A male Southern White Rhinoceros calf born on an unusually cold night at Florida’s White Oak Conservation Centre is now being hand-reared by the staff at New Mexico’s ABQ BioPark, thanks to a unique arrangement between the two facilities — via ZooBorns
Fabergé, the luxury jeweller famed for its encrusted eggs, is being taken over by London-listed miner Gemfields in a deal that values it at $142m (£89m).
Ian Harebottle, chief executive of Gemfields, said: This is a deal which will turn us into the leading coloured gemstones company in the world. By putting together our output of the highest-quality ethical gemstones with the Fabergé heritage and design skills, we can carve out a much larger and grander market space
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Multifaceted and stackable in a few different ways, simply wear the tentacle band or wear all three for a larger look. These rings are perfectly unconventional and distinct for an engagement/wedding band set. The delicate tentacle lovingly swirls around the reverse set Blue Sapphire — via Etsy
This Le Mans resto-mod comes from the Brooklyn-based workshop Moto Borgotaro, and they’ve done a fine job in accentuating the charm of the original — via Bike EXIF
The vertical loft was built in Rotterdam by Dutch architectural firm Shift. It was part of the restoration of an old, historical house in the middle of the city. Shift’s had the idea to replace the central house’s wall with a beautiful, minimalist three-story-high bookshelf that hides the building’s main structural element — via Gizmodo Australia
About once per decade, the medical profession takes a careful look back at Thailand’s plethora of penile amputations. The first great reckoning appeared in a 1983 issue of the American Journal of Surgery. Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam, by Kasian Bhanganada and four fellow physicians at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok, introduces the subject: It became fashionable in the decade after 1970 for the humiliated Thai wife to wait until her [philandering] husband fell asleep so that she could quickly sever his penis with a kitchen knife. A traditional Thai home is elevated on pilings and the windows are open to allow for ventilation. The area under the house is the home of the family pigs, chickens, and ducks. Thus, it is quite usual that an amputated penis is tossed out of an open window, where it may be captured by a duck.
The report explains, for readers in other countries: The Thai saying, ‘I better get home or the ducks will have something to eat,’ is therefore a common joke and immediately understood at all levels of society
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Swiss-based brand Techné has just unveiled the Merlin, a slim quartz watch with an oversized dial which offers outstanding legibility. Taking its inspiration from the earliest military timepieces, the Merlin is 38 mm wide and features a dial that is 21% wider than the average — via Watchuseek
Senator Patrick Leahy has abandoned his controversial proposal that would grant government agencies more surveillance power — including warrantless access to Americans’ e-mail accounts — than they possess under current law.
The Vermont Democrat said today on Twitter that he would “not support such an exception” for warrantless access. The remarks came a few hours after a CNET article was published this morning that disclosed the existence of the measure.
A vote on the proposal in the Senate Judiciary committee, which Leahy chairs, is scheduled for next Thursday. The amendments were due to be glued onto a substitute (PDF) to H.R. 2471, which the House of Representatives already has approved.
Leahy’s about-face comes in response to a deluge of criticism today, including the American Civil Liberties Union saying that warrants should be required, and the conservative group FreedomWorks launching a petition to Congress — with more than 2,300 messages sent so far — titled: Tell Congress: Stay Out of My Email!
A spokesman for the senator did not respond to questions today from CNET asking for clarification of what Leahy would support next week — via redwolf.newsvine.com
What may be this year’s most interesting bit of Hitchcockiana — certainly it’s the least expected — is available for viewing at www.filmpreservation.org, the website of the National Film Preservation Foundation.
It’s a 1924 English silent film, The White Shadow
, which was long thought lost. More accurately, it’s the film’s three first reels, lasting a little more than 40 minutes (the remainder of the film remains missing). The footage was found last year at the New Zealand Film Archive in canisters marked (Twin Sisters) with Betty Compson
. Compson is the film’s star. Some inspired sleuthing by the NFPF’s Leslie Anne Lewis revealed the film to be The White Shadow
.
What made this a big deal is that The White Shadow
is as close to being a Hitchcock film as a movie can get without actually qualifying. The director was Graham Cutts, a leading English filmmaker of the ’20s. With that name, he should have been an editor. Instead, it was Hitchcock who edited it. He also wrote the script, based on a novel by the English dramatist Michael Morton, and was assistant director and art director — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A woman in western Sweden who was arrested after police found skeletons in her apartment has now been charged for using the bones as sex toys, a hobby she claimed was motivated by an interest in history.
