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[obituary]

A farmer in southern Lebanon has dug up what might be the heaviest potato in the world.

"This giant weighs 11.3 kilos (24.9 pounds)," Khalil Semhat told the AFP news agency at his farm near Tyre, 85 kilometres (50 miles) south of Beirut.

"I've been working the land since I was a boy, and it's the first time I've seen anything like it."

Mr Semhat, 56, said he had to ask for help from a friend to get the huge vegetable out of the ground.

He insisted that he had used no fertilizer or other chemicals to produce it.

Mr Semhat said he hoped his potato will be recognised as the heaviest potato in the world.

The current world record, as recorded in the Guinness Book of Records, is held by K Sloan of the Isle of Man in Britain for a potato weighing a mere 3.5 kg (7 lb 13 oz).

2008 is the International Year of the Potato, a project sponsored by the United Nations which aims to focus attention on the importance of the vegetable in providing food security and alleviating poverty. l

[obituary]

A full moon has occurred closer to the Earth than it has done at any time for the past 15 years.

The Moon's elliptical orbit means its distance from the Earth is not constant.

It was a little over 350,000km away as it passed over the northern hemisphere, about 30,000km closer than usual.

Astronomers said the moon would appear brighter and larger than usual, but the sky in the UK was almost completely covered by cloud.

Closest path

Friday's full moon was predicted to appear up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full moons this year, according to Nasa.

The Moon's orbit is elliptical, meaning it does not follow a circular but rather an oval path.

It has reached the point where this oval orbit is nearest to the Earth.

"It's only every few years that a full moon happens to coincide with the part of the Moon's orbit when its closest to the Earth," said Marek Kukula, an astronomer at the UK's Royal Observatory.

The moon appears largest as it rises and sets, but this is a psychological illusion, Dr Kukula said.

"When it's close to the horizon, our brain interprets it as being bigger than it actually is, this is called the moon illusion," he said.

"The size may be striking when it's near the horizon," said Robert Massey of the UK Royal Astronomical Society.

However, he cautioned against expecting too much.

"The Moon may be brighter and may appear somewhat larger, but it's really quite hard for the eye to notice the difference; the eye will compensate for the extra brightness, it's not like going from night to day," said Dr Massey.

The Moon's brightness varies throughout its annual cycle, during the mid-winter in the northern hemisphere it can appear brighter simply because it is higher in the sky. l

[unartig]

Monday, December 15, 2008


eBay has banned a man from selling his soul

A musician fed up with his life was today barred from selling his soul to the highest bidder
Dante Knoxx, 24, offered the "used" item for a starting bid of £25,000.50 or a buy it now price of £700,000 on the internet auction site eBay
But eBay pulled the listing today with about two hours to go and no bids because it breached one of the firm's policies

You cannot sell anything that is not physical," said Mr Knoxx. "That includes ghosts, souls and spirits which is funny.
"I have been refunded but I had 200 people watching it, I'm really disappointed by that. "I had lots of emails asking if I was serious and religious groups telling me I couldn't do that, others wanted to talk about my soul.
"I had a lot of interest but no actual bidders which is a real shame." The Arts Institute graduate decided to try to sell his soul after a lack of creative jobs in his home town of Bournemouth, Dorset.
"I'm a highly creative person, but creativity is not without its drawbacks," he said in the listing.
"Unfortunately where I live there are hardly any jobs to keep a creative person like myself employed in anything other than boring, mundane office jobs."
Mr Knoxx was planning to use the money to get his experimental music group, Paradigm, which he created with his friend Zakk Altair, up and running.
He quit his "shoddy job" as a laptop repair technician and said: "I leave it to you, the denizens of Earth, to purchase my actual soul and in return allow me to acquire some tasty capital."
The auction included a legal contract entitling the new soul's owner to a percentage of Mr Knoxx's income for the rest of his life, with a guaranteed minimum of £1,000 per year.
Another clause entitled the owner to 10% of any intellectual works of Paradigm.
He also pledged to write a full account of the soul's life within three years and the owner of his soul would also be entitled to 10% of his estate in his will.
Other clauses in the contract included sending the owner an annual report of his soul, and a birthday card on Mr Knoxx's birthday, as well as a promise to plant three trees a year.
A final clause also stated Mr Knoxx could buy back his soul for £100,000,000

[unartig]

Monday, December 15, 2008


What the supernatural figure may have looked like



A burglar who broke into a house in Malaysia claims he was held captive by a 'supernatural figure' for three days without food and water, according to news reports.
Police official Abdul Marlik Hakim Johar told The Star newspaper the house's owners found the 36-year-old man fatigued and dehydrated when they returned from vacation Thursday.
He says they called an ambulance to take him to a hospital

.The man told police that every time he tried to escape, a 'supernatural figure' shoved him to the ground
Abdul Marlik could not immediately be reached and other police officials declined to comment

[unartig]

