I brought my pencil!

Teacher attacked by ungrateful squirrel!



A Michigan teacher guiding students around the University of Michigan campus was attacked by an irate squirrel when she tried to help one of its young.

The teacher spotted the squirrels Thursday as she ushered her students through a campus tour, The Ann Arbor News reported Friday. She noticed the young squirrels were not in their nest and a crow was eyeing one that appeared to have been left behind.

The teacher, whose name was not reported, first tried to shoo the crow away from the squirrels and then to draw the mother's attention to the danger.

The mother squirrel instead turned on the teacher.

Diane Brown, a spokeswoman for the Detroit Public Schools, said the teacher fell while running back to the bus to get away from the angry squirrel. The animal bit her ankle, but the teacher was able to get up and escape.

source: http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2009/04/24/Teacher-attacked-by-ungrateful-squirrel/UPI-41171240616437/

addams groove fail!

please hammer dont hurt them.



George Fath moved to his mobile home in rural Steuben County two months ago. The previous owners left a lot of trash in the yard, so Fath was cleaning up Thursday afternoon. That's when he found a 22 caliber bullet in the yard. He didn't want his three young boys to get hurt from the bullet, so Fath decided to dispose of it.

"My hammer was outside so I took the bullet and put it on a rock and smacked it with the hammer," Fath said.

Fath wasn't expecting the bullet to fire.

"It went off and went into my belly and knocked me on my butt," Fath said.

"I smacked the bullet and fell down and blood came pouring out," Fath said. "I was hitting it to smash it. I didn't expect it to go bang."

"I wasn't thinking about it. It was the dumbest thing I ever did in my life. I suggest nobody do it," Fath said.

Fath said he'll never hit a bullet with a hammer again.

source: http://www.wane.com/dpp/news/local_wane_steuben_county_man_fires_bullet_with_hammer_200904241621

happy fucking earth day!

Today is Earth Day, a holiday created to honor the planet and to raise the consciousness of man’s effect on the environment. Philadelphia has a very strong tie to this day. One of its native sons, Ira Einhorn, was a co-founder of the environmentalist jubilee.

But Mr. Einhorn has another line on his resume. In addition to being a environmental guru, he is the Unicorn Killer.



While a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Einhorn dated a Bryn Mawr College graduate by the name of Holly Maddux. When the affair ended in 1977, Mr. Einhorn went into a jealous rage and murdered her.

He concealed his crime for 18 months by stuffing Ms. Maddux’s body in a trunk that he kept in his apartment. The foul odor of the decomposing corpse coming from Mr. Einhorn’s Powelton Village apartment caused neighbors to complain. In 1979, police found the trunk stored in a closet in Mr. Einhorn’s apartment.

But there is a little mentioned irony about the Einhorn saga.

Ira Einhorn was arrested for murder March 28, 1979, the day the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident occurred. Ira Einhorn, environmentalist, was charged with murder during the same period as one of the greatest environmental accidents in United States history.

But the real irony is that more people died in the apartment of Ira Einhorn, co-founder of Earth Day than at Three Mile Island. The environmentalist killed more people than the so-called environmental disaster.

source: http://www.thebulletin.us/articles/2009/04/22/top_stories/doc49eebca59bdb3868756314.txt

eye leech!

A LEECH which had attached itself to an Australian woman's eyeball has been removed by doctors who had to think "outside the box''.

The 66-year-old woman was gardening in the backyard of her suburban Sydney home in March last year, when she accidentally flicked some moist soil and the leech into her left eye.

Her husband then watched in alarm as the leech wriggled its way over her cornea, headed for safety and a feed via the eye's mass of delicate blood vessels.



``It was tucked up underneath her upper eyelid,'' says emergency doctor Toby Fogg who helped to remove the blood-sucking critter.

"Our little fellow started off at about half a centimetre and by the time we removed it it was about 2cm long - it had quite a good lunch.''

"In the several months subsequent we had two more (people) come in with leeches on the eye, just by pure coincidence,'' he says.

source: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25359996-29277,00.html

knut!

Zoo keepers saved the life of a German woman who jumped into a polar bear enclosure at Berlin Zoo by pushing away of one of the animals when it attacked her.



The keepers' bravery was praised after they dragged the 32-year-old out of a moat for the animals. They had to shove the animal out of the way after one of four polar bears dived into the water and attacked her, inflicting serious bites to her legs and arms.

Knut, the zoo's baby bear that became an international celebrity in 2007 after it was hand-reared by a keeper, was in the enclosure at the time. Germany went polar bear crazy after the birth of the cute animal.

Police did not say why the woman jumped into the enclosure. She had to climb over a fence, a line of prickly hedges and a wall to get in.

She suffered serious injuries after being bitten on her arms and legs.

"The woman has proved herself to be careless by jumping into the enclosure," a police spokesman said "Logic tells us that polar bears will do this type of thing in this situation."

