Mind-reading toys could revolutionize play

SAN JOSE - A convincing twin of Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light saber.

But this is no chintzy Halloween costume. It’s a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user’s forehead and reads the brain’s electrical signals, then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the saber, which lights up when the user is concentrating. The player maintains focus by channeling thoughts on any fixed mental image, or thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky Inc. have big plans for brain wave-reading toys and video games. They say the simple Darth Vader game — a relatively crude biofeedback device cloaked in gimmicky garb — portends the coming of more sophisticated devices that could revolutionize the way people play...

--MSNBC

Giant snail!

Found at Neria's Whirl.

Genetic Discrimination Ban Clears House; Senate OK Expected

If legislation passed Wednesday by the House of Representatives becomes law, it will be illegal to deny a job or health insurance on the basis of a person's genetic makeup.

With more links drawn between genetic profiles and disease predispositions every day, supporters of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act say the bill will ease patients' worries of being singled out for faulty genes.

“GINA will do more than stamp out a new form of discrimination,” said Louise Slaughter (D-New York) who introduced the bill. “It will allow us to realize the tremendous potential of genetic research without jeopardizing one of the most fundamental privacies that can be imagined.”

Such discrimination is rare, but supporters of the bill worry that as genetic testing becomes common and scientists chart the complex links between genes and health, profiling might also increase...

Wired

Quake brings WWII PT boat up from ocean floor

Wreckage from a World War II torpedo boat was tossed up from the sea in the Solomon Islands after a powerful 8.1 earthquake hit the area in early April, an official said Friday.

Jay Waura of the National Disaster Management Office said the explosive-laden boat was exposed when reefs were pushed up three meters (10 feet) above sea level by the April 2 quake, which caused a devastating tsunami in the western Solomon Islands that killed 52 people.

The Solomons' coastline is still littered with decaying military wrecks from World War II, including the torpedo patrol boat commanded by U.S. President John F. Kennedy...

--CNN

Mammoth bones loom over Paris sale

For sale: a mammoth skeleton, a 150-kilogram meteorite and a kind of giant pearl formed in the stomachs of certain animals.

Christie's auction house in Paris is hosting an unusual auction of paleontological curiosities, including several prehistoric mammals. The sale takes place Monday.

Bidders interested in buying the star specimen — a 15,000-year-old Siberian mammoth dubbed "The President" — will need at least $199,000. And a lot of floor space: Tusks and all, it's 12.5 feet high and 16 feet long.

Skeletons of a 10,000-year-old, 13.5-foot-long rhinoceros and a 7.5-foot-high cave bear are also going under the hammer...

--USA Today

Pregnant cow runs riot across German city

A pregnant cow being chased by police and firefighters caused 25,000 euros (US$33,900) of damage on a three-hour rampage through the German city of Hanover.

Uschi escaped from a farm late Monday and became increasingly violent as she encountered shocked drivers and pedestrians in the city.

Pursued by the farmer, television camera crews and 30 police and firefighters, the Charolais cow lashed out at cars, benches, garden fences and whatever else got in her way during the 5-kilometer chase, authorities said...

--MSNBC

Two arrested for highway fistfight

State troopers in Minneapolis arrested two women engaged in a fistfight in the middle of rush hour traffic on a freeway.

The women had been riding in the same vehicle before getting out to fight in the center lane of Interstate 694 at during Wednesday's evening rush hour, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

A third person from their vehicle, a man, was not arrested...

--UPI

Drunk deposits horse in bank for night

A German man called on his bank for an unusual service when he was too tired and drunk to go home -- he bedded down there for the night with his horse.

The man, identified as Wolfgang H. by German media, went to sleep next to cash machines in the local branch of the Mittelbrandenburgische Sparkasse in Wiesenburg southwest of Berlin after unsaddling his horse Sammy and closing the door.

A spokeswoman for the bank said that aside from an undesirable deposit made by his horse inside the building, the 40-year-old account holder had not breached any house rules...

Hugh Grant arrested over "baked beans attack"

LONDON (Reuters) - Hugh Grant has been arrested and questioned by police after a photographer accused the actor of attacking him with a tub of baked beans.

Photographer Ian Whittaker told the Daily Star tabloid that he and Grant, 46, clashed near the home of the "Four Weddings and a Funeral" star.

Whittaker said Grant abused and kicked him on Tuesday before lobbing the beans. The paper printed photos of Grant with a plastic tub of food raised over his head.

