeochemical cycles, disease mitigation and Earth system research. These findings also will open up new frontiers in microbiology and other areas of research.

"The idea of alternative biochemistries for life is common in science fiction," said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. "Until now a life form using arsenic as a building block was only theoretical, but now we know such life exists in Mono Lake."

The research team included scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz., Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Penn., and the Stanford Synchroton Radiation Lightsource in Menlo Park, Calif.

NASA's Astrobiology Program in Washington contributed funding for the research through its Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology program and the NASA Astrobiology Institute. NASA's Astrobiology Program supports research into the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life on Earth.

[Peelz]

Christmas off to a bad start for the Peels family   

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/7319825.html

9 Houstonians indicted after record PCP seizure

The largest seizure of the narcotic PCP in the history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration resulted in the arrest of nine Houston residents Wednesday for allegedly conspiring to distribute enough of the powerful psychedelic to get at least 28 million people high, according to expert estimates.

Agents seized a whopping 57 gallons of the drug, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice.

PCP, or Phencyclidine, is known on the streets as angel dust, super grass, killer weed and rocket fuel.

The seizure of so much PCP could signal the emergence of a huge new market for the drug, which was popular in some areas in the 1970s but keeps a far lower profile than cocaine, marijuana or other illegal substances, authorities said.

haters

[Magz]

don't worry peels we got more operations going on............. :haptorrally:
cost of doing buisness buddy....... sacrafice the few for the success of the many.

[Colorado700R]

RoundHouse kicks to the face now officially legal in Texas!!!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/12/02/sot.chuck.norris.ranger.ktxa?hpt=T2

[Peelz]

RoundHouse kicks to the face now officially legal in Texas!!!

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2010/12/02/sot.chuck.norris.ranger.ktxa?hpt=T2

epic LOL!

send him over to Az to help them with their immigrant problem.

[Krandall]