Pennsylvania woman gives birth to sextuplets

A Pennsylvania woman has given birth to sextuplets in what she described Monday as a "miracle."

Stacey Carey and her husband, Brendan, welcomed three girls and three boys -- Emma, Samantha, Olivia, John, Patrick and Connor -- at Abington Memorial Hospital in Abington, Pennsylvania, last week. The infants remain in critical condition.

"We also have a 16-month-old daughter, so our family of nine is now complete," the mom told a roomful of reporters, eliciting laughs. "We weren't expecting a family this big, but we're happy now."

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http://articles.cnn.com/2011-06-06/us/pennsylvania.sextuplets_1_sextuplets-pennsylvania-woman-cesarean-section?_s=PM:US

Man tries to board train with pony in Wrexham

A man has been captured on CCTV trying to board a train accompanied by a pony.

Shocked staff watched as the man tried to get on the train at Wrexham General station with the white pony in tow

After a conductor refused him entry, the man returned to the ticket booth where he tried to buy two tickets - for himself and the animal.

Arriva Trains Wales (ATW) said horses were not permitted on safety grounds. The RSPCA said it was concerned and was viewing the CCTV tapes.

The man tried to travel on Saturday's 1902 BST service to Holyhead on Anglesey with his four-legged companion.

The ATW spokeswoman said: "Arriva Trains Wales allows dogs and small animals to travel on board trains.

"All animals, except dogs, must be conveyed within a fully enclosed basket or pet carrier with dimensions not exceeding 85 x 60 x 60cm.


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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-13437279

Facebook-loving parents name their baby "Like"

Though we haven't seen any of the baby pictures, the newest daughter of Lior and Vardit Adler is hopefully cute as a button. Because, well, she's named after one — Facebook's cherished "Like" button, that is.

Yes, this Israeli couple decided, after naming their first child Dvash ("honey") and their second kid Pie that it was time to go digital, and turned to "one of the most famous icons in the world" for inspiration, according to Lior.

He told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Like could be a modern equivalent of the traditional Jewish name Ahuva, which translates as "beloved."

But isn't Like a weird name? "I believe there will be people who will lift a eyebrow," acknowledged Like's proud father. And to be fair, it's got a slightly nicer ring than "Facebook," recently bestowed upon a newborn girl in nearby Egypt


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http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2011/05/16/6656187-facebook-loving-parents-name-their-baby-like

Australian police attribute man's death to internet photo trend

A growing internet photo trend is to blame for the death of a 20-year-old Australian man, police in Queensland said Sunday, warning other fans of the dangers surrounding "planking."

The activity has been growing in popularity in Australia as more and more people post photos of themselves "planking" -- or lying prone in various odd or humorous locations -- on various social media sites. A Facebook page called "Planking Australia" has garnered nearly 90,000 "likes" and has inspired similar pages such as "Planking Ireland" and "Planking Norway."

"This morning we have seen a young man take this activity a step further and attempt to plank on a balcony," Deputy Commissioner Ross Barnett of the Queensland Police said Sunday. "Unfortunately he has tragically fallen to his death. Police fear that as planking gains popularity there may be more injuries and potentially further deaths."

The danger, according to police, is followers of the trend are trying to "outdo" each other by taking bigger risks on where they try to "plank."

"The potential disaster increases as more and more risks are taken to get the ultimate photo," a statement issued by the Queensland police said.

Acton Beale, 20, died when he lost his footing and fell from the balcony of a high-rise building while attempting to "plank," the country's public broadcaster, ABC, reported.

Last week, a man caught photographing himself face down on top of a Queensland police car was arrested and charged with trespassing on police property, police said, warning that others will be charged "if they attempt the activity in areas that constitute trespass or in dangerous locations."

The trend appears to have been started in 2009 on Facebook as the "Lying Down Game" before reappearing in recent months as "planking."

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http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/15/australia.planking.death/?hpt=T2

Two-headed baby born in China

The babies were born by caesarean on Thursday at the Suining City Central Hospital in Sichuan. The twins weighed 9 pounds (4 kilograms) and measured 20 inches (51 centimetres), according to local press reports.