Grant's lawyers Schillings said an incident had taken place and was now under investigation. His agent in the United States said he had no official statement at this stage and London representatives could not be immediately reached for comment...

--Reuters

Flagellation ritual exposes Filipinos to rabies

More than a hundred men in the Philippines may have contracted rabies after taking part in a self-flagellation ritual to mark Good Friday, doctors and local authorities said on Thursday.

A health alert was issued after a man who took part in the traditional ceremony – where participants slash their backs with knifes before flaying themselves with bamboo whips – died from the virus on 11 April.

Mario Morales, the mayor of Mabalacat in Pampanga province north of Manila, told local media that Eduardo Sese may have contaminated up to 100 people who shared knives to cut themselves. He was bitten by an infected dog in February 2007.

The government doctor in Pampanga, Maria Clara Aquino, said vaccines had been given to 103 people who could have been exposed...

--New Scientist

New 'super-Earth' found in space

Astronomers have found the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, a world which could have water running on its surface.

The planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra.

Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.

They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life...

--BBC News

Miss Mexico modifies dress after outcry

Miss Mexico is toning down her Miss Universe pageant dress — not because it’s too slinky or low-cut, but because its bullet-studded belt and images of hangings from a 1920s uprising have outraged Mexicans.

The floor-length dress is accented with crosses, scapulars and a sketch of a man facing a firing squad. Designers who helped select the dress from among 30 entries argued it represented the nation’s culture and history, especially since Mexico City is hosting the pageant in May.

Cut from a traditional natural cotton called manta, the dress depicts scenes from the 1926-1929 Cristero war, an uprising by Roman Catholic rebels against Mexico’s secular government, which was imposing fiercely anti-clerical laws. Tens of thousands of people died...

--MSNBC

Colombia truck crashes, spills cocaine

A truck loaded with cocaine flipped after taking a curve too fast, spilling nearly a ton of the drug across a Colombian highway.

Police said the drugs were hidden in the truck’s walls and roof, which ripped open Thursday when the vehicle overturned in Medellin, 155 miles north of the capital, Bogota.

The driver escaped injury but was quickly arrested...

--MSNBC

Woman Finds WWII Grenade in Potatoes

A woman in a town near Naples got an unwelcome surprise when she bought a sack of potatoes at a nearby market, put them into water to peel and discovered one of them was a hand grenade apparently left over from World War II.

Olga Mauriello had put the potatoes in a vat of water and had just begun peeling them Tuesday when she found the explosive, covered in dirt, police said Wednesday.

An alarmed Mauriello, 74, called neighbors, who in turn called police...

--ABC News

Sea lion attacks 13-year-old surfing off Australian coast

A sea lion leaped out of the sea and attacked a 13-year-old girl as she surfed behind a speedboat off Australia's west coast, a newspaper reported Sunday.

A marine scientist said the attack by the sea lion, which can grow to more than 880 pounds in weight but usually stay away from humans, was bizarre and that the sea lion may have been trying to play with the girl.

Ella Murphy had her jaw broken and lost three teeth after the sea lion attacked her on Friday as she was being towed on a surfboard behind a speedboat at Lancelin, a town 80 miles north of the Western Australia state capital of Perth, The Sunday Times newspaper reported...

--USA Today

Winnie the Pooh causes bomb scare

A man who went to a Missouri post office to pick up a novelty phone he ordered over the Internet was alarmed that the package was ticking; it subsequently created a bomb scare.

It turned out that the phone — shaped like Winnie the Pooh — had a feature the customer did not know about: An incoming call causes Winnie's head to spin, and the feature apparently had been activated during shipping.

The ticking that prompted evacuation of the Wright City post office Thursday morning was Winnie's head repeatedly hitting the side of the package, Missouri Highway Patrol spokeswoman Cpl. Julie Scerine said...

--USA Today

Hungarian motorway blocked by escaping rabbits

Hungary's busiest highway, connecting Budapest with the Austrian capital Vienna, was closed early on Monday after a truck carrying rabbits crashed, letting 5,000 of the animals loose on the road, police said...

--Reuters

3 Central American nations ban self-styled Antichrist

Three Central American governments have banned a man claiming to be the Antichrist from entering their countries, outraged by his inflammatory preaching against the Catholic Church and organized religion.

El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have banned Jose de Jesus Miranda, who heads a cult-like movement with sermons televised from Miami to dozens of mostly Latin American nations and wants to join followers at a rally next week in Guatemala.

