Good and/or funny news thread

[Stephi_B]

August 07, 2007

EMERGENCY STOP

Train Halts to Replace Beer Tap

A train in Germany carrying soccer fans made a 25-minute unscheduled stop Saturday -- to replace a broken beer keg tap.

Imminent rail strikes may be threatening to bring Germany to a standstill later this week, but one German train made an unscheduled halt for an entirely different reason -- to replace a broken beer keg tap.

A group of German soccer fans was traveling Saturday in the "Samba Wagon" of a special train ferrying them from Leverkusen to Hamburg to see their hometown heroes face FC St. Pauli when the wagon's beer tap broke.

Faced with the alarming prospect of a beer-less journey, the train made an unscheduled halt in Wuppertal station -- at 9:20 in the morning. Police officers kept an eye on the fans as they mingled with travelers on the train platform and chanted football songs.

Meanwhile, a taxi rushed to fetch a replacement for the crucial instrument. Twenty-five minutes later, the new tap had arrived and the train could continue on its way.

"Deutsche Bahn reacted in a swift and un-bureaucratic way so as not to endanger the good mood of the soccer-mad travelers," German police said in a statement Monday, adding there had been a "good atmosphere" among the fans as they waited in the station.

The way home was presumably less cheery for the Bayer Leverkusen fans -- their team lost 0-1 in the German Football Association cup match.

jtw/ap



You go DB!

[Stephi_B]

Small but good news:

Afghan women 'fighting for peace'

By David Loyn
BBC Developing World correspondent



The barked instructions and sounds of feet running round on a matted floor are like any team anywhere in the world warming up.
But this training session is unique.
The people running round to warm up before putting on their boxing gloves are women - and this is Afghanistan.
A new generation is challenging the usual stereotype of Afghan women as shadowy figures concealed from head to foot behind powder-blue burqas.
And the training is tough.
Occasionally the trainers, who run the national male boxing team as well, sprinkle water onto the floor to damp down the dust flying into the air as the women pace round, then warm up on punch-bags before squaring up in pairs against each other for training bouts.

Reclaiming space
The gym is in the football stadium, notorious in the Taleban years for frequent public executions, including of women.
But in agreeing to come to box these young women are doing more than exorcising the ghosts of a dark period in Afghan history.
The training is sponsored by a peace group who want to give women more self-respect, and reclaim boxing as a sport in a country scarred by conflict - making martial arts constructive and not destructive.
They call it "fighting for peace".
The boxers are in their late teens and these unlikely ambassadors for peace challenge pre-conceptions both about boxing and about women, particularly Afghan women.
Like most of them, Maleeha says she is there for recreation, but in halting English, she does understand the reason behind the project.
She says they are "fighting to end war".
A few want to take the sport further.
Women's boxing is not yet an Olympic sport, but if it becomes one, Shala hopes to be on the team.
She points out that the boxers come from all corners of Afghanistan, not divided by tribal loyalties that have split Afghanistan in the past.

More than just sport
"If you get involved in sport then you stay out of war.
In the past there was war between different peoples in Afghanistan, but a sport like boxing brings people together. It's not fighting. It's a competition."
Between training sessions the boxers sit down and discuss non-violent approaches to conflict resolution.
The NGO backing the project, Co-operation for Peace and Unity, is headed by Kanishka Nawabi.
He says they are teaching women to be confident and regain self-respect in a male-dominated society.
"Afghanistan has been through a very violent conflict, and sport was not excluded from this process. What we are trying to do is to promote peace for this group, as a role model for society.
"Yes they do boxing, but not for the sake of violence."

[brightpearl]

New Bat, Frogs Among Six Species Found in Congo
Sara Goudarzi
August 8, 2007

Six new animal species have been found in remote forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), conservationists announced yesterday.

A two-month expedition, led by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), discovered a tiny bat (see photo below), a rodent, two shrews, and two frogs previously unknown to science.
"If we can find six new species in such a short period, it makes you wonder what else is out there," Andrew Plumptre, director of WCS's Albertine Rift Program, said in a press release.

The Albertine Rift region includes the Misotshi-Kabogo Forest and nearby Marungu Massif along the western banks of Lake Tanganyika, the long skinny lake between the DRC and Tanzania (see a DRC map).

