Even the Weekly World News thinks Bush is an idiot

NEW WHITE HOUSE SHOCKER!
PRESIDENT TO NAME YODA HOMELAND SECURITY CHIEF
Bush refuses to change his mind even after learning Yoda isn't real

IN a bombshell revelation that shocked even his closest Republican supporters, President George W. Bush announced that his new director of Homeland Security would be Yoda, the famed Jedi master from the Star Wars films.

White House insiders reveal that Bush got the idea after watching the new Stars Wars DVD set he said Santa gave him for Christmas.
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one administration source tells Weekly World News that Cabinet members were shocked when Bush announced his decision. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly blurted out, "But Yoda doesn't exist!" Still, the President refused to budge. "Bush shot back, 'So what?,' " says the source. " 'I'm the president. If I say we're winning the war in Iraq, then we're winning it. If I say Saddam and Al Qaeda are linked, then they are. If I say we'll find weapons of mass destruction there, then we will -- eventually. Trust me on that one.' "

Adds the source, "As usual, Bush refused to change his mind even after learning that Yoda isn't real."

Instead, Bush told the Cabinet he was especially impressed with Yoda's 500-year track record in "fighting evildoers, like that Garth Vader guy."

He added, "And I'm particularly interested in his ability to sense fluctuations in The Force caused by evil acts. I see that ability to be an asset in predicting when and where our most vile enemies, like Osama Bin Laden, Abu al-Zarqawi and Michael Moore, will strike."

Even top political advisor Karl Rove tried to dissuade the President, pointing out that Yoda dies in Star Wars: Episode VI -- Return of the Jedi. But the President just clamped his hands over his ears and screamed, "Don't tell me what happens! I haven't seen that one yet."

Tasmanian Devil disease

In Tasmania, the Devil Now Faces Its Own Hell

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
May 31, 2005
New York Times

LAUNCESTON, Tasmania - Even by the brutish standards of Tasmanian devils, Rosie, Harry and Clyde have led a lamentable life.

A year ago, when the three were each the size of a sesame seed, they wriggled out of their mother's birth canal and undulated their way to her pouch. There, each locked onto a teat and grew like gangbusters.

But tragedy struck. Within months, their mother developed devil facial tumor disease - a mysterious malady that in the last three years has killed nearly half of all the world's devils, marsupials that are found only in Tasmania. Shortly after she died, the baby devils, grown to the size of tiny puppies, were found dangling from their mother's pouch, starving to death.
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Right now, wildlife experts are struggling to comprehend the nature of the fast moving epidemic. Moving at a rate of 6 to 10 miles a year, it is 100 percent fatal. Only the west coast, isolated by mountain ranges inhospitable to devils, is disease free. Nearly half of the estimated 150,000 devils in Tasmania are now dead.

Devil facial tumor disease is grotesque; the mother of Rosie and her brothers died when grotesque tumors ballooned out of her face and neck, choking off her ability to eat. It is also an extraordinary puzzle. Scientists do not understand its cause, mode of transmission, time from infection until the tumors appear, or potential to infect others.

Their current best guess breaks all the rules of modern biology. Scientists suspect that the disease is caused by a cancer cell that itself moves from one animal to another when they bite one another.
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Geoff King, who lures devils to his ranch in northwestern Tasmania for ecotourists to observe, said they lived solitary, nocturnal lives, coming together to devour carrion. Its bite is as strong as that of a dog four times its weight. "They are nature's cleanup crew," Mr. King said.

Females have lustrous black coats with a purple hue, white stripes on their rump or below the neck, exceptionally long luxurious whiskers and narrow pointy faces. When they get excited, their ears turn blood red. "They are beautiful," Mr. King said.

Males have similar markings along with big boxy heads and heavily scarred faces and rumps. A devil can eat a quarter of its body weight in one feeding. "They're as tough as bloody nails," Mr. King said.

Devils got their name from early European settlers who heard spine-chilling screams and thought that Satan was surely in the backyard. "Devils do make weird noises," Mr. King said. "When they first arrive at a carcass," he said, "they make a recognition signal - whorf? Are you there? Then they start hissing from the stomach. Growls turn to whines and flow into screeches. They sound like a groaning witch."

