Moss on the Hawaiin Islands is regarded as among the oldest multicellular organisms in the world.

The peat moss propagates by creating duplicates of itself which means that the existing crop originated from exactly the same founder plant that arrived at Hawaii hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It’s believed that human activity including its use as a packing material might have aided the moss spread throughout the islands in recent times. “The peat moss has had explosive growth where it was introduced, especially on Oahu,” said study co-author Eric Karlin.

A moss spreading throughout the Hawaiian Islands (map) appears to be an ancient clone that has copied itself for some 50,000 years—and may be one of the oldest multicellular organisms on Earth, a new study suggests.

The peat moss Sphagnum palustre is found throughout the Northern Hemisphere, but the moss living in Hawaii appears to reproduce only through cloning, without the need for sex or production of spores.

Read the entire article here:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/12/111230-cloning-sex-moss-hawaii-oldest-science/

The Original Post is Located Here: Study Shows Ancient Moss Cloned itself for 50,000 Years

A guy in North Carolina was imprisoned after trying to purchase items with a forged $1 million bill at Walmart.

The 53-year-old tried to buy a carpet cleaner, a microwave oven and a variety of other products over-the-counter with a $1 million bill which he insisted was legitimate, even though the largest bill in circulation is just $100. The guy was arrested and charged with attempting to acquire property by false pretense.

Do you have change for a million-dollar bill.

Police say a North Carolina man insisted his million-dollar note was real when he was buying $476 worth of items at a Walmart.

Investigators told the Winston-Salem Journal that 53-year-old Michael Fuller tried to buy a vacuum cleaner, a microwave oven and other items. Store employees called police after his insistence that the bill was legit, and Fuller was arrested.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45834097/ns/us_news-weird_news/

The Original Post is Located Here: Man Tries to Use $1,000,000 Bill at Walmart

Scientists are already able to obtain sound from recordings produced in Alexander Graham Bell’s laboratory.

Bell had created the recordings to protect against having his ideas compromised and had delivered them to the Smithsonian Institute, his staff have been working on enhancing the quality of sound of Thomas Edison’s phonograph. It’s not recognized if any of the voices on the recordings is that of Bell himself nevertheless there was only 2 other folks dealing with him at that time indicating that one of them may be him.

Bell, made famous by his invention of the telephone, was working with a team of researchers in his Volta laboratory in the 1880’s in Washington D.C. and as a precaution against having his ideas stolen by competing teams, periodically sent samples of the results of his and his team’s efforts to the Smithsonian Institute, also in Washington, for safe-keeping. Unfortunately, devices to play the recordings were not sent along as well, which meant the recordings sat unheard in storage for a century and a quarter.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-team-high-tech-optical-technique-year.html

The Original Post is Located Here: Sound Pulled from a Very Old Recordings

A lady in Sweden has located her wedding ring on a carrot in her own backyard after it had been misplaced for sixteen years.

Lena Paahlsson had lost the ring in 1995 after putting it on her kitchen area draining board to do some cooking. When she returned to get it she noticed it had been gone and despite turning the kitchen upside-down no one could find it. Sixteen years after and Lena was digging up vegetables in her own garden when she found a gold ring around one of the carrots – it’s her ring, it must have made its way in to the garden compost pile then to the veggie garden where a carrot had grown exactly in the middle of it.

Lena Paahlsson had long ago lost hope of finding the ring, which she designed herself, reports Dagens Nyheter.

The white-gold band, set with seven small diamonds, went missing in her kitchen in 1995, she told the paper.

Although the ring no longer fits, she hopes to have it enlarged so she can wear it again.

Mrs Paahlsson and her family live on a farm near Mora in central Sweden.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16374283

The Original Post is Located Here: Lost Ring Found on Growing Carrot After 16 Years

The animal rights group feels cows killed on the highway must have memorials intended for them.

PETA ( People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals ) has requested authorization to buy memorial markers to put on roadways at locations where cows trucks have been involved in an accident causing in the fatalities of the cows aboard. “Sparing them from being tossed from a speeding truck and deprived of care afterward, sometimes for several hours, seems the least we can do,” said Tracy Patton.