A former heroin addict who was briefly imprisoned as a youth in his native Puerto Rico, Miranda, 60, talks openly in a video on his Web site about how he loved cocaine and dreamed of working in a Colombian drug lab.

He has the number 666 identifying the Antichrist tattooed on his arm but says he is Jesus Christ reborn on Earth, arguing Saint Paul's teachings show this is what Antichrist means...

--Reuters

Horses may be drugged for Stones gig

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Preparations to sedate as many as 300 horses stabled at Belgrade's racecourse to keep them calm during a Rolling Stones concert have enraged Serb animal lovers who are lobbying to have the gig moved to another venue.

The concert is expected to draw more than 100,000 people to the Hippodrome, Belgrade's largest fenced space. The horses will be only a few metres from the stage.

"Horses differ, the same as people. Some are more nervous, more skittish," said hostler Jovanka Prelic. "If they get too nervous or start to panic during the concert, they'll get sedatives"...

--Reuters

Semi driver checks on doughnuts, crashes

MINOT, N.D. - A semi driver whose truck rolled on its side, dumping a load of specialty sunflower seeds, says it happened when he tried to check on a couple of doughnuts.

Merv Bontrager of Milo said he looked away briefly from an off-ramp on which he was driving Tuesday morning and ended up rolling his rig on the southeast edge of Minot.

It seemed to happen in slow motion, he said.

"I just looked down briefly on the floor where I had thrown a couple of doughnuts I was going to eat later, to see where they had landed," Bontrager said...

--Yahoo! News

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Scientists claim radiation from handsets are to blame for mysterious 'colony collapse' of bees

It seems like the plot of a particularly far-fetched horror film. But some scientists suggest that our love of the mobile phone could cause massive food shortages, as the world's harvests fail.

They are putting forward the theory that radiation given off by mobile phones and other hi-tech gadgets is a possible answer to one of the more bizarre mysteries ever to happen in the natural world - the abrupt disappearance of the bees that pollinate crops. Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well.

The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up...

--The Independent

Creepy-crawly robot to mend a broken heart

A device that sounds like a 21st-century version of a medicinal leech may soon be set loose inside the chests of heart patients. Resembling a robotic caterpillar, it will crawl across the surface of their beating heart, delivering treatment without the need for major surgery.

The device, called HeartLander, can be inserted using minimally invasive keyhole surgery. Once in place, it will attach itself to the heart and begin inching its way across the outside of the organ, injecting drugs or attaching medical devices. In tests on live pigs, the HeartLander has fitted pacemaker leads and injected dye into the heart. This video shows the latest prototype creeping over the surface of a beating model heart (2.1MB, mpg format).

The 20-millimetre-long robot has two suckers for feet, each pierced with 20 holes connected to a vacuum line, which hold it onto the outside of the heart. By moving its two body segments back and forth relative to one another it can crawl across the heart at up to 18 centimetres per minute. This back-and-forth movement is generated by pushing and pulling wires that run back to motors outside the patient's body. The robot is being developed by Cameron Riviere and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania...

--New Scientist

Young whale found in New York harbor

NEW YORK - Marine biologists were standing watch on Tuesday over a young whale that lost its way in New York harbor and nearly wandered into a narrow waterway notorious for industrial pollution.

The animal, described as a juvenile minke whale about 15 feet long, was cruising around Gowanus Bay, the outlet from the mile-long Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. It appeared to be in good health and not distressed, said Kim Durham, rescue program director for the Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation.

The foundation, based in Riverhead, N.Y., specializes in cases involving whales, dolphins, seals and sea turtles.

Durham and other experts were dispatched to the scene after the whale was spotted early Tuesday. A television news helicopter videotaped it leaping out of the water, a behavioral trait common to whales of the baleen species...

--Yahoo! News

Drought uncovers Australia's drowned town

ADAMINABY, Australia (AFP) - Australia's worst drought in a century has uncovered a town deliberately flooded 50 years ago as part of a massive hydro-electricity scheme, stirring painful memories for former residents.

Adaminaby, a small farming town nestled in the Snowy Mountains on the border between New South Wales and Victoria states, was submerged under 30 metres (98.5 feet) of water in 1957 when the local valley was dammed to form the man-made Lake Eucumbene.

The settlement was never expected to be seen again but the severity of the drought has evaporated most of the lake, bringing it back to the surface.

"We couldn't believe it when the old streets started to reappear," said Leigh Stewart, a local history buff who grew up in the old town and once ran a shop there.