Devil sex turns up the volume. In March and April, males engage in vicious, blood-soaked combat, said Dr. Menna Jones, a wildlife biologist who also works in the environment department. Females select "big butch dudes," Dr. Jones said, and allow themselves to be dragged by the scruff of the neck into a burrow. There they scream and fight for several days, mating many times for hours at a time. At the end of such bouts, the male thrusts his sperm into the female every two minutes.

Three weeks later, the female gives birth to about 20 or 30 embryos that wiggle through a string of mucus that leads to her pouch, which has only four teats, Dr. Jones said. The first to arrive lock on and survive. All others perish.

By August the pouch gets crowded. When she hunts, the mother leaves her roly-poly little devils in a den. The young are weaned at nine months, emerging from the den in the fall as goofy teenagers. Mom departs.

After six years of scavenging, screeching and seeking mates, devils abruptly die, Dr. Jones said. They are one of the few species in the world with so-called catastrophic mortality. How and why they die this way is not known, she said.
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Tasmanians have always taken devils for granted, Mr. Mooney said. Few scientists ever bothered to study them. When the first animal with facial tumors was photographed, in 1996, he said, "people thought, eeew, that looks horrible, but it did not ring alarm bells."

After five more years scientists realized the disease was widespread, Mr. Mooney said. Later surveys show a devastating picture. Spread animal to animal, the disease is now endemic to two-thirds of the island, which is slightly smaller than West Virginia. The disease starts out as a raspberrylike lesion on the gums, palate or under the tongue, Dr. Jones said. Within months, tumors erupt around the mouth, neck and face. A few weeks later, they explode, weeping and oozing, pushing out teeth, eyes or noses, and sometimes invading the rest of the body. "It is a disgusting sight," Dr. Jones said. "Animals starve to death three to six months after the first signs of a tumor.

Here in Launceston, Dr. Stephen Pyecroft is spearheading the government's investigation into what is causing the disease. A virus seemed likely. But so far, Dr. Pyecroft said, every effort to identify a virus has come up empty-handed. A virus has not been ruled out, he added, but scientists are now entertaining other hypotheses.

Since Tasmania has widespread use of agricultural chemicals and pesticides, researchers are looking at 10 toxins to see if devil disease is associated with poisons that can cause tumors.

But the leading theory is that devil facial tumor disease is caused by a transmissible tumor cell, Dr. Pyecroft said. It goes like this: About a decade ago, a random mutation occurred in a single animal in a type of cell involved in hormonal regulation. This devil developed tumors on or near its face. When another devil bit into the tumor, it was infected with tumor cells. With time, tumor cells were passed around in the bloody fray of devil social life, spreading the disease.

In this hypothesis, tumor cells alone are the infectious agent. In nature, this is not supposed to happen, Dr. Pyecroft conceded. Healthy animals exposed to pathogens, including tumor cells, will normally mount an immune response to fight off the infection.

But genetically speaking, devils are virtual clones. With scant variation in their DNA - perhaps from a population bottleneck in the recent past - they may have nearly identical immune systems. Hence they cannot fight off the tumor cells.

Every tumor cell examined so far is the same in every animal, male and female, regardless of area of origin. The chromosomal rearrangements, presumably from the one random mutation, are identical.

Dr. Pyecroft said another disease offered support for the idea that tumor cells could be infectious. That disorder, canine transmissible venereal tumor disease, is passed among dogs during sex or when they lick and sniff infected tissue. The tumors are identical, suggesting that they are passed by contact.

The big difference is that the disease is not fatal in dogs. They mount an immune response and get over it.

Button-Battery Sized, Propane Fuel Cell for MP3 Players and Beyond

Hank Hill must be so proud!

New Propane-Burning Fuel Cell Could Energize a Future Generation of Small Electrical Devices

Engineers have created a propane-burning fuel cell that's almost as small as a watch battery, yet many times higher in power density. Led by Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology, the team reports in the June 9 issue of the journal Nature that two of the cells have sufficient power to drive an MP3 player. If commercialized, such a fuel cell would have the advantage of driving the MP3 player for far longer than the best lithium batteries available'.

'Fuel cells have been done on larger scales with hydrocarbon fuels, but small fuel cells are challenging because it's hard to keep them at the high temperatures required to get the hydrocarbon fuels to react,' Haile says. 'In a small device, the surface-to-volume ratio is large, and because heat is lost through the surface that is generated in the volume, you have to use a lot of insulation to keep the cell hot. Adding insulation takes away the size advantage.'

