On April 7, 1994, Federal Express Flight 705, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30 cargo jet ferrying electronics across the United States from Memphis, Tennessee to San Jose, California, experienced an attempted hijacking for the purpose of a suicide attack.

Auburn Calloway, a FedEx employee facing possible dismissal for lying about his previous flying experience, boarded the scheduled flight as a deadheading passenger with a guitar case carrying several hammers and a speargun. He intended to disable the aircraft’s cockpit voice recorder before take-off and, once airborne, kill the crew using the blunt force of the hammers so their injuries would appear consistent with an accident rather than a hijacking. The speargun would be a last resort. He would then crash the aircraft while just appearing to be an employee killed in an accident. This would make his family eligible for a $2.5 million life insurance policy paid by Federal Express.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

art { Caleb Brown }

“Hasse” which was known in Ystad tavern circles, had a total of 146 wasp stings on the body including 54 on the genitals. He was so bloated that a neighbor thought it was a whale carcass lying on the lawn. […]

The autopsy and scene investigation revealed that “Hasse” tried to have sex with the wasp nest. They found semen on some of the dead wasps and a couple of “Hasse” pubic hair in the entrance of the nest. […]

Angry animal rights activists have reacted strongly to the event.

{ News Sweden | Continue reading | Thanks GG! }

Hurricane Sandy was the largest storm to hit the northeast U.S. in recorded history, killing 159, knocking out power to millions, and causing $70 billion in damage in eight states. Sandy also put the vulnerability of critical infrastructure in stark relief by paralyzing subways, trains, road and air traffic, flooding hospitals, crippling electrical substations, and shutting down power and water to tens of millions of people. But one of the larger infrastructure failures is less appreciated: sewage overflow.

Six months after Sandy, data from the eight hardest hit states shows that 11 billion gallons of untreated and partially treated sewage flowed into rivers, bays, canals, and in some cases, city streets, largely as a result of record storm-surge flooding that swamped the region’s major sewage treatment facilities. To put that in perspective, 11 billion gallons is equal to New York’s Central Park stacked 41 feet high with sewage, or more than 50 times the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The vast majority of that sewage flowed into the waters of New York City and northern New Jersey in the days and weeks during and after the storm.

{ Climate Central | PDF }

The risk of waking from a general anaesthetic while under the surgeon’s knife is extremely small - about one in 15,000 - research reveals.

Out of nearly 3 million operations in 2011 there were 153 reported cases. […] A third - 46 in total - were conscious throughout the operation.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The incidence of accidental awareness during general anaesthesia (AAGA) is reported by several studies to be surprisingly high, in the range of 1–2 per 1000 general anaesthetics administered. These studies employ a direct patient questionnaire (usually repeated three times over a period of up to 30 days postoperatively) known as the ‘Brice protocol.’ It is also reported that a high proportion of patients experiencing AAGA suffer psychological problems including posttraumatic stress disorder. There are in fact very few studies reporting an incidence of AAGA much lower than this, an exception being that of Pollard et al., who found an incidence of 1:14 500. However, their methods might be criticised as they administered the questionnaire only twice over a 48-h period, which might only detect two thirds of cases . Anecdotally, anaesthetists do not perceive the incidence of AAGA to be so high. A small Japanese study found that only 21 of 172 practitioners had known of an incident of AAGA under their care, with an overall incidence of just 1:3500. In a larger UK survey of over 2000 consultants, Lau et al. reported that anaesthetists estimated the incidence to be approximately 1:5000, similar to the estimated incidence reported previously by 220 Australian anaesthetists of between 1:5000 and 1:10 000.

{ Anaesthesia/Wiley | Continue reading }

Brooklyn man furious his roommate wanted to move out allegedly murdered her fish

[…]

“They were my babies! I can’t have children, so my pets are like my kids,” Brenda Alvarez said yesterday. “They were beautiful fish and cost about $25 each.” […]

Alvarez, 45, said she wanted to move out of the Nostrand Avenue apartment because of growing tension between the longtime friends. […]

Santiago allegedly roughed up Alvarez before turning on the fish. He killed them in front of her, she said. […]

Santiago, 47, was arrested and charged with animal cruelty and assault.

{ NY Post | Continue reading }

This January, a 21-year-old Canadian tourist named Elisa Lam disappeared while visiting Los Angeles. Lam was last seen at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, where she had been staying. Tuesday, her body was found at the bottom of one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks. […]

The hotel’s guests were horrified at the news. […] But anyone familiar with Los Angeles’s history couldn’t have been too surprised. Downtown LA has long been seedy, and somewhat dangerous; the Cecil Hotel, for its part, has a long and sordid criminal history [Austrian serial killer Jack Unterweger stayed at the Cecil Hotel for five weeks in 1991 while murdering prositutes].

