News

Anti-matter above us

“A satellite dispatched to scout out high-energy gamma rays streaming from the cosmos found that not only were flashes of gamma rays oddly close to home, but they were also powerful enough to annihilate matter,” Irene Klotz reports for the Discovery Channel. “The radiation stemmed from lightning storms on Earth. Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Telescope recorded 17 gamma ray flashes coming from Earth that matched up with lightning tracked by the World Wide Lightning Location Network, operated out of the University of Washington in Seattle. Previous gamma ray telescopes had detected the terrestrial gamma radiation, which was a huge surprise when it was first discovered in 1994. … Fermi's observations of terrestrial gamma rays have deepened the mystery. At least one of the flashes contain an unmistakable pattern of positrons – the antimatter counterpart of electrons.”

What, no tip?

When college students Leslie Pope, 22, and John Wagner, 24, attempted to leave a restaurant in Bethlehem, Pa., in October without paying the mandatory 18-per-cent gratuity, they were arrested and handcuffed by police. The couple, in a party of eight, felt their service was so slow and shoddy – they had to fetch their own cutlery and napkins, for instance – that they refused to pay the more than $16 (U.S.) tip on their bill. They had been dining during the Lehigh Pub's happy hour. Their waitress was observed outside, smoking. The group waited for more than an hour for their food. The owner called the police, who cited them for theft of services. Less than a week after the story was widely reported, Northampton County's district attorney recommended the charges be dropped.

Sources: The (Easton, Pa.) Express-Times, The Daily Telegraph

A dark, stormy memoir

The online magazine Slate has chosen what it considers the worst sentence in Sarah Palin's recently published memoir Going Rogue . From page 102: “As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on.”

Lucky the sheep

“The world's oldest sheep has died in Australia at the age of 23 – twice the normal life expectancy – after succumbing to a record heat wave,” BBC New reports. “Lucky hit the Guinness record in 2007 and was a celebrity in her hometown of Lake Bolac, near Melbourne.” The ewe died on the farm where she had been found as a lamb, her owner Delrae Westgarth said. Lucky was hand-reared from birth after being abandoned by her mother. She went on to have 35 offspring of her own. “She used to come and howl at the back gate, torment the dogs and that sort of thing,” Ms. Westgarth told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. Lucky succumbed to a weeklong heat wave, as temperatures soared above 30 C.

Not drowned

“A two-day police hunt for a drowned man was called off when the 24-year-old turned up at the crime scene looking for his clothes,” Ananova.com reports. “Maciej Nowak had disappeared after being dumped by his girlfriend and was last seen drinking heavily into the early hours in Urzedow, Poland. And when his clothes were found the next morning by a lake, friends feared he had killed himself. But just as police divers were about to call in a submarine, Nowak appeared and asked what all the fuss was about.” He told police he couldn't remember why he had taken his clothes off because he was drunk. The naked man woke up at a nearby house where he was taken in and sobered up. His girlfriend, Kasia Lubelska, 23, said she wouldn't be getting back together with him. “It's stupid things like this that caused me to dump him,” she said. “How can I allow someone like him to be the father of my children?”

Hobbie-J the clever

“Scientists say they have created the world's cleverest rat, called Hobbie-J, by modifying a single gene in a technique they believe could also be used to boost human brainpower,” David Harrison writes for The Daily Telegraph. “Hobbie-J, named after a Chinese cartoon character, can remember objects for three times longer than other rats and is better at finding its way through mazes. The rat, when it was an embryo, was injected with genetic material to boost the NR2B gene which controls memory.” Dr. Joe Tsien, who led the experiment at the Medical College of Georgia, said: “Hobbie-J can remember information for longer. It's the equivalent of me giving you a telephone number and somehow you remembering it for an hour.” It is hoped the gene enhancement could one day be used in a drug treatment for human brain disorders.

Thought du jour

“There are only two kinds of people who fail: Those who listen to nobody, and … those who listen to everybody.”

– Thomas M. Beshere Jr. in The Official Explanations