I have never heard of a case like this and neither have my colleagues, so I dare to say that this kind of case is quite uncommon,
prosecutor Kristina Ehrenborg-Staffas told The Local.
A 37-year-old woman, who was arrested in September, was formally charged on Tuesday at the Gothenburg District Court for the crime of violating the peace of the dead
(brott mot griftesfriden).
The prosecutor could not explain how the woman had managed to collect almost an entire skeleton, but explained that the human remains had been used in an “unethical” way.
In the confidential section of the investigation we have material which indicates she used them in sexual situations,
the prosecutor told the TT news agency — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Yamaha knows that if it ain’t broke, you don’t fix it. But the XJR1300 is also ripe for a makeover, so the Japanese factory called in the Wrenchmonkees. The result is MonkeeFist, the first in a series of Yard Built Specials
commissioned by Yamaha from leading custom builders — via Bike EXIF
The threat of flu looms large in the northern hemisphere as winter starts to set in. But getting a preventative shot might not be the best line of defence any more — because new research suggests a small dose of crystal meth might be effective too.
Researchers, from the National Health Research Institutes in Taiwan and the University of Regensburg in Germany, have been working together to investigate how methamphetamine interacts with different viral infections. Meth is a widely abused drug, and there’s a wealth of evidence that suggests chronic use can dramatically increase the risk of picking up viruses because it suppresses the immune response of the body.
The researchers guessed the same would be true for influenza, but, like all good scientists, they had to prove their hypothesis — so they set to testing it out. First, they took human lung cells and nurtured them in the lab before exposing some of them to cystal meth. They then exposed the cells to the H1N1 influenza virus.
What they observed surprised them. Instead of increasing the rate of development and spread of the virus, meth seems to reduce susceptibility to flu. The results are published in PLoS One — via redwolf.newsvine.com
This project [Madhav Joshi and Associates] is a co-ed residential school with a CBSE curriculum educating 240 students per year. It spreads over 10 Acres of land. The school has two parts; residential cluster and academic cluster. The residential cluster comprises of 10 dormitories, 5 studio apartments for warden, residence for the principal and student’s centre. The academic cluster consists of 14 classrooms, 3 laboratories, 2 teacher’s rooms and 2 toilet blocks. Catering Centre with dining hall and adequate service areas have been provided. Presently, the total construction area is 6200 sqm — via ArchDaily
Usherwood, in Abinger Hammer, near Dorking, Surrey, was designed in 1934 by Amyas Connell and Basil Ward, later to become the Connell Ward and Lucas Partnership. The name, incidentally, is down to the first owner. That was Tom Usherwood, a commercial artist and friend of one of the architects.
The house looks in need of some updating, but as this is grade II-listed, you will have to be sympathetic (which is no bad thing). If you want to put in a bid, the price is £595,000 — via WowHaus
If you’ve taken the time to make a gorgeous handmade gift, why not present it in handmade wrapping? Nicola, of Next to Nicx, shows you how she created a fleet of beautiful paper gift bags, photo by photo — via MAKE
A breakthrough new experimental treatment that uses nanoparticles covered with proteins to trick the immune system, managed to stop it attacking myelin and halt disease progression in mice with relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis (MS). The researchers say the approach may also be applicable to other auto-immune diseases such as asthma and type 1 diabetes.
Corresponding author Stephen Miller is the Judy Gugenheim Research Professor of Microbiology-Immunology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago in the US. He says in a statement:
We administered these particles to animals who have a disease very similar to relapsing remitting multiple sclerosis and stopped it in its tracks.
We prevented any future relapses for up to 100 days, which is the equivalent of several years in the life of an MS patient,
he adds — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Lotus Notes is no more and will henceforth be known as … drumroll please … IBM Notes.
Big Blue quietly let it be known the Lotus brand will disappear in the forthcoming version 9.0 of Notes and Domino, products that back in 1995 were so desirable it wrote a cheque for $US.3.52bn to acquire them.
That acquisition was literally a hold the front page event, as a price tag of $US.3.52bn was all-but-unheard-of in those far-off days, when Notes was the clear leader in a product category known as groupware
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
The BMW R80/7 was built by Luka Cimolini in his garage in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Luka’s original plan was to customize a Dnepr, but documentation issues put paid to that. So he snapped up a 1977 R80 in the UK and shipped it to eastern Europe — via Bike EXIF
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