Chicken Little was right
"The sky is falling … sort of," says LiveScience. "Over the last 10 years, the height of clouds has been shrinking, according to new research. The time frame is short, but if future observations show that clouds are truly getting lower, it could have an important effect on global climate change. Clouds that are lower in the atmosphere would allow Earth to cool more efficiently, potentially offsetting some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. 'We don't know exactly what causes the cloud heights to lower,' study researcher Roger Davies of the University of Auckland in New Zealand said in a statement. 'But it must be due to a change in the circulation patterns that give rise to cloud formation at high altitude.' " The findings are published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Nigerian scammers profiled
Everyone will have received one: an e-mail from a mysterious stranger in Nigeria in possession of vast wealth and needing your bank account details, says the New Scientist. Joshua Oyeniyi Aransiola, a sociologist at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, spent six months earning the trust of these so-called Yahoo Boys and interviewed 40 of them. The interviews reveal they are usually undergraduates and regularly pay bribes to the police and even the organization tasked with stopping them. Perhaps more surprisingly, many use voodoo, too.
Drowned in regulations
"A [British]man who fell into a lake drowned after firefighters called to the scene said they could not enter the water if it was higher than ankle deep, for health and safety reasons, an inquest has been told," The Guardian reports. "Simon Burgess, a 41-year-old charity shop worker, died at Walpole Park, in Gosport, Hampshire, on March 10. He is believed to have had an epileptic seizure either before or after falling into the water while feeding swans. Witnesses raised the alarm, but the hearing was told on Tuesday that members of a fire crew refused to get to him because the water was more than ankle deep. Instead, they waited for a specialist water rescue team and Burgess was only taken out of the lake 28 minutes after the alarm was raised."
Plankton on the menu?
"Britain's wartime population would have been fed plankton by scientists under proposals to avert critical food shortages, newly discovered documents have disclosed," The Telegraph reports. "Plans were drawn up to harvest the microscopic creatures to sustain the country if food supplies were cut off during the Second World War. Secret letters between academics that proposed harvesting tonnes of protein-rich plankton from Scottish sea lochs have just been discovered. They claimed the waters were 'soup-like' in richness with nutritional material and that some types of plankton were quite 'tasty.'"
Mother dies, siblings feud
"A [death notice]printed in a Florida paper and spread across the Internet revealed a rift between the deceased's son and her other children," says United Press International. "Angelo 'A.J.' Anello, 63, wrote the obituary for his mother, Josie Anello, who died at the age of 93 [on]Feb. 11, and used the opportunity to take swipes at his siblings, The Tampa Bay Times, [in]St. Petersburg, Fla., reported Thursday. 'She is survived by her son, 'A.J.,' who loved and cared for her; daughter 'Ninfa,' who betrayed her trust, and son 'Peter' who broke her heart, reads the third line of the obituary, which was printed in the Tampa Tribune."
Road race is pranked
"Imagine enduring months of training for a half-marathon and crossing the finish line only to learn you might not have completed the entire race," says The Huffington Post. "That was the case for about 40 people participating in the Village Bakery Half Marathon in North Wales who were pointed in the wrong direction by misplaced signs, the BBC reports. Pranksters reportedly moved at least two signs meant to mark the race route for runners. As a result, only three of the first 15 runners to cross the finish line actually ran the full distance, according to Yahoo! Sports. The others came up about two miles too short, according to the BBC."
Thought du jour
"Tigers die and leave their skins; people die and leave their names."
- Japanese proverb