The animal rights group known for risque anti-fur campaigns and ‘Meat is Murder’ slogan, is going one step further to give dead cows a memorial reserved for human victims.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals want to buy highway markers in memory of cattle killed when trucks hauling them flipped to remind truck drivers of their responsibility to safely transport their cargo.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2080612/PETA-demands-installation-highway-memorials-COWS.html

The Original Post is Located Here: PETA Demands Memorials for Cows

A strange event in 1961 that inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s popular movie might have at last been solved.

California’s Monterey Bay was the scene of the weird occurrence in 1961 when a number of seabirds rammed themselves in to buildings for reasons that eluded experts for many years. Researchers nevertheless think they’ve finally solved the secret, indicating that the birds had feasted on infected fish which poisoned all of them and led to serious confusion.

Whodunit? A final mystery surrounding the work of film legend Alfred Hitchcock— what triggered the crazed bird flocks that helped inspire his 1963 thriller The Birds— appears solved by scientists.

Dying and disoriented seabirds rammed themselves into homes across California’s Monterey Bay in the summer of 1961, sparking a long-standing mystery about the cause among marine biologists. The avian incidents sparked local visitor Hitchcock’s interest, along with a story about spooky bird behavior by British writer Daphne du Maurier.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/story/2011-12-27/hitchcock-birds-mystery/52246616/1

The Original Post is Located Here: Bizarre Incident that Inspired ‘The Birds’

Thirty eight year old Sarah Crane is convinced one of her drying socks showed the face of Jesus in the wrinkles.

The sock joins a large list of mundane inanimate items that believed to include the face of Christ in reports and media stories worldwide. “I called my boyfriend over straight away – we could both clearly see the face of Jesus in the sock,” she said. “I immediately took some pictures to show our family and friends – they all thought it was hilarious.”

The Original Post is Located Here: Woman Sees Face of Jesus in a Sock

The 2 satellites will enter in to orbit around the moon within numerous hours to start mapping its gravity.

Scientists wish the mission can provide fresh information in to the moon’s inner structure that might help reveal a little more about how the moon created and why the near and far sides are so different. “Grail will improve our knowledge of the Moon’s nearside gravity by more than 100 times over what was previously known, and by more than 1,000 times over what was known on the far-side,” said lead scientist Dr Maria Zuber.

Both spacecraft were put in elliptical paths around the lunar body over the weekend after performing braking manoeuvres following their more than 100-day journey from Earth.

The identical Grail twins are to map gravity variations across the lunar body in unprecedented detail.

This will help scientists refine our theories for how the Moon formed.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16353839

The Original Post is Located Here: Nasa’s Grail Gravity Twins To Enter Moon’s Orbit

China has announced intentions to land a man on the moon and also to construct a space station by as soon as 2020.

The statement arrived as part of a 5-year plan that highlights the development of China’s space exploration initiatives such as the progression of new satellites and a substantial technological discovery in manned spaceflight by 2016. “When looking up at the starry sky, we are full of longing and yearning for the vast universe,” said China space official Zhang Wei. If the country is successful in its goals it’ll be the very first nation to place a man on the moon since the last Apollo mission in 1972.

The Original Post is Located Here: China Declares Manned Moon Mission

A lady hit by a man’s body after he was hit by a train is suing the victim over her injuries.

In 2008 Hiroyuki Joho was hit by a train and died after attempting to cross the railway lines during heavy rain. His body flew upwards by the force of the incident and hit Gayane Zokhrabov, that knocked her to the ground and broke her arm and leg. “If you do something as stupid as this guy did, you have to be responsible for what comes from it,” said the judge who handled the case.

Calling it a “tragically bizarre” case, an Illinois appeals court has ruled that a man killed by a train while crossing the tracks at a Chicago Metra station can be held responsible after part of his body struck and injured a bystander.

In 2008, Hiroyuki Joho, 18, was hurrying in the pouring rain with an umbrella over his head, trying to catch a Metra train, when he was struck by an Amtrak train traveling at more than 70 mph.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-train-death-lawsuit-20111229,0,1119897.story

The Original Post is Located Here: Woman Sued a Man That Was Hit By A Train