The parents, who are migrant farmers living outside of the southwestern city, did not learn of the abnormality until two days before the mother was due to give birth.

Two ultra sound scans in September and February failed to reveal the two heads because the technicians were viewing the single embryo in profile.

Doctors consider separating the babies, who have separate spines and esophaguses but share major organs, almost impossible.

"It is hard to say how they will survive in the future but we will try the best to keep them alive at the moment," said Pu Youhua, a doctor with Suining Hospital.

The pair have now been moved to a hospital in nearby Chongqing for further examination.

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http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/Health/20110510/sichuan-china-conjoined-twins-110510/

Woman awakens from surgery speaking in foreign accent

Woman Gets British Accent After Surgery

As medical oddities go, this incident stands out: A lifelong resident of Oregon went to the dentist for surgery and awakened from sedation speaking in a British, or somewhat-British, accent.

The 56-year-old woman appeared Thursday on NBC’s "Today," answering questions in what this MSNBC story describes as “an odd mixture of Irish, Scottish and northern British, with perhaps a dash of Australian and South African for good measure.”

Some speculate that she may have foreign accent syndrome, a rare but real speech disorder. It’s most often caused by a stroke, but can also be caused by a blow to the head, brain hemorrhage or multiple sclerosis.

A person’s speech is still understandable, but the rhythm is unusual, according to a University of Texas at Dallas primer on the disorder. People may have trouble pronouncing consonant clusters or elongate their vowels.

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http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-foreign-accent-20110505,0,7374634.story

US 'web suicide nurse' William Melchert-Dinkel jailed

A US man who helped persuade an English man and a Canadian woman to commit suicide after finding them online has been given a jail term in Minnesota.

Ex-nurse William Melchert-Dinkel, 48, was convicted in March over the deaths of Mark Drybrough, 32, from Coventry, and Nadia Kajouji, 18, from Ontario.

The judge ordered him to spend an initial 320 days in prison and then for the next 10 years return to jail on the anniversaries of his victims' deaths.

His lawyer plans to lodge an appeal.

Melchert-Dinkel, who wiped away tears as he was sentenced, apologised in a statement read by his lawyer, Terry Watkins, and said he felt "shame and remorse".

The official sentence handed down by Judge Thomas Neuville was six-and-a-half years in jail, with most of it suspended unless Melchert-Dinkel violates the terms of his probation over the next 15 years.

The sentence was structured in such a way that he will have to spend two-day spells in prison on the anniversaries of the deaths of Mr Drybrough and Ms Kajouji over the next decade.

The judge said that while Melchert-Dinkel's actions were directly related to the victims' deaths, other factors were also involved.

Ms Kajouji's mother, Deborah Chevalier, told the Associated Press news agency she was disappointed the sentence was not longer.

Mr Watkins has said his client intends to appeal against the conviction on the grounds his remarks were shielded by the free speech protections of the US constitution.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13289119

Ancient 'Nutcracker Man' ate more like a cow, it seems

The strong-jawed human relative nicknamed "Nutcracker Man" likely didn't crack nuts at all, preferring to graze on grass like a cow instead, scientists find.

These findings could dramatically alter conventional wisdom regarding what the earliest members of the human lineage and their relatives ate.

The extinct hominid, officially called Paranthropus boisei, ranged across East Africa 1.2 million to 2.3 million years ago, living side-by-side with the direct ancestors of humanity. It earned its nickname because of its massive jaw and huge molars.

"Nutcracker Man never has been used in the scientific literature, but that's the common name," said researcher Thure Cerling, a geochemist at the University of Utah.

It was long assumed that because of its powerful jaw, P.boisei lived up to its nickname and ate nuts, seeds and other hard items. Still, a recent study of its teeth did not turn up the kind of pitting one would expect from hard meals, hinting that it actually dined on softer fare.

Now scientists investigating carbon isotope ratios in Nutcracker Man's teeth found "it most likely was eating grass, and most definitely was not cracking nuts," Cerling said.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42865408/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Errant Visitors Caught at Old Faithful

BILLINGS - Some Yellowstone National Park visitors went off the beaten path at Old Faithful and were caught by an onlooker all the way in Wisconsin.