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/5142098/Woman-survives-polar-bear-mauling-at-Berlin-Zoo.html

but was it a fixed gear?

A cyclist was knocked out after being hit by a corpse thrown from a speeding car.



Student Wu Dan, 16, was riding home when the incident happened.

His uncle Yun Tsui said: "A car passed and a package came flying out the door. It had a dead woman inside. My nephew was very upset."

Police believe she was the victim of a car accident and was being dumped by the driver who had hit her in Dongyang, eastern China..

source: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/2009/04/09/student-hit-by-corpse-thrown-from-speeding-car-86908-21265014/

outbreak!

Monkeys escape Oregon research center; 4 still at large.



Employees from the Oregon National Primate Research Center were attempting to capture four monkeys that escaped after their cage was cleaned Friday afternoon.

The monkeys (which are Macaques, or snow monkeys) were last seen along the south edge of the university's west campus in Beaverton - an area near a light-rail line, said Jim Newman, an Oregon Health & Science University spokesman. The monkeys are too fast to catch, so caretakers were trying to lure them into cages baited with apples.

Threatened monkeys will bite and their saliva could contain a virus that harms people.



The escape occurred when a caretaker cleaned an outdoor cage that housed nine monkeys. The worker forgot to put the lock back on, and the monkeys figured out how to slide the door open, Newman said. Four monkeys were quickly captured, one was caught in the evening and four remain on the loose.

OHSU did not alert the public until the monkeys ventured near the rail line. A 10-foot chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire, serves as a barrier between the campus and the train.

The primate center affiliated with OHSU has long been criticized by animal-rights groups, who say the research monkeys are mistreated. Newman said OHSU does not believe the employee who forgot to lock the cage is an activist who got a job at the primate center.

Newman said the escapees are breeding monkeys and no tests were being conducted on them.

source: http://www.komonews.com/news/local/42471287.html

honey murder!

Australian man murdered beekeeper for his honey



An Australian man was convicted Wednesday of murdering a fellow beekeeper so he could steal 40,000 Australian dollars ($27,880) worth of honey and has been sentenced to life in prison.

A jury with the Brisbane Supreme Court took less than a day to convict Donald Robert Alcock, 34, of the 2007 murder of beekeeper Anthony Ross Knight in Woodford, a rural town in Queensland state.

Prosecutors told the court that Alcock was is desperate financial trouble in May 2007 when he entered the 41-year-old Knight's home, shot him in the back while he was sleeping and stole tubs of his honey to sell.

The jury was told that Alcock loaded the largest tubs of honey onto his truck and drove them to a honey distributor but was pinned under a 3,000-pound (1,400 kilogram) tub while unloading the shipment and had to be taken to the hospital.

Knight's decomposing body was found on June 4, 2007.

Alcock _ who pleaded not guilty in court _ confessed to police that he meant to hurt Knight but not kill him, prosecutors said.

"If Tony was home I was going to have to maim him or hurt him bad if I was going to knock off the honey," Alcock said in a video confession recorded by police. "I thought (the bullet) would go straight through him actually."

source: http://www.baynews9.com/content/36/2009/3/25/452484.html

the brain that wouldnt die!

Scientists have created an "artificial brain" they believe could help them discover a cure for diseases like Alzheimer's.



Researchers at Aston University in Birmingham took cells from a cancerous tumour and "reprogrammed" them to create those identical to the human nervous system.

Michael Coleman, who led the research, funded by the Humane Research Trust, which advocates alternatives to animal testing, said: "What we have developed is effectively an artificial brain capable of processing thought at the most basic level.

It is closer to the human brain than anything else around.

"What we've made is the most basic unit of the human brain. They're processing, they're connecting, they're communicating."

To keep the cells alive, researchers feed them every two days by injecting them with nutrients and minerals.

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/5050106/Scientists-create-artificial-brain-to-help-fight-Alzheimers.html

time out!

Scientists have made a breakthrough in understanding how HIV spreads through the human body after filming the process for the first time ever.



Researchers found that the virus is transferred from infected cells to healthy ones in a previously unknown way.

It is hoped that the discovery will help researchers create a vaccine to combat the virus, which has led to the deaths of more than 25 million people.



The study was made possible after experts created a molecular clone of infectious HIV and inserted a protein into its genetic code which glows green when exposed to blue light.

This allowed scientists to see the cells on digital video, and capture the way HIV-infected T-cells interact with uninfected ones.

They noted that when an infected cell came into contact with a healthy one, a bridge was created between them, called a virological synapse.

Researchers were then able to observe the fluorescent green viral particles moving towards the synapse and into the healthy cell.

The US study has broken new ground by revealing that it is the synapse through which the viral proteins are gathered and moved into uninfected cells.

The new video footage indicates that HIV avoids recognition by being directly transferred between cells.

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/5058131/Scientists-film-HIV-spreading-for-first-time.html