A rare frog that survived floods and drought in the Upper Murray is increasing in numbers.
The Booroolong frog is listed as threatened in Victoria and its numbers are declining in New South Wales.
But a survey has revealed its habitat has recovered and numbers are on the rise — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The company to which Australia outsources operations of its Do Not Call Register has been fined for making telemarketing calls to numbers listed on the Register (not The Register, which we italicise).
Australia implemented a Do Not Call Register in 2007, after consumer anger about telemarketing moved the federal government to act. If consumers choose to be listed on the Register, telemarketers must not call 30 days after the date of enrolment. The Register was well-received by consumers and the direct marketing industry, with the latter accepting it as an inevitability.
A contract to operate the service was awarded to Service Stream Solutions, a listed company the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) says still operates the service today.
ACMA also says a 10 week campaign arranging installations for energy-saving products
conducted by Service Stream used numbers listed on the Register, because the list wasn’t re-checked against the Register
.
That’s a silly thing to do, because ACMA suggests calling lists should be checked every 30 days — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Vinyl wall decals are removable but not re-positionable. Also available via Amazon — via Stickerbrand
— via Youtube
A strong family history of seizures could increase the chances of having severe migraines, says a study in Epilepsia journal.
Scientists from Columbia University, New York, analysed 500 families containing two or more close relatives with epilepsy.
Their findings could mean that genes exist that cause both epilepsy and migraine.
Epilepsy Action said it could lead to targeted treatments — via redwolf.newsvine.com
today we have the beautiful and neglected and dilapidated los angeles theatre — via moby los angeles architecture
Citizen! New opportunities await you in the exciting field of Friction Welding… At Home! Yes — you too can enjoy the countless wonders of permanently attaching some plastic things to other plastic things — at will. Amaze your friends! In this video you will learn how to make your own friction welder, and I demonstrate just how amazingly strong a spin-weld is. Have fun, be safe, and enjoy! — via Youtube
The building developer Meriton stands to lose a caretaker contract at World Square worth more than $2 million a year after a dramatic falling out with tenants.
The owners’ corporation of the World Tower residential apartments at World Square has accused the builder of breach of contract over building defects and maintenance issues worth more than $1 million.
A Fairfax Media investigation has discovered the owners’ corporation has served Meriton, its building caretaker, with at least 15 official breach notices and formal complaints in the past two years.
Some of the breaches include fire safety defects and Meriton’s failure to provide security swipe card details amid concerns over overcrowding in the building.
Meriton awarded itself the building management contract for World Tower after it completed the development in 2004 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
William Shatner — aka Captain James Tiberius Kirk (also the porky lawyer from Boston Legal, depending on your age) — has been communicating with a Canadian astronaut stationed on the International Space Station.
Chris Hadfield, currently on board the ISS as a flight engineer and due to take over as mission commander after the current crew leaves in March, got a tweet from Shatner asking @Cmdr_Hadfield Are you tweeting from space? MBB.
(MBB stands for My best, Bill
, in case you’re wondering.)
Hadfield’s reply shows a more than casual interest in the tales of a younger Kirk and his fictional exploits across the universe:
@williamshatner Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we’re detecting signs of life on the surface.
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 3, 2013
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
This eight-fisted drinker is enjoying a refreshing fishtini. Hang him in your bar, patio, rec room, kitchen, man cave — wherever you entertain — so guests will know they’ve come to the right place for for a splash of their favourite libation — via Etsy
Totally blind mice have had their sight restored by injections of light-sensing cells into the eye, UK researchers report.
The team in Oxford said their studies closely resemble the treatments that would be needed in people with degenerative eye disease.
Similar results have already been achieved with night-blind mice.
Experts said the field was advancing rapidly, but there were still questions about the quality of vision restored.
Patients with retinitis pigmentosa gradually lose light-sensing cells from the retina and can become blind.
The research team, at the University of Oxford, used mice with a complete lack of light-sensing photoreceptor cells in their retinas. The mice were unable to tell the difference between light and dark — via redwolf.newsvine.com
I made something instead: a crocheted octopus coffee cup cosy — via Twinkie Chan Blog
The body of an unidentified man recovered from the sea off north Wales 30 years ago will be exhumed this month in the hope that it can be returned to his family.
The exhumation, from an unmarked grave at Menai Bridge cemetery, on Anglesey, is part of a nnationwide attempt by police forces around Britain to put names to more than 1,100 unidentified bodies dating back to the 1950s.
The national Missing Persons Bureau, which is the driving force behind the work, has established a website containing images and identifying features of the individuals who have remained nameless for so many years, in the hope of closing some of the cases. The site is one of only a few such facilities in the world.
As well as 1,029 men and women, the site contains details of 105 babies in unmarked graves, unclaimed by families, sometimes for decades — via redwolf.newsvine.com
escape artist, originally uploaded by Barry Fackler.
The same week that a leaked video out of Steubenville, Ohio showed high school boys joking and laughing about an unconscious teenager in the next room who had just been raped — They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson!
— House Republicans let the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expire. They opposed an expanded version of the legislation that had increased protections for the LGBT community, immigrants and Native American women.
This week we’ve also seen mass protests in India after a woman was brutally gang raped and died from her injuries. American media covering the Indian protests have repeatedly referenced the sexist culture, reporting how misogyny runs rampant in India. The majority of mainstream coverage of what happened in Steubenville (primer), however, has made no such connection. In fact, the frequent refrain in discussions of Steubenville in comment threads is that these boys are sociopaths
, shameful anomalies. We’d rather think of them as monsters than hold ourselves accountable as a nation and tell the truth — these rapists are our sons — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The Italian central bank has suspended all bank card payments in the Vatican, citing its failure to implement fully anti-money laundering legislation, Italian media report.
The Holy See was required to meet European Union safeguards on finances by the start of 2013.
Its failure means tourists will have to pay cash at its museums and shops.
A Vatican spokesman said contacts were under way and the suspension of bank card payments should be short-lived
.
Pope Benedict has promised greater transparency in Vatican finances and the operations of its bank, the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which has in the past been implicated in major money-laundering scandals — via redwolf.newsvine.com
It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.
Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no energy at all, and higher temperatures correspond to higher average energies.
However, by the 1950s, physicists working with more exotic systems began to realise that this isn’t always true: Technically, you read off the temperature of a system from a graph that plots the probabilities of its particles being found with certain energies. Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies. In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower, energies, the plot would flip over and the sign of the temperature would change from a positive to a negative absolute temperature, explains Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany — via redwolf.newsvine.com
— via Society6
Finnish artist Kaija Papu created this incredibly realistic looking sculpture of a police car from carved foam plastic covered in a hand-crocheted exterior — via MAKE
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