These forests have been off-limits to researchers for decades because of violence and instability in the region.

"Scientists first explored the region around Kalemie—the main town on Lake Tanganyika in DR Congo—in the early 1900s but didn't really get into the mountains on the escarpment above Lake Tanganyika until the 1950s," Plumptre told National Geographic News.

"Collections of birds were made in the 1950s and also some frogs. Mammal collections were made at some point—probably in the 1940s."

Only a small area of the forest was surveyed before the rift became inaccessible in the 1960s. According to Plumptre, no further expeditions had visited the sites along the length of the forest block until this year.

Treasure Trove

The survey, conducted between January and March, gave researchers a chance to document the rift's rich biodiversity.

In addition to the newfound creatures, scientists logged a variety of known species including chimpanzees, bongos (a type of antelope), buffalo, elephants, leopards, and several types of monkeys, birds, and reptiles.

"There is an endemic bird species, the Kabobo apalis, and a subspecies of black-and-white colobus [monkey] only from this forest," Plumptre said.

The expedition team also found several unique plant species, some of which were unidentifiable by survey botanists. Those samples will be sent to specialists for further investigation.

"Given the findings with the vertebrates, it is likely that some of the plants will represent new species as well," Ben Kirunda of WCS's botanical team said in the release.

Researchers suspect that the unusual plants and animals evolved in these forests because they have been cut off from the Congo rain forest, one of the largest in the world.

"It's isolated from the main forest block of the Congo Basin and probably has been like this for at least 10,000 years," Plumptre said.

Protection Plan

As a result of the survey, conservationists have pegged the region that includes Misotshi-Kabogo and Marungu as one of the most important sites for conservation in the Albertine Rift.

Aside from a few instances of gold mining, there is little human impact to the forests at the moment, they note.

And when survey members met with the heads of local villages, the team found that most leaders are supportive of turning the forests into a protected region.

"Since few people live there, it would be relatively easy to create a park while supporting [their] livelihoods," James Deutsch, director of WCS's Africa Program, said in the press statement.

[Stephi_B]

^ love the cute green frog


Pencil removed from head after 55 years
Aug 8 2007
icWales

A woman has had an operation to remove a pencil lodged in her head after 55 years of torment.
Margaret Wegner, now 59, was four when she fell while carrying the 8cm pencil, which went through her cheek and into her brain.
“It bored right through the skin and disappeared into my head,” Wegner told Germany’s best-selling newspaper Bild. “It hurt like crazy.”
At the time the technology did not exist to safely remove the pencil, so Wegner had to live with it – and the chronic headaches and nosebleeds that it brought - for the next five-and-a-half decades.
But on Friday, Dr Hans Behrbohm, an ear, nose and throat specialist at Berlin’s Park-Klinik Weissensee, was able to use modern techniques to identify the exact location of the pencil so that he could determine the risks of removing it, and then take most of it out.

[Stephi_B]

August 14, 2007

CAMBODIAN JUNGLE METROPOLIS
Ruins of Giant City Found Around Angkor Temples
By Markus Becker

What was long believed to be a scattered settlement surrounding the famous temple complex of Angkor Wat in Cambodia has now been identified as the largest pre-industrial city to have been discovered so far.

When a non-specialist hears "Angkor," they normally think of Angkor Wat -- the famous temple complex that the Khmer built in the jungle of Cambodia an estimated 900 years ago. But there is more in the Angkor region -- much more than even experts had suspected until now.

"For more than 100 years, science has focused on the massive sandstone temple complexes and their inscriptions," says Damian Evans of the University of Sydney in Australia. "No one wanted to find out where and how people lived there -- or they were not able to because of the many years of violence."

City Of Abundance

The systematic exploration of Angkor has only been relatively safe since the terror regime of the Khmer Rouge ended in the 1990s -- and Evans and has team have been busy ever since. What the scientists are now publishing in the professional journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a breathtaking testament to a long-gone age.

According to the new map drawn up by the scientists, the Angkor Wat region contained far more than scattered temples -- it was the site of a giant city with an area of more than 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles). As a comparison, New York City has an area of about 1,200 square kilometers (463 square miles); without its bodies of water, the area of the city is less than 800 square kilometers (309 square miles). Berlin has an area of about 900 square kilometers (348 square miles).