"It brought back a lot of memories, I can still see in my mind's eye how the town was," he adds, gesturing around the muddy wreckage of what was once his family home...

--Yahoo! News

Woman arrested for shoplifting blames crime on irritable bowel syndrome

A woman arrested for shoplifting has blamed the crime on irritable bowel syndrome, authorities said. Helen Gallo, 61, of Clearwater, was arrested Sunday after allegedly shoplifting from a Cape Coral grocery store, The Daily Breeze of Cape Coral reported.

Gallo reportedly told authorities that she could not wait in line because she has irritable bowel syndrome, according to the newspaper...

--ABC News

Runaway mouse delays flight

HANOI (Reuters) - A small white mouse running around a Boeing 777 delayed a Vietnam Airlines flight to Tokyo for more than fours, newspapers reported Monday.

A passenger saw the mouse on the aircraft, which had arrived in Hanoi from the central city of Danang at 10 p.m. Saturday and was scheduled to continue to Japan.

"Technicians were sent to seek and kill the mouse on the Boeing and this task lasted for over four hours," according to one report in the online newspaper VietnamNet www.vnn.vn.

The report and others in state-run newspapers said the passengers went to a hotel and luggage was removed during the search for the mouse...

--Reuters

90 year old 60-lb. rockfish caught in Alaska

A commercial fishing boat hauled in what may have been one of the oldest creatures in Alaska -- a giant rockfish estimated to be about a century old.

The 44-inch, 60-pound female shortraker rockfish was caught last month by the catcher-processor Kodiak Enterprise as it trawled for pollock 2,100 feet below the surface, south of the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea.

The Seattle-based vessel, owned by Trident Seafoods, pulled up an estimated 75 tons of pollock and 10 bright-orange rockfish.

Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle measured, photographed and documented the fish. They removed an ear bone, the otolith, which contains growth rings similar to rings in the trunks of trees.

They estimate the rockfish was 90 to 115 years old...

--CNN

Border cops recover 1,000 stolen wedding gowns

U.S. border police found 1,000 wedding gowns stolen from a cancer charity and crammed into a truck trying to get into Mexico, federal authorities said on Tuesday.

The donated dresses were on their way to Los Angeles to a fundraiser for the Making Memories Breast Cancer Foundation in November when they were stolen in Scottsdale, Arizona, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said.

Inspectors in southern Arizona recovered the dresses late last week when they inspected a tractor trailer that had been denied entry to Nogales, Mexico, by Mexican customs officials...

--Reuters

Mystery cat takes regular bus to the shops

Bus drivers have nicknamed a white cat Macavity after it has started using the No 331 several mornings a week.

The feline, which has a purple collar, gets onto the busy Walsall to Wolverhampton bus at the same stop most mornings - he then jumps off at the next stop 400m down the road, near a fish and chip shop.

The cat was nicknamed Macavity after the mystery cat in T.S Elliot's poem. He gets on the bus in front of a row of 1950s semi-detached houses and jumps off at a row of shops down the road which include a fish and chip shop...

--Daily Mail

Experts open dolphin 'chat line' in Florida

A marine mammal rehabilitation facility opened a dolphin "chat line" of sorts Saturday, hoping to teach a deaf dolphin's unborn calf to communicate.

Castaway, as the stranded Atlantic bottlenose dolphin is named, has been recovering at the Marine Mammal Conservancy since Jan. 30. A battery of tests has confirmed she is deaf.

Dolphins need to hear echoes of sounds they produce to find food, socialize and defend themselves against predators...

--ABC News

$17K found under old NJ slot machines

It's the casino equivalent of reaching under your couch cushions and finding a buck or so in loose change.

Only the take at the former Sands Casino Hotel topped $17,000 worth of coins that fell under or around slot machines over the past three decades.

The casino was closed last November and will be torn down later this year to make way for a new gambling hall. The 2,350 machines had not been moved in the 26 years the Sands operated in Atlantic City, so workers removing them expected to find some stray cash.

Just how much, however, was a surprise. It was $17,193.34, to be exact...

ABC News

Richards says father comment a joke

Keith Richards may never have met a drug he didn't like, but on Wednesday the Rolling Stones guitarist denied mixing his father's ashes with cocaine and snorting the ghoulish concoction.

