Beach goers and boaters along the coast of Central California are accustomed to seeing fascinating sea creatures large and small off its shore—but an Arabian horse?

http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/-/world/13719758/spooked-horse-swims-3km-out-to-sea/

Researchers have reportedly discovered what could be the oldest evidence of graphic imagery in a cave in southwest France.

The New York Times reports a drawing of a female vulva, thought to be 37,000 years old, has been found on the collapsed roof of a rock shelter at the Abri Castanet site in the Vézère River valley.

The area was being researched by a team including New York University anthropologist Randall White who said the discovery was “the oldest evidence of any kind of graphic imagery.”

Dr White said the drawing was illustrated by circles with small slits on one side.

“You see this again and again and again,” Dr. White said. There are also very simple images, in profile, of animals, including horses and lionlike big cats, he told the New York Times.

Dr White said humans at the time lived in the shelters and often used ivory beads and other ornamentation to decorate their bodies.

Dr White said his team report their findings in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The team home that by deciphering more of the art they can understand the culture of the people better.

“What we hope to be able to do is map the distribution of images on the ceiling and all of the activities of the time,” he said.

“There may be a relationship between the art on the ceiling and their lives.”

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/13702507/caveman-pornography-found

A scientific ghost town in the heart of southeastern New Mexico oil and gas country will hum with the latest next-generation technology – but no people.

A $US1 billion city without residents will be developed in Lea County near Hobbs, officials said, to help researchers test everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets.

Hobbs Mayor Sam Cobb said the unique research facility that looks like an empty city will be a key for diversifying the economy of the nearby community, which after the oil bust of the 1980s saw bumper stickers asking the last person to leave to turn out the lights.

“It brings so many great opportunities and puts us on a world stage,” Cobb told The Associated Press before the announcement.

Pegasus Holdings and its New Mexico subsidiary, CITE Development, said Hobbs and Lea County beat out Las Cruces, for the Center for Innovation, Technology and Testing.

The CITE project is being billed as a first-of-its kind smart city, or ghost town of sorts, that will be developed on about 39 square kilometres west of Hobbs.

Bob Brumley, senior managing director of Pegasus Holdings, said the town will be modeled after the real city of Rock Hill, S.C., complete with highways, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. No one will live there, although they could as houses will include all the necessities, like appliances and plumbing.

The point of the town is to enable researchers to test new technologies on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. For instance, while some researchers will be testing smart technologies on old grids, others might be using the streets to test self-driving cars.

“The only thing we won’t be doing is destructive testing, blowing things up – I hope,” said Brumley.

Not far from the Texas border, Hobbs has seen new growth in recent years but local leaders have been pushing to expand the area’s reputation to include economic development ventures beyond the staple of oil and gas.

The investors developing CITE were looking for open spaces. Brumley said his group scoured the country for potential sites, “but we kept coming back to New Mexico. New Mexico is unique in so many ways.”

One big plus for New Mexico was its federal research facilities like White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico and Los Alamos and Sandia national labs.

Gov. Susana Martinez joined officials in announcing final site selection for the project, which she hailed as “one of the most unique and innovative” economic development projects the state has seen. She noted that no tax breaks were given for the development. “The only thing they have asked for is guidance,” she said.

Brumley said plans are to break ground on the town by June 30. The initial development cost is estimated at $US400 million, although Brumley estimates the overall investment in the project to top $US1 billion.

The project is expected to create 350 permanent jobs and about 3500 indirect jobs in its design, development, construction and ongoing operational phases.

Hobbs, a community of about 43,000 people, currently has two non-stop flights from Houston each day and is working on getting daily service to Albuquerque and Denver.

The mayor said discussions for the new flights have just started but having the research center may bolster efforts to connect Hobbs to more cities.

AP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/the-1b-new-town-where-nobodys-home-20120510-1ydl8.html#ixzz1uQiqoQZ2

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/the-1b-new-town-where-nobodys-home-20120510-1ydl8.html

James Matthews, Scotland correspondent

The Dull and Boring plan was hatched after a resident of Dull, near Aberfeldy in Perthshire, cycled through Boring in Oregon.

The Dull folk of Perthshire then contacted their Boring counterparts across the Atlantic with a view to striking up the partnership.

It may be dull and boring but the two towns are thrilled to be linking up

They have not been twinned, because Boring is far larger than Dull, but planning officials in the US town have sent a ‘Declaration of Sistership’.