That makes "Greater Angkor" by far the world's most imposing pre-industrial settlement, Evans and his colleagues write. Even the giant cities of the Maya look tiny by comparison: Tikal, the largest of them to have been accurately measured, was only 150 square kilometers (58 square miles).

The Greater Angkor Project (GAP) -- which involves experts from Australia, Cambodia and France -- has now also confirmed the old assumption that Angkor was a city between the ninth and the 16th centuries, according to Evans. French scientist Bernard-Philippe Groslier has been exploring Angkor since the 1950s, and he has developed the hypothesis that it was a giant complex of settlements that sheltered more than a million people thanks to a complex irrigation system. The giant city, which featured several centers, was nourished, defined and eventually ruined by this system.

The extended irrigation network consisted of rivers, canals and reservoir lakes, and it allowed the medieval Khmer to harvest rice several times a year, according to the new study. That not only filled the plates of Angkor's inhabitants, it also provided them with comfortable surpluses that led to enormous wealth. The Khmer empire was able to extend its power, especially during the rule of King Suryavarman II, to whom the construction of the Angkor Wat temple complex is attributed.

Using land surveys, microlight planes and radar satellites provided by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the GAP researchers discovered more than 1,000 artificial lakes and at least 74 hitherto unknown temples. "Our new map shows for the first time that Angkor was no collection of scattered temples," Evans told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "It was a consistent, interwoven urban network, about 10 times the size of anything from the ancient world discovered so far."

The map also shows that the size of the settlements cannot -- as was previously assumed -- simply be determined on the basis of the city walls, Evans adds. While Angkor Wat and the neighboring walled city of Angkor Thom were especially densely settled, "we can also see that Angkor did not end within its city walls but was a giant fabric of agricultural and settled areas that stretched, practically without interruption, for at least 1,000 square kilometers," he says. Within this area, there was hardly a single square kilometre that was not modified or made use of in some way, according to Evans.

The new data refute the assumption that the irrigation system was not suited for intensive rice cultivation, says Evans: "All major reservoir lakes have inflow and outflow facilities; there are canals to distribute the water; and every single water source in the region was intensely and ruthlessly exploited."

"Ever More Complex And Uncontrollable"

That was presumably what led to the downfall of Angkor, says Evans. "Rice cultivation in Angkor required enormous amounts of water," he points out. Large forest areas were cleared in order to make room for the irrigated fields. The system had such proportions that, in time, it probably led to massive problems -- such as leaching of the upper soil, erosion and overpopulation. The delicate and complex system is also likely to have reacted extremely sensitively to natural disasters and wars.

Traces of hectic adjustment measures, broken dikes and system failure were found especially in the newly surveyed north of Angkor, the researchers write in their scholarly article. "This suggests that, over a period of several centuries, the system became more and more complex and uncontrollable."

But nothing more precise is known. "We will carry out excavations and pollen analyses," says Evans, adding that, now that the settlement area can be quantified, more accurate assumptions about the population of medieval Angkor have also become possible -- "instead of wild speculation about a million people." The new map, he says, "at least reveals where we should look for answers."



Wow!

[brightpearl]

I love this kind of thing. *sigh* Nerd.

FRIDAY, Aug. 24 (HealthDay News) -- When interacting with their infants, female rhesus monkeys use special vocalizations similar to the "baby talk" used by human mothers to get an infant's attention, University of Chicago researchers report.

"Motherese is a high pitched and musical form of speech, which may be biological in origin," Dario Maestripieri, associate professor in comparative human development, explained in a prepared statement.


"The acoustic structure of particular monkey vocalizations, called girneys, may be adaptively designed to attract young infants and engage their attention, similar to how the acoustic structure of motherese, or baby talk, allows adults to visually or socially engage with infants," he said.


The researchers studied vocalizations among adult female rhesus macaques on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico. When a baby was present, there was a significant increase in the amount of grunts and girneys among the adult females.

"The calls appear to be used to elicit infants' attention and encourage their behavior. They also have the effect of increasing social tolerance in the mother and facilitating the interactions between females with babies in general. Thus, the attraction to other females' infants results in a relatively relaxed context of interaction where the main focus of attention is the baby," the researchers wrote.

The study was published in the current issue of the journal Ethology.