Snails are able to survive intact after being eaten by birds, according to scientists.
Japanese white-eyes on the island of Hahajima, Japan feast on tiny land snails.
Researchers found that 15% of the snails eaten survived digestion and were found alive in the birds’ droppings.
This evidence suggests that bird predation could be a key factor in how snail populations spread
Food giant Nestle has taken a big step towards expanding its operations in China, one of the world’s biggest consumer markets.
It has agreed to buy a 60% stake in the Chinese sweets and snack maker, Hsu Fu Chi International, for $1.7bn (£1bn) — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you’ve always wanted to play angry birds in real life, just get a sling shot and then crochet some birds and pigs like Flickr user deadcraft did — via Neatorama
A stunning piece of modernism in London SE26, this 1930s Berthold Lubetkin-designed Six Pillars modernist house, which is on the market for a not-inconsiderable price.
The price of £1,750,000 will probably mean a Lotto win is required to pick it up. But on the bright side, it’s actually on at a reduced price –- down £150,000 from its original selling price — via WowHaus
AN image processing system that obscures the position from which photographs are taken could help protestors in repressive regimes escape arrest — and give journalists plausible deniability
over the provenance of leaked photos — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The phone-hacking scandal that is mushrooming in Britain, with arrests, skullduggery and influence peddling, would be a delicious story for The News of the World if it were not about the newspaper itself. Instead, the hunter became the hunted, and last Thursday Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation summarily slid the 168-year-old News of the World under a double-decker bus. Its final issue was Sunday — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Here is a challenge to News Limited CEO John Hartigan. Publish the News Limited Code of Professional Conduct. Not only internally, where it can be found buried on the staff intranet, but publicly, clearly linked from all News Limited’s mastheads and available in hard copy to anyone who asks.
And if you don’t publish it, Crikey will — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A nuclear reactor in Japan was forced to shut down due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish near the power plant.
A similar incident was also reported recently in Israel when millions of jellyfish clogged down the sea-water cooling system of the power plant.
Such massive invasions of the species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends — via redwolf.newsvine.com
VISA last week closed a donation channel to WikiLeaks after a payment processor briefly accepted money transfers to the anti-secrecy site — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sacked News of the World staff appear to have fired a parting shot at their former editor Rebekah Brooks, disguising mocking messages in the crossword of the tabloid’s final edition.
Brooks, now the chief executive of News International, reportedly brought in two loyal proofreaders to sanitise Sunday’s final edition of any jibes directed at her following the newspaper’s spectacular demise during the phone hacking scandal.
But they failed to detect the not-so-cryptic clues that appear to savage her in the crosswords on page 47 — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of BSkyB appeared to be dead in the water last night after proof emerged that executives at his British newspaper empire mounted a cover-up of the full scale of alleged criminal wrongdoing at the News of the World.
In another extraordinary day in the phone-hacking scandal, Downing Street sources confirmed that Government lawyers were drawing up a strategy to halt the £9bn deal which looked a certainty only a week ago — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Electronics retailer Dick Smith has taken its New Zealand homepage offline after apparently being hit by a glitch that allowed customers to shop for free.
Twitter users wrote on Monday morning that purchasers using the retailer’s site, dicksmith.co.nz, were told to pay only the cost for the delivery with no charge for the goods ordered.
The Australian-based company sells electronics, including big plasma TVs, laptop computers and iPhones, worth thousands of dollars — via redwolf.newsvine.com
As the Australian and New Zealand governments look to crack down on global roaming rorts, Vodafone has unveiled new global roaming data packs for travellers headed to our Trans-Tasman neighbours.
The packs, aimed at reducing the high costs associated with checking email or accessing the internet through an Australian Vodafone phone while in New Zealand, come in four varieties that last one month each: $25 for 100 megabytes (MB); $50 for 300MB; $100 for 1 gigabytes(GB); and $200 for 2GB — via redwolf.newsvine.com
There’s an interesting new timepiece under development at Hublot — for now I will call it the Hublot Antikythera
, based upon an ancient Greek device of the same name — via Perpetuelle.com Watch Blog
Police have been handed internal News International memos from 2007 that appear to acknowledge that the practice of phone hacking was more widespread than previously thought and that police were paid for helping with stories.
The memos – which were written in the wake of the jailing of the News of the World’s former royal editor Clive Goodman and the newspaper’s £100,000-a-year private investigator Glenn Mulcaire — allegedly show that the pair were not the only News International employees implicated in phone hacking. The memos have now been passed to police investigating the matter — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Sandra Rawline, 52, said she was told to come to work wearing younger, fancy suits
and lots of jewellery. And she had to dye that hair — her boss even offered to do the colouring.
When she refused, the Houston Chronicle reports, she was fired within a week and replaced by a woman 10 years her junior. She has sued for discrimination in the Houston courts — via The Guardian
A bioluminescent mushroom that was first found in 1840 and later forgotten has been rediscovered and reclassified by a team at San Francisco State University.
British botanist George Gardner first described the glowing mushroom — which shines so brightly that you can read by it — on a trip to Brazil in 1840. He sent it to the Kew Herbarium where it was named agaricus gardneri. The species was not seen again until 2009. Now a team led by Dennis Desjardin have collected new samples of the forgotten mushroom and reclassified it as neonothopanus gardneri after careful examination of the mushroom’s anatomy, physiology and genetic pedigree. The team hopes that by studying the Brazilian mushroom and its other bioluminescent cousins, they will be able to shed light on how and why some fungi glow — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Florida is warm in the winter, and it’s an easy trailer-truck ride to most of the country. But Florida is also about the worst possible place to grow tomatoes. Both the climate and the soil are completely unsuitable, Estabrook says, so farmers must drench their fields in pesticides and fertilizers to have any hope of a crop.
On top of that, the tomatoes you see in those supermarkets have been bred for high yields and durability, not flavor. As a farmer once said — an honest farmer — ‘I don’t get paid a cent for flavor,’
Estabrook says.
There’s an even darker side to the modern commercial tomato, too, he says. Up until recently, workers on many of Florida’s vast industrial tomato farms were basically slaves. People being bought and sold like animals,
Estabrook says. People being shackled in chains. People being beaten for either not working hard enough, fast enough, or being too weak or sick to work. People actually being shot and killed for trying to escape. That sounds like 1850’s slavery to me, and that, in fact, is going on, or has gone on
— via redwolf.newsvine.com
Bob Lutz, the former Vice Chairman of General Motors, is the most famous also-ran in the auto business. In the course of his 47-year rampage through the industry, he’s been within swiping range of the brass ring at Ford, BMW, Chrysler and, most recently, GM, but he’s never landed the top gig. It’s because he made the cars too well
, he says. It might also have something to do with the fact that Maximum Bob, who could double as a character on Mad Men, is less an éminence grise than a pithy self-promoter who has a tendency to go off corporate message. That said, his new book, Car Guys vs Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business, has a message worth hearing. To get the US economy growing again, Lutz says, we need to fire the MBAs and let engineers run the show — via redwolf.newsvine.com
If you had to list the builders at the top of today’s custom scene, most observers would put Deus in the top five. A lot of this reputation comes from transforming Yamaha’s SR series—a machine that’s not officially sold in Australia, but is well-suited to Sydney’s rutted streets. So we bring you the latest Deus SR, nicknamed Oddjob — via Bike EXIF
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