Community Councillor Marjorie Keddie told Sky News: “It’s an amusing idea rather than a very serious idea.

“I can just imagine tourists coming up and suddenly seeing a sign, ‘Dull Twinned With Boring.’

“It makes people smile and, in this economic climate, it’s a good idea.”

The Perthshire village of Dull has a population of around 84 people.

It grew around a monastery centuries ago and is home to the origins of St Andrew’s University.

They say Dull is never boring so local estate agents call it “Dull by name but not by nature”.

Meanwhile, Boring has its own catchphrase and prides itself on being “an exciting place to call home”.

http://oddnews.org/77-odd-news/1084-scotland-s-dull-and-america-s-boring-join-up.html

For computer users, a few mouse clicks could mean the difference between staying online and losing Internet connections this July.

Unknown to most of them, their problem began when international hackers ran an online advertising scam to take control of infected computers around the world.

In a highly unusual response, the FBI set up a safety net months ago using government computers to prevent Internet disruptions for those infected users. But that system is to be shut down.

The FBI is encouraging users to visit a website run by its security partner, http://www.dcwg.org , that will inform them whether they’re infected and explain how to fix the problem. After July 9, infected users won’t be able to connect to the Internet.

Most victims don’t even know their computers have been infected, although the malicious software probably has slowed their web surfing and disabled their antivirus software, making their machines more vulnerable to other problems.

Last November, the FBI and other authorities were preparing to take down a hacker ring that had been running an Internet ad scam on a massive network of infected computers.

“We started to realise that we might have a little bit of a problem on our hands because … if we just pulled the plug on their criminal infrastructure and threw everybody in jail, the victims of this were going to be without Internet service,” said Tom Grasso, an FBI supervisory special agent.

“The average user would open up Internet Explorer and get ‘page not found’ and think the Internet is broken.”

On the night of the arrests, the agency brought in Paul Vixie, chairman and founder of Internet Systems Consortium, to install two Internet servers to take the place of the truckload of impounded rogue servers that infected computers were using.

Federal officials planned to keep their servers online until March, giving everyone opportunity to clean their computers. But it wasn’t enough time. A federal judge in New York extended the deadline until July.

Now, said Grasso, “the full court press is on to get people to address this problem.” And it’s up to computer users to check their PCs.

This is what happened:

Hackers infected a network of probably more than 570,000 computers worldwide. They took advantage of vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Windows operating system to install malicious software on the victim computers. This turned off antivirus updates and changed the way the computers reconcile website addresses behind the scenes on the Internet’s domain name system.

The DNS system is a network of servers that translates a web address — such as www.ap.org — into the numerical addresses that computers use. Victim computers were reprogrammed to use rogue DNS servers owned by the attackers. This allowed the attackers to redirect computers to fraudulent versions of any website.

The hackers earned profits from advertisements that appeared on websites that victims were tricked into visiting. The scam netted the hackers at least $14 million, according to the FBI. It also made thousands of computers reliant on the rogue servers for their Internet browsing.

When the FBI and others arrested six Estonians last November, the agency replaced the rogue servers with Vixie’s clean ones. Installing and running the two substitute servers for eight months is costing the federal government about $87,000.

The number of victims is hard to pinpoint, but the FBI believes that on the day of the arrests, at least 568,000 unique Internet addresses were using the rogue servers. Five months later, FBI estimates that the number is down to at least 360,000. The US has the most, about 85,000, federal authorities said.

Other countries with more than 20,000 each include Italy, India, England and Germany. Smaller numbers are online in Spain, France, Canada, China and Mexico.

Vixie said most of the victims are probably individual home users, rather than corporations that have technology staffs who routinely check the computers.

FBI officials said they organised an unusual system to avoid any appearance of government intrusion into the Internet or private computers. And while this is the first time the FBI used it, it won’t be the last.

“This is the future of what we will be doing,” said Eric Strom, a unit chief in the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Until there is a change in legal system, both inside and outside the United States, to get up to speed with the cyber problem, we will have to go down these paths, trail-blazing if you will, on these types of investigations.”

Now, he said, every time the agency gets near the end of a cyber case, “we get to the point where we say, how are we going to do this, how are we going to clean the system” without creating a bigger mess than before.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/tech-news/a/-/technology/13487703/hundreds-of-thousands-to-lose-internet-in-july

Photo: ZUMA Press

It sounds outrageous, but King Tut’s stomach bacteria might hold the cure for obesity.