The 63-year-old rocker caused an international uproar on Tuesday when newspaper New Musical Express quoted him as saying: "The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow ... . It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Richards, known for his death-defying appetite for drugs, said in a statement on his band's Web site, rollingstones.com, that "the complete story (was) lost in the usual slanting"...

Yahoo! News

Rare striped rabbit spotted in Indonesia

One of the world's rarest rabbits has been captured on camera in Indonesia's rainforests for only the third time ever, a leading conservation group said on Thursday.

The Sumatran striped rabbit -- a little over a foot long and chalk coloured with dark brown stripes -- is critically endangered and was last photographed in the Bukit Barisan Park in 2000, the World Conservation Society (WCF) said in a statement.

A programme manager at WCF's Indonesian office, Nick Brickle, said the rabbit was photographed in a forest in south Sumatra at the end of January.

"It is a nocturnal animal. Other than that, we do not know more about it," Brickle told Reuters, describing it as about 30 cm (12 inches) long and similar in size to a small cat...

Yahoo! News

Lost dog found four years later, 1,100 miles from home

A Boston terrier named Mickey who disappeared four years ago from his suburban Kansas City backyard was found in Montana and reunited with his owners this week.

Cher Jarosz and her daughter Kari Mitchell thought they had lost Mickey forever -- until they received a call from an animal shelter last week 1,100 miles away in Billings, Montana.

A microchip on Mickey helped the Billings Animal Shelter return him...

--CNN

Falling woman saved by pile of human waste

A Chinese woman survived a plunge from a sixth-floor balcony thanks to a convenient pile of excrement which broke her fall, local media said.

The accident happened when the woman was hanging out laundry on Monday in Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, the Kuaibao tabloid said on its Web site (www.kuaibao.net).

"Workers happened to be emptying the building's septic tank, which had not been tended for a long time and had regularly blocked sewage pipes," the newspaper said...

Reuters

Coyote captured in Loop to be set free

Animal wanders into downtown Quiznos

A coyote that wandered into a Loop sandwich shop and took a seat in the beverage cooler will be set free today.

The uninvited guest may have been looking for food when it wandered into the Quiznos sandwich shop on east Adams near Wabash. That sent all the customers out the restaurant's front door, which was apparently open because of the warm weather.

Animal control took the coyote away about 40 minutes later. The coyote will be released at the Flint Creek Wildlife Rehab Center near Barrington, a large, fenced-in area where he and other transplanted urban coyotes can roam the limited prairie -- without benefit of a nearby Quiznos...

--ABC7 Chicago

Monkey flees zoo, attacks bus passenger

MEXICO CITY - A spider monkey that escaped from a Mexico City zoo boarded a bus and attacked a passenger, Red Cross officials said Tuesday. The monkey got on the bus at about 11 p.m. Monday after escaping from the San Juan de Aragon Zoo, Red Cross spokesman Jair Martinez said. Zoo officials could not immediately be reached for comment.

The animal sat next to the bus driver for almost an hour as he drove through the city, and scratched and bit a 20-year-old female passenger when she tried to hold it, the Mexican news agency Notimex said...

Yahoo! News

Keith Richards admits snorting father's ashes

Keith Richards has acknowledged consuming a raft of illegal substances in his time, but this may top them all. In comments published Tuesday, the 63-year-old Rolling Stones guitarist said he had snorted his father's ashes mixed with cocaine.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father," Richards was quoted as saying by British music magazine NME.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," he said. "... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive"...

Yahoo! News

Rubber sidewalks flex their muscle in Poynette, Wisconsin

Environmentally Friendly Sidewalks Save Trees

Poynette, Wis. -- Village officials in Poynette are bouncing with pride with their groundbreaking move to save some of the city's oldest trees.

Tree-lined streets are majestic and beautiful, but they come at a cost, WISC-TV reported."What was happening was the roots further down were lifting the soil and that was lifting the concrete," said Poynette Village Commissioner Dennis Lynn.

It's a problem faced along many urban streets: older trees breaking through sidewalks and causing dangerous obstacles for walkers...

--WISC TV

Swan's true love waits at the docks

MUNSTER, March 31 (UPI) -- It looks like it will be another long summer for a swan smitten with a pedal boat in northern Germany.

The lovestruck swan known as Black Petra by the locals around Aasee was apparently "imprinted" with the boat, which is shaped like a swan, and spent last summer swooning after it to the delight of visitors.

Scientists said poor Petra apparently bonded to the first moving object she saw upon hatching, which turned out to be the bobbing boat rather than her mother...

--UPI