(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
Baa, humbug, I say!"(blah, blah, blah, health insurance company) ain't cheap. With a high deductible we still have to cough up $760 a month. (It's like having to make two car payments every month, but you don't get the cars.)"You should read the whole thing at The Smirking Chimp.
The 'bullet holes' in this tusk areMammoth tusks show up meteorite showerMay I recommend that you take a reinforced umbrella if you venture outside on Thursday night. See related story here about the Geminids.
Fossils could provide a new gold mine for micrometeorite hunters.
Rex Dalton
Bullet-like pieces of what is thought to be an ancient meteorite shower have been found embedded in mammoth tusks and bison bone. The discovery of the 2–5 millimetre holes left by meteorites opens a window into a impact event thought to have happened over Alaska and Russia tens of thousands of years ago. And it could provide a whole new way to chart impacts from space.
The fragments, found in seven mammoth tusks and the skull and horns of a Siberian bison, match the geochemical composition of iron meteorites. "We think that the micrometeorites came from an air-burst of a meteor 30,000 to 34,000 years ago," says Richard Firestone, co-author of the study and a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "We think a wave of meteoric material sprayed the region."
Looks like ol' Trent may be in trouble.BreauxLott.com registered 6 weeks before Lott gave notice.
Last month, after Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) announced that he was retiring before the end of the year, it was widely speculated that Lott may be considering a lobbying partnership with former senator John Breaux. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, any pre-negotiating between Lott and Breaux would violate Senate ethics rules. The Hill reports today Lott’s son, Chet, “secured the rights to the domain name” breauxlott.com “six weeks before his father announced his retirement,” raising further questions about whether Lott broke Senate rules.
Pope offers 'shortcut' through purgatoryWould Virgin Airlines be okay?
Mike Aivaz and Jason Rhyne
Published: Friday December 7, 2007
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Pope Benedict XVI has decreed that Catholics can cut short their future purgatory stays by visiting a holy shrine in Lourdes, France, a site where believers say the Virgin Mary appeared to a shephardess in 1858. Catholic pilgrims who visit Lourdes from now through next year, which will mark the 150th anniversary of the miracle claim, will receive an "indulgence" from the Pope, which he says will speed the trip to heaven.
"The door for indulgences is not always open, though, and for years after the Vatican Council reforms of the 1960s, they were rarely offered -- until 2000, when Pope John Paul II started using them to attract pilgrims to World Youth Day," reports the New York Times' Mike Nizza. "The pilgrimage, which must be made in the next year, can be accomplished using Vatican charter flights that began over the summer."
For Catholics not in a position to jaunt off to France, prayer at other select sites during a ten-day span in February may also do the trick. According to the BBC, the Pope indicated that "believers who prayed at places of worship dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes from 2-11 February next year -- or who were unable to make the journey -- would also be able to receive indulgences."
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REUTERS/Han Jae-hoEmployees of Everland amusement park dressed in Santa Claus outfits take a Santa Claus qualifying examination during a promotional event for the Christmas holiday season at the amusement park in Yongin, about 50 km (31 miles) south of Seoul, December 5, 2007. About 30 employees took part in a one-day course at its Santa Claus school and will serve customers as Santa Clauses.
from http://www.ozf5.com/The inaugural flight of Emirates' new nonstop service between Dubai and Houston touched down here Monday, directly linking the two energy centers.I guess KBR and Halliburton got tired of having to make connections in enemy territory like NY.
At the same time, word circulated that another Middle Eastern carrier, Qatar Airways, may be flying into Houston.
Natural gas-rich Qatar's national airline will start flights to Houston by mid-2008, the airline's chief executive officer, Akbar al-Baker, was quoted as saying in a story in the Gulf Times.
This story is from the AP via Pravda.The Japanese conducted a research to find out that young chimps have a better short-term memory than human adults.
That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
"No one can imagine that chimpanzees young chimpanzees at the age of 5 have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.