Researchers have recently discovered that modern use of antibiotics has wreaked havoc on the health and content of our gut bacteria. In turn, these changes have altered how our metabolisms work, possibly making us more prone to getting fat.

Now scientists from the University of Oklahoma have proposed an unexpected solution: Why not replenish our gut flora using fecal bacteria from ancient mummies as a guide?

Since ancient mummies lived in an era before antibiotics, it’s worth a look to see how their intestinal bacteria differed from modern gut flora, to discover what has changed. For the study, researchers not only performed DNA analysis on samples collected from the intestines of mummies found in North and South America, but they also hunted for preserved feces left in ancient cave soil, reports NineMSN.

“[Ancient gut flora] do appear to be different,” said Cecil Lewis of the University of Oklahoma. “My first hypothesis would be that chlorinated water and antibiotics fundamentally changed human microbiomes.”

Interestingly, researchers found that ancient human gut bacteria is more akin to what is found in the guts of non-human primates, such as chimpanzees. By comparison, the intestinal contents of modern humans appear more depleted and sterilized.

“The association between antibiotics and obesity is important to explore,” added Lewis. “It’s too early to tell if it’s a good idea to repopulate our guts with bacteria. But it’s certainly an important idea that requires investigation.”

If repopulation of gut bacteria does prove to be a viable solution to obesity, then it may not be long before doctors are prescribing microbial soups to their patients based on the fecal bacteria that Lewis and his team discovered in the intestines of mummies. It’s an idea that may make your stomach churn in more ways than one.

Interestingly, the content and diversity of our gut bacteria has not only been linked to obesity and metabolism, but it has also been linked to mental health. For example, our floral content has been shown to help control depression and anxiety, and likely plays a crucial role in the regulation of our brain chemistry.

Growing research on the importance of our gut bacteria has even prompted the creation of a new social network that connects people based upon the floral content of their guts, called MyMicrobes.

Could obesity be cured by injecting our guts with fecal bacteria from ancient mummies? | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

This photo, posted on the church’s web-site caused a scandal when the site’s editors erased the patriarch’s watch. Photo: AP. Source: Sunday Herald Sun

IT could have been an Easter miracle but the mystery of a “disappearing” $30,000 watch from the wrist of the most senior member of the Russian Orthodox Church has actually been explained by modern technology – and left the church rather red-faced.

In what it described as a “blunder,” the church admitted that an official photograph of Patriarch Kirill, the leader of Russia’s Orthodox Christians, was doctored to show him without the expensive Swiss-made Breguet timepiece, The (London) Times reports.

The watch was first spotted after photographs emerged of the patriarch meeting recently with Russia’s Justice Minister Alexander Konovalov.

When journalists brought attention to it, the patriarch said he only wore a cheap watch given to him by outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev and any pictures of him wearing the Breguet must have been faked.

The mystery then deepened when a photograph – with said watch clearly visible on the patriarch’s wrist – was found on the church’s own website. In an apparent attempt to spare the patriarch’s blushes, staff quickly did some photo-editing to “remove” the watch.

The effort backfired however, with the watch’s reflection remaining clearly visible on the surface of a polished table at which the patriarch was sitting.

A video of the meeting also emerged, clearly showing the Breguet.

After being mocked in various online forums, the church eventually admitted that an over-zealous member of its press department had made a “ridiculous mistake” by manipulating the photograph.

“One of the basic principles of our work,” it said, “is a general refusal to use photographic editing programs to change the appearance of a picture … this question will be thoroughly investigated and those responsible will be severely punished.”

The church added that the photograph had been restored to its original state and apologized for the “blunder.”

There was no explanation, however, for the patriarch’s original denials.

He has already been the target of widespread criticism after publicly endorsing incoming president Vladimir Putin in last month’s election, calling his 12 years in power a “miracle of God.”

Church airbrushes out leader’s $30K watch | News.com.au.

Gator the rescue goose’s adoptive parents, Bob and Lauree Strouse, were so concerned his feet would suffer on their walks, they got him a pair of sandals.

Gator enjoys the freedom of St Augustine in his smart new sandals (Picture: Mercury)

The couple designed the footwear to combat the hot and harsh concrete in the town of St Augustine, Florida.