Monday, December 15, 2008




A city council in California has imposed a curfew on its own mayor, after they got fed up with her working late at the City Hall
Mayor Blanca Figueroa regularly works until the small hours of the morning. Members of the council, who say they have safety concerns about her night-owl ways, have now banned her from staying at the office after 11pm.
The mayor is less than happy about this, calling the curfew 'petty'

The mayor of the town, 14 miles east of Los Angeles, insists that she needs to work into the night because her days are taken up by meetings, and she has an overflowing inbox of correspondence from residents

[unartig]

Friday, December 12, 2008



. You'd better wipe that ;-) off your face - or you might be forced to pay up
A Russian businessman has trademarked the emoticon - the combination of punctuation marks used to convey a wink in text messages and e-mail.
The man who now own the rights to the typographic wink is Oleg Teterin, president of the mobile ad company Superfone. He said on Thursday he doesn't plan on tracking down individual users, following the decision by the federal patent agency

'I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder,' he said in comments to NTV.
Companies will be sent legal warnings if they use the symbol without his permission, he said.
'Legal use will be possible after buying an annual license from us,' he was quoted by Kommersant as saying. 'It won't cost that much - tens of thousands of dollars.' Bargain.
He also said since other similar emoticons - :-) or or - resemble the one he has trademarked, use of those symbols could also fall under his ownership.
Other Russian Internet entrepreneurs reacted to the effort predictably, with >:-0 and :-(
'Imagine the next wise-guy who trademarks the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet and then says anyone who uses the Russian alphabet has to send him money. It's absurd,' Alexander Manis, the director of a broadband internet and mobile company, told NTV.
Maksim Mashkov, owner of an Internet cafe and bookstore, said he doubted the trademark's legal basis since the symbol has existed in the public domain for years.
Indeed, Russia media said Teterin wasn't even the first person to try to trademark the symbol in Russia. Kommersant said a St. Petersburg court in 2005 agreed with an appeal from the German corporation Siemens, which was sued by a Russian man claiming he held the trademark.
Scott Fahlman, a professor at the Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, is widely credited with innovating the three keystrokes - a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis - as a smiley face, 25 years ago. He simultaneously ivented the :-( as well

[unartig]

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Raging rodents: A Cape Ground squirrel kicks a female neighbour where the sun doesn’t – or rather does – shine

.They're mean, moody and know how to fight. Each other, mainly
With moves straight out of a martial arts movie, they don't hold back when it comes to beating up their mates.
And, being more Squirrel Nutjob then Squirrel Nutkin, they're a family whom Beatrix Potter would have steered well clear of

The creatures were pictured by British photographer David Slater in Etosha National Park, Namibia.
He describes the vegetarian beasts – Cape Ground squirrels – as 'adorable' despite their behaviour.

Group pose, complete with steely eyes and a strangely human set of expressions

'They're very inquisitive animals and I soon discovered that, if I put the camera on the floor, they couldn't resist an inspection,' said Mr Slater, of Coleford, Gloucestershire.
'Such close encounters with wildlife are what I really enjoy.
'I've often watched them from the car when in a game park and discovered a small family that had residence in a distant corner of a campsite.'

Crouching tiger, hidden squirrel: Actually, this is more WWE wrestling than Kung Fu

Unlike their British cousins, these squirrels are poor climbers and so live on or under the ground.
And, when not attacking one another, they like nothing better than using their tails as sun umbrellas or sunbathing with legs outstretched.

Spring into action: Another pair of squirrels take a giant leap for Tufty kind

[دل تنگم]

Astronomers have continued to cast their eyes to the heavens, with bigger and better telescopes and as much passion as ever this year, but some of the coolest findings of 2008 were right in our own backyard, or at least looked like they were.

Here are five favorite findings in astronomy for 2008:

1. Alien worlds

With the extrasolar planet tally now well above 300, astronomers seem to be on track for spotting another Earth (the astronomical jackpot) before long. Along the way this year, a jaw-dropping announcement came in November when two teams of astronomers reported they had snapped direct images of exoplanets.
Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, calls the images "the most spectacular thing in 2008."

"In my own professional opinion this is by far the most definitive picture of a planet ever taken," Marcy said during a telephone interview, referring to the direct image by the Hubble Space Telescope of the planet called Fomalhaut b.

The gold rush of exoplanet discoveries this year boils down to new techniques and observatories as well as energetic astronomers involved, Marcy said.

Some other highlights include: the least-massive planet, weighing in at just three times the mass of Earth; the hottest planet, with temperatures reaching about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit (2,200 degrees Celsius); and three so-called super-Earths orbiting a star.

Astronomers like Marcy predict the upcoming year will bring us even closer to detecting Earth's twin. For instance, NASA's Kepler mission is scheduled to launch in March with the goal of finding rocky planets about the size of Earth that orbit within the habitable zone of their host stars where liquid water and life might exist. Stay tuned.

2. Martian life?

The red planet has gotten celebrity treatment this past year, with the touchdown of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander in May, the continuing presence of the Mars Exploration Rover twins (Spirit and Opportunity) and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (which has imaged nearly 40 percent of the planet).

