Street fighting
"There has been traffic chaos in two Paris suburbs after their feuding mayors declared the same busy road one-way, but in opposite directions," BBC News reports. "Patrick Balkany, the conservative mayor of Levallois-Perret, initially made the D909 one-way to reduce the amount of commuter traffic through his district. But Gilles Catoire, the Socialist mayor of neighbouring Clichy-la-Garenne, said this increased congestion in his area. He made his section of the road one-way in the opposite direction. With the contradictory road signs in place, the unsurprising result was gridlock, prompting the deployment of municipal and national police to direct traffic away from the area."
Earth's calmest spot
"The search for the best observatory site in the world has led to the discovery of what is thought to be the coldest, driest, calmest place on Earth - a place where no human is thought to have ever set foot," LiveScience reports. A U.S.-Australian research team has pinpointed a site, known simply as Ridge A, that is 4,050 metres high up on the Antarctic Plateau on the continent at the bottom of the world. A study revealed that Ridge A has an average winter temperature of -70 C and an extremely low amount of water in the air. "It's so calm that there's almost no wind or weather there at all," said study leader Will Saunders, of the Anglo-Australian Observatory in Australia. "The astronomical images taken at Ridge A should be at least three times sharper than at the best sites currently used by astronomers. ... a modestly sized telescope there would be as powerful as the largest telescopes anywhere else on Earth."
Source: MSNBC.com
E-mail rudeness
Vicki Walker was forced out of her job as an accountant at a health-care company in Auckland, N.Z., after colleagues complained her e-mails were too "shouty" and confrontational. A tribunal heard that she spread disharmony among her co-workers by sending missives with entire sentences in capital letters. She also behaved "provocatively" by highlighting key phrases in bold or red, according to her employer, ProCare Health. The panel found that, while she had caused friction in her office, her conduct did not amount to grounds for dismissal. Her firm had no e-mail style guide, meaning employees could not be certain about what communications were deemed unacceptable. Ms. Walker was awarded $12,600 and plans to appeal for further compensation.
Sources: The New Zealand Herald, The Daily Telegraph
Bad nail day?
"If you are having a bad fingernail day, blame the weather," Paul Simons writes in The Times of London. "When the air is dry, fingernails become more brittle and easy to break, and in very humid air nails become more flexible and liable to shearing and splitting - which seems to explain why it's easier to cut nails after a bath or shower. According to scientists at the University of Manchester, when the air is reasonably humid, ideally at 55 per cent relative humidity, nails are at their strongest and resist damage such as splitting and shearing."
Dinosaurs in colour
"It is a question that has baffled the greatest scientific minds - and those of the average seven-year-old: What colour were dinosaurs?" Andrew Johnson writes in The Independent on Sunday. "Now a dramatic breakthrough in fossil examination has sparked a race to discover an answer that may satisfy the scientific community as well as anxious crayon wielders. A research team at Yale University believe they have established a technique which can identify the colour of fossilized feathers and fur. Preliminary results suggest that the true colours of dinosaurs may soon be revealed. A team headed by Prof. Derek Briggs, director of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, discovered that tiny, fossilized structures previously believed to be the remains of bacteria were in fact carbon deposits called melanosomes, which indicate the colour pattern of modern birds' feathers."
Soaring and surfing
"According to a report published by the Climate Group, a think tank based in London, computers, printers, mobile phones and the widgets that accompany them account for the emission of 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide around the world in 2007," The Economist reports. "That is about 2 per cent of the estimated total of emissions from human activity. And that is the same as the aviation industry's contribution. According to the report, about a quarter of the emissions in question are generated by the manufacture of computers and so forth. The rest come from their use."
Thought du jour
"Keeping up with the Joneses was a full-time job with my mother and father. It was not until many years later when I lived alone that I realized how much cheaper it was to drag the Joneses down to my level."
- Quentin Crisp (1908-99), British author and raconteur