The trio have become a regular sight since finding Gator wandering along the edge of Lake Roy in Winter Haven, Florida.

They feared its resident alligators would gobble him up, so took him under their wing. ‘We rescued him,’ said Mrs Strouse. They called him Gator because it’s a shortening of the rather pessimistic ‘Gator bait’. That was four years ago.

Stylish yet practical: Gator’s sandals (Picture: Mercury)

They now regularly take him out for a walk but make sure he is on a lead in crowded areas to make sure he does not get into mischief.

But at heart Gator is a home body. ‘He grazes in the yard,’ said Mr Strouse. ‘He eats grass and ants and bugs,’ his wife added.

Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/865755-the-goose-who-wears-a-pair-of-sandals#ixzz1rF3QLEd5

A British businessman is said to have stumbled on a never-before-seen Andy Warhol sketch at a US art sale – picking it up for less than $5.

The 1930s sketch was hidden among other items Andy Field bought in Las Vegas, The Sun newspaper reported.

The signed work is thought to have been etched by Warhol when he was either ten or 11.

Experts have hailed it the earliest known example of the late American’s Pop Art.

And the value? A cool $2m on a formal valuation but it could go for a lot more than that.

Despite the possibility he could sell and cash in, Mr Field says he has no plans to sell the piece he found in 2010.

“It moves the birth of Pop Art back two decades, showing Warhol was already doing that sort of stuff at a far younger age,” he told The Sun.

“I’m not interested in the financial gain for now. It’s only right that great art should be shared.”

The figure in the drawing is 1930s singer and actor Rudy Vallee. The seller was a drug abuser who told Andy his aunt had been a carer for Warhol in his youth.

via Found – artwork from Warhol, age 10 – The West Australian.

A crash victim was moments away from being taken to the morgue when rescue volunteers challenged paramedics’ advice and found he was still alive.

The 30-year-old Melbourne man had been pronounced dead more than an hour earlier and covered with a plastic tarp when State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers found a pulse.

The SES volunteers had seen the man’s body shudder and twitch as he hung upside down from his mangled Porsche but paramedics assured them that movement by a corpse was not unusual.

The man is now fighting for his life in the Royal Melbourne Hospital and an investigation has been launched into his bungled rescue.

SES spokesman Lachlan Quick said the volunteers were concerned the man was still alive before they removed him from the vehicle.

“They mentioned it to the ambulance guys, who said that it (movement) can be attributed to this sort of effect when there’s a spinal injury,” he told AAP.

“It was raised and addressed and discussed and then put to one side, and they went about their business.”

The man was critically injured when his vehicle collided with a four-wheel drive near Bacchus Marsh, west of Melbourne, about 2am (AEST) on Sunday.

Two intensive-care paramedics pronounced him dead when they couldn’t find a pulse and were later called back urgently to treat him.

Tow-truck driver Trevor Oliver said the man was left in the car for about an hour and spent another 40 minutes lying critically injured on the ground before emergency services realised there had been a mistake.

“The SES got the driver out of the car, wrapped him in a tarp and sat him on the side of the road and for about 40 minutes we sat there watching his feet move,” he told AAP.

“It was only when the coroner’s representative turned up to pick up the body, and the SES and the coroner’s representative went to pick up the body and they noticed that something was odd and (discovered) he still had a very weak pulse.”

An investigation has been launched into the incident, which will be headed by The Alfred hospital’s director of trauma, Professor Russell Gruen.

Ambulance Victoria regional manager Simon Thomson could not explain on Monday how the paramedics concluded that the man was dead.

He said they were highly experienced paramedics and were traumatised by what had happened.

“Paramedics use a process to assess whether someone has died or not. We’re not clear of the exact circumstances on this occasion,” he said.

“However, what we do know is that a man was extensively trapped in the vehicle and that has been a factor in terms of paramedics being able to access him to assess him.”

The two paramedics are not due to return to work until Friday and are unlikely to face disciplinary action but could undergo retraining if it is found they made a clinical error.

The ambulance union says worker fatigue was not an issue in the case.

Ambulance Employees Australia Victorian secretary Steve McGhie said he had spoken to both paramedics and neither was able to detect a pulse or that the man was breathing.”These sorts of things happen very rarely. It’s unfortunate but … I think they did everything that they possibly could at that particular time.”

SES saves Vic crash man from morgue – Yahoo!7.