{ Slate }

related/video { Surveillance video of Elisa Lam shows bizarre behavior }

On the evening of August 13, 1967, two women were attacked and killed by grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) in separate incidents within Glacier National Park (GNP). Following these incidents, there was speculation that due to odors associated with menstruation, women may be more prone to attack by bears than are men (Rogers et al. 1991).


In a study designed to test the hypothesis that bears are attracted to the odors of menstruation, Cushing (1983) reported that when presented with a series of different odors (including seal scents, other food scents, non menstrual human blood, and used tampons), four captive polar bears elicited a strong behavioral response only to seal scents and menstrual odors (used tampons).

Herrero (1985) analyzed the circumstances of hundreds of grizzly bear attacks on humans, including the attacks on the two women in GNP, and concluded that there was no evidence linking menstruation to any of the attacks. The responses of grizzly bears to menstrual odors has not been studied experimentally.

[…]

Menstrual odors were essentially ignored by black bears of all sex and age classes.

{ Bearman’s | Continue reading | Thanks Tim! }

The Tunguska event was an enormously powerful explosion that occurred near (and later struck) the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, on June 30, 1908. The explosion is believed to have been caused by the air burst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5–10 kilometres (3–6 mi) above the Earth’s surface.

Although the meteoroid or comet appears to have burst in the air rather than hitting the surface, this event still is referred to as an impact. Estimates of the energy of the blast range from 5 to as high as 30 megatons of TNT, with 10–15 megatons of TNT the most likely—about 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

The Tunguska explosion knocked an estimated 80 million trees down over an area covering 2,150 square kilometres (830 sq mi) (i.e. circular area of 52km in diameter). It is estimated that the shock wave from the blast would have measured 5.0 on the Richter scale.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Governor Andrew Cuomo wants to use $400 million in federal funding to buy beachfront homes as he seeks to reshape the New York coastline so the state is better prepared for storms like Hurricane Sandy.

The cash would come from the $51 billion Congress approved last month to help the region recover from the Oct. 29 storm.

The governor would use the money to pay owners the pre-storm value of their homes. More than 300,000 houses in New York were damaged by Sandy.

Once sold, the houses would be razed and the land would remain vacant.

{ Bloomberg | Continue reading }

{ Walter Bond, NIO’s “Director of Militant Direct Action,” is serving a federal sentence for torching a restaurant that served foie gras. He’s written that the world would be better off if “non-Vegans were disposed of.” | Gawker | full story }

{ Cleaning lady stole a train in Sweden, crashed into house }

In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook. As a result, spinach was reported to contain a tremendous amount of iron—35 milligrams per serving, not 3.5 milligrams (the true measured value). While the error was eventually corrected in 1937, the legend of spinach’s nutritional power had already taken hold, one reason that studio executives chose it as the source of Popeye’s vaunted strength.

The point, according to Samuel Arbesman, an applied mathematician and the author of the delightfully nerdy “The Half-Life of Facts,” is that knowledge—the collection of “accepted facts”—is far less fixed than we assume. In every discipline, facts change in predictable, quantifiable ways, Mr. Arbesman contends, and understanding these changes isn’t just interesting but also useful. For Mr. Arbesman, Wolf’s copying mistake says less about spinach than about the way scientific knowledge propagates.

Copying errors, it turns out, aren’t uncommon and fall into characteristic patterns, such as deletions and duplications—exactly the sorts of mistakes that geneticists have identified in DNA. Using approaches adapted from genetics, paleographers—scientists who study ancient writing—use these accumulated errors to trace the age and origins of a document, much in the same way biologists use the accumulation of genetic mutations to assess how similar two species are to each other. For example, by analyzing the oddities and duplicated errors in the 58 surviving versions of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” researchers deduced the content of the original version.

Mr. Arbesman’s interest in the spread of knowledge also leads him to the story of Brontosaurus, the lovable, distinct herbivore we all grew up with—only it never existed. Originally described in 1879 by Othniel Marsh, the Brontosaurus was soon determined to be a type of dinosaur that Marsh had already discovered in 1877, the Apatosaurus. But since the original Apatosaurus was just “a tiny collection of bones,” while the Brontosaurus that Marsh named “went on to be supplemented with a complete skeleton, beautiful to behold,” the second discovery captured the public’s imagination and the name “Brontosaurus” stuck for nearly a century. Only recently has the name “Apatosaurus” started to gain traction.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }