Awkward Moments Not Found In Your Average Children’s Bible

 

Awkward Moments Not Found In Your Average Children’s Bible

Island celebrates first birth in 35 years

Ile de Sein, France, population 215:

It’s been a long time coming, but after a 35-year wait the residents of the tiny island of Ile de Sein, off Brittany had cause to pop the Champagne corks this weekend.
On Sunday morning the remote island in the Atlantic Ocean witnessed its first birth in over a third of a century when a mother of three had a baby girl.
The birth of Emily at 6.25am on Sunday was announced later that morning by the island’s doctor Ambroise Menou.
In recent years on the rare times when a newborn has been expected, the birth has taken place on the mainland in Brittany where parents can get access to medical facilities that don’t exist on the island.
But the mother of Emily and her husband, a volunteer firefighter who both live on the island, were determined to end the drought and decided their baby should be born on Ile de Sein.

Camera stolen by eagle retrieved, bird's eye view footage recovered (Video)

[Western Australia] Aboriginal rangers had set up the motion-sensor camera at a gorge on the Margaret River in May, to try and capture images of fresh-water crocodiles.
Gooniyandi ranger Roneil Skeen says the camera disappeared not long afterwards.
"Unexpectedly our camera went missing so we thought we had lost it because it fell into the water," he said.
But a few weeks ago, they got a phone call to say a Parks and Wildlife ranger had found the small device at the Mary River, about 110 kilometres away.
They have been able to extract three 30-second clips that reveal the culprit to be a thieving sea eagle.

Child taken from womb by social services

Big Brother at work in the UK:

A pregnant woman has had her baby forcibly removed by caesarean section by social workers.
Essex social services obtained a High Court order against the woman that allowed her to be forcibly sedated and her child to be taken from her womb.
The council said it was acting in the best interests of the woman, an Italian who was in Britain on a work trip, because she had suffered a mental breakdown. The baby girl, now 15 months old, is still in the care of social services, who are refusing to give her back to the mother, even though she claims to have made a full recovery.
The case has developed into an international legal row, with lawyers for the woman describing it as “unprecedented”.
They claim that even if the council had been acting in the woman’s best interests, officials should have consulted her family beforehand and also involved Italian social services, who would be better-placed to look after the child.
Brendan Fleming, the woman’s British lawyer, told The Sunday Telegraph: “I have never heard of anything like this in all my 40 years in the job.
“I can understand if someone is very ill that they may not be able to consent to a medical procedure, but a forced caesarean is unprecedented.
“If there were concerns about the care of this child by an Italian mother, then the better plan would have been for the authorities here to have notified social services in Italy and for the child to have been taken back there.”
The case, reported by Christopher Booker in his column in The Sunday Telegraph, raises fresh questions about the extent of social workers’ powers.
It will be raised in Parliament this week by John Hemming, a Liberal Democrat MP. He chairs the Public Family Law Reform Coordinating Campaign, which wants reform and greater openness in court proceedings involving family matters.

Orchid Mantis: The Predator That Lures Prey By Mimicking Flowers

Praying or preying

The orchid mantis (hymenopus coronatus) is famous for its remarkable similarity to the orchid
flower, but researchers from Macquarie University have now discovered that its’ unique form of deception not only attracts its prey by resembling a blossom, but is in fact even more attractive to pollinators than the real flower.
Since its discovery in South East Asia more than a century ago, the rarity and elusive nature of the orchid mantis has made it difficult for scientists to understand why and how it has evolved this bizarre appearance.
Researchers James O’Hanlon and Marie Herberstein from Macquarie University, along with Gregory Holwell from the University of Auckland mounted an expedition to Malaysia to study the orchid mantis. They observed that the body of the orchid mantis was attractive to flying insects, demonstrating how their flower-like appearance has evolved to lure in unsuspecting pollinators searching for nectar in flowers.
“What really surprised us was the fact that the orchid mantises were even more successful at attracting pollinators than real flowers,” said O’Hanlon.
“Their bright floral colours and petal shaped legs create a tantalizing lure for insects. So it seems that orchid mantises not only look like flowers but also beat flowers at their own game.
“After more than a century of conjecture we provide the first experimental evidence of pollinator deception in the orchid mantis and the first description of a unique predatory strategy that has not been documented in any other animal species.”
Their findings have been published in the Chicago Journals for The American Society of Naturalists.

Chowing down on a butterfly.

Press release source: Macquarie University

Mathematical crime-fighter helps hunt for alien worlds

A curious mathematical crime-fighter has just boosted our confidence that the galaxy is brimming with alien worlds.

The statistical phenomenon, called Benford's law, has been shown to fit existing data on both confirmed and candidate exoplanets. The results suggest that of the thousands of planetary candidates, the majority will turn out to be real worlds and not errors in the data.

Initially a mere mathematical oddity, Benford's law states that the first digits of the numbers in certain sets follow a pattern of probability. For the numbers in a variety of data sets, 1 is the leading digit about 30 per cent of the time. Higher digits are less frequent: on average, just 4.6 per cent of numbers in such sets begin with 9.

Thomas Hair at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers wondered if Benford's law would hold true even beyond the solar system. "I became intrigued with the idea that exoplanet mass might fit," he says.

Hair examined data from the online catalogue exoplanets.org, which lists 755 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 3500 planet candidates, many of them found only in the past few years by NASA's Kepler space telescope. Masses are given in multiples of Earth's or Jupiter's mass. He found that the figures closely fit Benford's law for both units.

"The close fit with Benford's law gives a confirmation to experts' belief that most of the candidates are valid," says Hair, who will present the work in January at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland.

Source: New Scientist

Historic UFO audio archive dating back to the 40s recovered

"A historic UFO audio archive documenting the beginning of the modern UFO era has been made available online. The archive was compiled by Wendy Connors and Roderick Dyke, and re-discovered and made available online by Isaac Koi and Giuliano Marinkovic.

"You can find the Faded Disk archive at Archive.org."

Source: Open Minds.