'The new technology tackles this problem by burning just a bit of the fuel to generate heat to maintain the fuel cell temperature.'

finally, the mysterious Starbucks logo explained.

I could never figure out what the Starbucks logo was. If she's a mermaid, why does it look like she's holding two fish she caught by their tails? Turns out, mermaids use to be depicted with two tails in place of their legs.

How the Starbucks Siren Became Less Naughty

The whole sex-symbol status of mermaids hinges on the question which part is 'woman' - upper or lower. 'The other type of mermaid' that hapless Fry was referring to would have problems attracting suitors, of course. And how do you do it with the normal type?

Wise mythologists came up with the answer, of course. And the answer is a two-tailed mermaid sometimes called a Melusine.

The book had an old engraving of a two-tailed mermaid. It reminded me of the Starbucks Siren, but back then I did not realize that the original Starbucks logo had a slightly altered version of that engraving in the original brown cigar band-shaped logo.
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The next, more familiar green iteration of the logo has a more attractive stylized siren. The chest is hidden, but the belly button is still there.
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...the current logo.... cropped the siren image so that only a hint of the tails is visible. I asked hourly partners at Starbucks and friends, and none of them could figure out what those things to the side of Siren's head were.

So really the Starbucks mermaid is holding her tails/legs wide open, giving everyone a nice view of her snatch!

Holographic movies show promise for medical, military applications

I want my HTV!

In a small research laboratory at UT Southwestern Medical Center, a grainy, red movie of circling fighter jets emerges from a table-top black box, while nearby, a video of a rotating human heart hangs suspended in a tank of gooey gel.

These images - the first true, three-dimensional, holographic movies - are the brainchild of Dr. Harold "Skip" Garner, professor of biochemistry and internal medicine at UT Southwestern.
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In the long term, Dr. Garner said, entertainment uses could include 3-D multiplayer games, theme park or advertising displays, and "Holo TV." He and his colleagues have worked with students in Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business to develop a tentative business plan that explores the possible commercialization of the technology, focusing on medical applications.
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Dr. Garner's holographic video system is based on complex optics principles, sophisticated computer programs, and a small computer chip covered with about a million tiny mirrors. He and his research team - Dr. Huebschman and computer programmer Bala Munjuluri - have published details of their system in several publications, including in the journal Optics Express in 2003. Dr. Garner's Web site contains technical details and sample holographic movies, at http://innovation.swmed.edu/research/instrumentation/res_inst_dev3d.html.

The heart of the holographic system is the digital light processing micro-mirror chip, made by Texas Instruments and currently used in television, video and movie projectors. Those devices incorporate a computer that processes an incoming digital signal by rapidly - several thousand times a second - changing the angle of each micro-mirror to reflect light from a regular light bulb. The resulting image is a two-dimensional video projected onto a screen.

One of Dr. Garner's innovations was to replace regular light with laser light. Such light is coherent, meaning it is made up of light of all one wavelength, with all light waves traveling "in phase" with one another. Light from a white light bulb comprises many different wavelengths that are out of phase.

Dr. Garner's system also requires a different kind of digital signal than those feeding into today's projection TV sets. His signal is a sequence of two-dimensional interference patterns, called interferograms, which can be generated either from scratch or from data gathered from 3-D imaging applications, such as sonograms, CAT scans, magnetic resonance imaging, radar, sonar or computer-aided drafting.

Rings of bone grown for couples

From BBC NEWS Science/Nature:

Each couple, selected from 180 volunteers across the UK, will have their wisdom teeth extracted at Guy's Hospital in London.

The eventual product will be a specially designed pair of rings made from a combination of traditional precious metals and the bone tissue of either partner.
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Often there are bits of bone left in the gap where a wisdom tooth attached itself to the jawbone. These segments are rich in osteoblasts - the cells which are responsible for forming bones.

'Basically, the material is a baked glass ceramic composite. It goes through a couple of processes and ends up as porous bioactive material which mimics the structure of bone,' said Mr Kerridge.

'We seed it with osteoblast, which are the bone cells. They grow into the structure and the material then becomes replaced with bone material.'