The Wisconsin resident was watching one of the park's webcams when he saw four people standing on the cone of the geyser Wednesday. More than two dozen others jumped on the bandwagon. The Wisconsin onlooker notified park rangers, who then issued fines to three of the offenders.

"It's very difficult to approach the Old Faithful geyser without seeing several signs that tell you to be careful. I don't know that anyone remembers a time that we had this number of people walk off the boardwalk at Old Faithful in recent history," said park spokesman Al Nash.

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http://www.kulr8.com/news/local/Errant-Visitors-Caught-at-Old-Faithful-121004024.html

Lost City Revealed Under Centuries of Jungle Growth

Hidden for centuries, the ancient Maya city of Holtun, or Head of Stone, is finally coming into focus.

Three-dimensional mapping has "erased" centuries of jungle growth, revealing the rough contours of nearly a hundred buildings, according to research presented earlier this month.

Though it's long been known to locals that something—something big—is buried in this patch of Guatemalan rain forest, it's only now that archaeologists are able to begin teasing out what exactly Head of Stone was.

Using GPS and electronic distance-measurement technology last year, the researchers plotted the locations and elevations of a seven-story-tall pyramid, an astronomical observatory, a ritual ball court, several stone residences, and other structures.


The Maya Denver?

Some of the stone houses, said study leader Brigitte Kovacevich, may have doubled as burial chambers for the city's early kings.

"Oftentimes archaeologists are looking at the biggest pyramids or temples to find the tombs of early kings, but during this Late-Middle Preclassic period"—roughly 600 B.C. to 300 B.C.—"the king is not the center of the universe yet, so he's probably still being buried in the household," said Kovacevich, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

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http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/04/110426-maya-lost-city-holtun-science-guatemala-ancient/

Amazon seller lists book at $23,698,655.93 -- plus shipping

Lots of normal people would pay $23 for a book.

But $23.7 million (plus $3.99 shipping) for a scientific book about flies!?

This unthinkable sticker price for "The Making of a Fly" on Amazon.com was spotted on April 18 by Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and blogger.

The market-blind book listing was not the result of uncontrollable demand for Peter Lawrence's "classic work in developmental biology," Eisen writes.

Instead, it appears it was sparked by a robot price war.

"What's fascinating about all this is both the seemingly endless possibilities for both chaos and mischief," writes Eisen, who works at the University of California at Berkeley and blogs at a site called "it is NOT junk." "It seems impossible that we stumbled onto the only example of this kind of upward pricing spiral."

Eisen watched the robot price war from April 8 to 18 and calculated that two booksellers were automatically adjusting their prices against each other.

One equation kept setting the price of the first book at 1.27059 times the price of the second book, according to Eisen's analysis, which is posted in detail on his blog.

The other equation automatically set its price at 0.9983 times the price of the other book. So the prices of the two books escalated in tandem into the millions, with the second book always selling for slightly less than the first. (Not that that matters much when you're selling a book about flies for millions of dollars).

The incident highlights a little-known fact about e-commerce sites such as Amazon: Often, people don't create and update prices; computer algorithms do.

Individual booksellers on Amazon and other sites pay third-party companies for algorithm services that automatically update prices. Some of these computer programs purportedly work very well, getting sellers up to 60% more sales because they underbid the competition automatically and repeatedly.

The advantages are clear: If you're managing dozens of sale items on Amazon or eBay, it's difficult if not impossible to keep up with all of them.

"If you have more than 100 items, then it's impossible for you to manually focus on the price," said Victor Rosenman, CEO of a company called Feedvisor, which sells algorithm services to people who use Amazon.

"It's pretty much like the stock exchange. What you see there is the prices changing all the time -- but they never change drastically. Sometimes it's a dollar here a dollar there -- maybe $10. For a book, it probably would be pennies."

These algorithms vary widely in quality, however, as the Amazon case shows.

Sellers easily can avoid the million-dollar-book situation if they set price ceilings and floors on their pricing algorithms, so that the competitive bidding shuts off at a certain dollar mark, Rosenman said.

"It's like you put on the gas and didn't have the handbrake," he said. "This is a very basic mistake. So I am very, very surprised this thing happened at all."

