Protect Your Family Jewels
According to Mid-Day, a popular news service in Mumbai, a gang of thieving eunuchs are hypnotising unwitting housewives and relieving them of their valuables:
Asha Dilip Pandit, 55, was chatting with her daughter Shivali, 26, a teacher, when two eunuchs entered their home. Shivali gave them Rs 5 but the eunuchs refused to leave, while one of them asked for a glass of water. While Shivali was getting them water the other eunuch asked for tea.
One of the eunuchs followed Shivali into the kitchen. The other sat at the entrance of the house and told Asha that according to Vaastu Shastra, her entrance was in the wrong direction. This, she was told, was the main cause of suffering in the family.
The eunuch then asked for an empty glass, water and salt. They asked Asha and Shivali to watch the glass, and hypnotised them. They stole Asha’s mangalsutra and gold chain, Shivali’s gold ring and her father’s ring
“The eunuch entered my house at 10.45 am. We regained consciousness at 12.30 pm. We don’t remember anything that happened in between,” said Asha. They later managed to piece together the story after one of their neighbour’s told them that a eunuch was seen standing outside the house.On realising they were looted, the family registered an FIR at LT Marg police station. The incident apparently is a common one in the area.
“We have carried out several raids to trace the gang of eunuchs who are hypnotising people before looting them. We have carried out searches at Kamathipura, Tardeo, Mahim, Bandra, Colaba and Bhandup areas,” said a police officer.
We would like to remind our readers to guard their own valuables with renewed vigilance and to steer well clear of anybody making non-sequiterial requests for liquids and salts anywhere within their vicinity.
Source: Mid-Day
The Man Who Stole The Mona Lisa
August 21st 2011 marks the one hundred year anniversary of the theft of the Mona Lisa, by Leondardo da Vinci, from the Louvre in Paris.
The portrait was taken by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian man, who took the opportunity to relieve the four iron wall-pegs of their famous charge and walk out with it under his painters smock.
The theft was not noticed until the following day and it consequently remained missing for two years before it’s new owner unwittingly came forward.
The theft made international headlines at the time but has become largely forgotten in modern society. However, a new documentary feature entitled “The Missing Piece – The Truth Behind The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa” goes to great lengths, with the participation of Vincenzo’s now 84 year-old daughter Celestina, to uncover exactly what happened and why.
Screenings of the documentary are likely to be limited so if you manage to track it down make sure to share your views on it in the comments below.
Source: MonaLisaMissing.com
The Good Book?
Chances are that you may already be familiar with Penn & Teller, but what you mayn’t have heard yet is that Penn, the looming, bombastic ‘talkier’ half of the legendary magic duo has just released a book: ‘God, No!’
In it he tackles, you guessed it, issues of Faith from the perspective of a confirmed Atheist.
He’s currently doing Press duties to promote the publication, even going so far as to sit across a table from the delightful Piers Morgan who, in Penn’s own words;
“Seems he hadn’t read the book, and I had no idea what he was trying in the interview. Odd.”
You can see a snippet of that odd interview here, read a short essay that Penn’s penned for CNN giving a flavour of the book here and, if you’re ready to go the whole hog, you can buy the book here.
Do let us know if you’re going to get it, or have got it already, and what you think of it in the comments below!
South Korean Scientists Create Glowing Dog – pics
On Wednesday, Scientists from Seoul National University in South Korea announced that they have created a glowing dog while utilising a cloning technique designed to find cures for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Pictured is the team’s genetically modified female beagle, Tegon, which was born in 2009 and was found to glow in a fluorescent green colour while under ultraviolet light.After two years of testing, the research team has found that the glowing ability is triggered by a doxycycline antibiotic and can be turned on or off by adding or removing certain drugs to the dog’s food.
“The creation of Tegon opens new horizons since the gene injected to make the dog glow can be substituted with genes that trigger fatal human diseases,” explained lead researcher Lee Byeong-chun. He went on to state that humans and dogs have 268 common diseases, and that creating dogs with artificial symptoms could help in the treatment of these deadly diseases that affect humans.
Full story and pics at Toms Guide
Child Born with 34 Fingers and Toes Now a World Record Holder
Ten fingers. Ten toes. And another 14 tossed in for good measure. A one-year old boy in India is now a record holder as Guinness has recognized his 34 fingers and toes as the most belonging to anyone in the world.
This young man born with 34 fingers and toes set a Guinness World Record for most digits.
Akshat Saxena had seven fingers on each hand and 10 toes on each foot when he was born in India in 2010., a Guinness spokeswoman told The Huffington Post.
“I was so happy to see my baby as it was our first child,” his mother Amrita Saxena told NDTV. “But later, when I saw his fingers, I was shocked and surprised,” Doctors recently amputated the excess appendages in a series of surgeries and now Saxena has the typical five digits per limb, the Guinness spokeswoman said.
This prodigious polydactyl wasn’t born with thumbs, but doctors planned to create them with pieces of the extra fingers.
Via Hindustan Times
Man with roughly 50-75% of his brain missing works as civil servant, lives normal life
A man with an unusually tiny brain manages to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, which was caused by a fluid build-up in his skull.
Scans of the 44-year-old man’s brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue (see image, right).
“It is hard for me [to say] exactly the percentage of reduction of the brain, since we did not use software to measure its volume. But visually, it is more than a 50% to 75% reduction,” says Lionel Feuillet, a neurologist at the Mediterranean University in Marseille, France.
Feuillet and his colleagues describe the case of this patient in The Lancet. He is a married father of two children, and works as a civil servant.
The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg. When Feuillet’s staff took his medical history, they learned that, as an infant, he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus – water on the brain.
The shunt was removed when he was 14. But the researchers decided to check the condition of his brain using computed tomography (CT) scanning technology and another type of scan called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They were astonished to see “massive enlargement” of the lateral ventricles – usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.
Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled.
“The whole brain was reduced – frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes – on both left and right sides. These regions control motion, sensibility, language, vision, audition, and emotional and cognitive functions,” Feuillet told New Scientist.
Bill Gates’ advanced power reactor gets closer to reality.
Terrapower, a startup funded in part by Nathan Myhrvold and Bill Gates, is moving closer to building a new type of nuclear reactor called a traveling wave reactor that runs on an abundant form of uranium. The company sees it as a possible alternative to fusion reactors, which are also valued for their potential to produce power from a nearly inexhaustible source of fuel.
Work on Terrapower’s reactor design began in 2006. Since then, the company has changed its original design to make the reactor look more like a conventional one. The changes would make the reactor easier to engineer and build. The company has also calculated precise dimensions and performance parameters for the reactor. Terrapower expects to begin construction of a 500-megawatt demonstration plant in 2016 and start it up in 2020. It’s working with a consortium of national labs, universities, and corporations to overcome the primary technical challenge of the new reactor: developing new materials that can withstand use in the reactor core for decades at a time. It has yet to secure a site for an experimental plant and surprisingly, the funding to build it.
Full Story at Technology News