A major goal of such missions has been to find signs of past or present liquid water, the main ingredient for life. That's why Phoenix snagged a star-studded headline when the lander collected water ice near Mars' north pole this year.

Earlier in the year, Spirit found deposits of silica in Gusev Crater, suggesting, scientists said, that hot water once flowed through the Martian soil in hydrothermal vents. As on Earth, these hydrothermal vents may have once harbored life. The discovered silica could preserve fossils of such ancient life if it did indeed exist there.

And just in from MRO — evidence of carbonates on the Martian surface. Since carbonates can't survive in acidic, harsh conditions, the mineral finding suggests any microbes crawling around when Mars was wet could've enjoyed a cushy existence.

3. Dark energy

Scientists were hot on the trail this year of a mysterious "force" called dark energy that has been expanding the universe at an increasing pace and was only discovered about 10 years ago.

Though, admittedly, scientists say they are more than a few years away from solving the puzzler of what dark energy is, a new method this year confirmed its existence, suggesting the force is stifling the growth of galaxies in the universe. Basically, in an expanding universe dominated by dark energy, galaxies fly away from one another rather than mingle and merge.

These results also suggest dark energy takes the form of what Einstein called the cosmological constant — a term in Einstein's theory of general relativity that represents the possibility of empty space having a density and pressure associated with it.

4. Black hole antics

Black holes are so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape their gravitational grips. Though invisible, astronomers have inferred the presence of the dark behemoths from their effects on nearby objects. And this year, it seems, all the crazies came out of their cosmic closets.

Take the fastest spinning black hole, found to whirl around at speeds approaching the speed of light.

And when it comes to obesity, one black hole could've gobbled up 18 billion suns. This giant would dwarf the smallest black hole found this year, weighing in at about 3.8 times the mass of our sun and spanning just 15 miles (24 km) in diameter.

Researchers also found this year that some supermassive black holes, which reside at the centers of many or all galaxies, spew out giant bubbles from the tips of their jets. (As material falls into the gravitational clutches of a black hole, the energy can be spit out as jets of radiation and high-speed particles.) The bubbles ultimately pop, spilling their gaseous guts. Turns out, the hot gas keeps the black hole and its galaxy from ballooning to mega sizes.

Black holes can also take the form of "masked fugitive" Computer simulations revealed that when two black holes merge, the energy produced can kick the newly merged black hole clear out of its galaxy.

Also, for the first time this year, scientists detected such a rogue black hole racing along at 5,900,000 mph (2,650 kilometers per second).

5. Solving Mercury mysteries

More than half of our solar system's smallest planet (Pluto once took this honor), Mercury, had remained a mystery until this year. On Jan. 14, NASA's MESSENGER probe made its first flyby of Mercury, beginning a mission to image the entire planet.
From the get-go, the probe sent back intriguing images, including clear evidence for volcanoes. Images of the Caloris basin showed hints of lava flows and the presence of a shield volcano larger than the state of Delaware, with gently sloping sides.

And Mercury is indeed shrinking as its iron-rich core slowly cools. Scientists had speculated this much from images taken during the Mariner 10 mission in 1974. But MESSENGER images showed more faults than did Mariner 10, suggesting the strain from the planet's contraction was at least one-third greater than originally thought.

More to come: The thousands of images and other data collected by MESSENGER could also shed light on other Mercury mysteries, including the planet's relatively giant core, which makes up about two-thirds of the planet's mass. One idea is that huge impacts hundreds of millions of years ago might have stripped the innermost planet of its original surface.

[unartig]

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Who's that girl? Hang on - pink car, blonde hair, wooden acting. Surely, that's got to be, er, Paris Hilton looking remarkably like Thunderbirds heroine Lady Penelope.

Swap the pink Rolls for a pink Bentley and a rich Brit who lives in her own mansion for a rich American and you have a dead ringer.

The hotel heiress, 27, was spotted making a late-night shopping stop in west Hollywood, where she spent two hours at an arcade trying on jewellery

[unartig]

by JO STEELE - Thursday, January 15, 2009


It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a Jane Austen fixation must be in want of a very tolerant husband.

We do: Denise and Stuart Vaughan

That was certainly the case when Denise and Stuart Vaughan got married in full period Pride and Prejudice costumes.
They dressed in the original outfits used in the BBC's TV production, which starred Colin Firth as Mr Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet

'It was like having my very own Mr Darcy - the vicar even said "Welcome Mr and Mrs Darcy",' said music teacher, Denise, 45, who met Stuart, 50, four years ago when they played husband and wife in a theatre show. 'This was my second marriage and I had already done the white meringue dress. I am a bit of a thespian and a huge fan of period dramas.
'I am convinced in my former life I was a housekeeper - it is my favourite era. I know the book back to front and found out about this shop in London which rents out the costumes - it was very economical.'
She added: 'Stuart sent me a text on the morning of the wedding to say 'Got outfit on - must love you!'"
The couple, who have three children each, wed at a Methodist church in their home town of Marple, in Stockport