Some of these algorithm services give clients control over their equations, letting them edit them as they go. That doesn't always work out well, Rosenman said.

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http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/04/25/amazon.price.algorithm/

10 Crazy Stories About Bill Gates From Paul Allen's New Book (MSFT)

Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has a memoir called "Idea Man" coming out today. In it, he reveals some amazing stories about his friend Bill Gates.

Early excerpts from the book portrayed Gates as a tough negotiator who talked Allen into receiving a smaller share of the company they founded together.

But the memoir also contains some lighter anecdotes about Gates in his childhood and the early days of Microsoft. If you're only familiar with Gates in his elder-statesman charity role, you may not recognize the hard-charging thrill seeker who built the most profitable tech company in history.

In high school, he went dumpster diving to try and get source code.

In high school, Gates and Allen honed their programming skills on a DEC minicomputer owned by a local company, C-Cubed. But as students, they didn't have access to as much information as the company's employees, which frustrated them. So at night, Allen would boost the smaller Gates up to the top of the company's dumpsters, where he'd look for interesting stuff. Once, they found a printout of the TOPS-10 source code, and it unlocked a lot of secrets.

They also hacked the company's accounting file to try and get free computing time.

As the charges mounted up for their borrowed computer time, Gates and Allen began looking for a way to access one of the free accounts at C-Cubed. They somehow got access to an administrator password, and used it to steal the company's internal accounting file. (Allen doesn't go into detail about how they got the password.) They were hoping to decrypt the file to get one of the free accounts, but they got caught and the company booted them.

He wrote his high school's scheduling program to book him into an English class with all girls.

One summer, Gates contracted to write a class scheduling program for his high school. He made sure to "preload" himself into an English class with a dozen girls and no other boys.

Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-bill-gates-2011-4#ixzz1Jwa9qeum

World's oldest man dies in Montana at 114

GREAT FALLS, Mont. (AP) — Walter Breuning's earliest memories stretched back 111 years, before home entertainment came with a twist of the radio dial. They were of his grandfather's tales of killing Southerners in the Civil War. Breuning was 3 and horrified: "I thought that was a hell of a thing to say."

But the stories stuck, becoming the first building blocks into what would develop into a deceptively simple philosophy that Breuning, the world's oldest man at 114 before he died Thursday, credited to his longevity.

Here's the world's oldest man's secret to a long life:

— Embrace change, even when the change slaps you in the face. ("Every change is good.")

— Eat two meals a day ("That's all you need.")

— Work as long as you can ("That money's going to come in handy.")

— Help others ("The more you do for others, the better shape you're in.")

Then there's the hardest part. It's a lesson Breuning said he learned from his grandfather: Accept death.

"We're going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you're born to die," he said.

"Everybody says your mind is the most important thing about your body. Your mind and your body. You keep both busy, and by God you'll be here a long time," he said.

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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gsDmreRfJbw75ZdXEjbX_8MBmubQ?docId=b7fbd86a47864232bdfd35e8ef9b2299

Genus Envy: The Cow Who Thinks It's A Horse

A horse is a horse, of course, of course -- unless it's a bovine.

A young German lass was told by her parents that she couldn't have a horse, but she wasn't ready to give up her yearnings to ride free throughout the Bavarian countryside atop a four-legged mammal. So the 15-year-old trained a cow named Luna to do the job.


The Associated Press article relaying the magical journey of Regina Mayer and her animal calls the two "soul mates" and recounts the years of acclimation it took to make Luna into the running, jumping, saddle-friendly cow she is today. Luna will obey commands to "go" and "gallop" and in turn gets the grooming and petting so often reserved for horses. Sometimes Luna gets a bit sassy and won't do as she's told, but to combat this tendency, Mayer got help from "a cow expert in Switzerland on how to deal with 'steering' problems." (See what they did there?)

The lesson being: Don't judge an animal by its hide. Though this open-mindedness really should have become standard the moment we saw that you can teach a squirrel to water ski.


Read more:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/06/genus-envy-the-cow-who-thinks-its-a-horse/#ixzz1IoHbdZZM