Doom’s day Computation

Scientist have have nailed down how and when Earth will cease to exist. The sun will expand into a red giant, pushing Earth farther out into space, but not far enough. Our planet will be snagged by the sun's outer atmosphere, plunging to its doom inside the fiery stellar furnace .

Cake 1, Man 0

A man dies in cake-eating contest in UK. An inquest is to be held on a man who died during a contest to see who could eat the most fairy cakes. 

Mistaken Identity

IRS audits 7-year old for $60,000 in back taxes.

A new use for a full can of Beer!!!

Woman fights off robber with a full can of beer. I can certainly say this is not the intended use of the  “beer can” when it was manufactured.

Narrow escape for Passengers of Luftansa Jet

A jumbo jet nearly crashed Saturday as it attempted to land in the midst of a tropical storm in Germany. Check out the video here.

Crow Training

Following news is from boingboing.
Technology hacker Joshua Klein   built a vending machine that teaches crows to deposit coins they find into a special vending machine that dispenses peanuts. He has been studying crows for over ten years and has learned that they are very intelligent. Their brain/body weight ratios are similar to chimpanzees. He's showing a video of how a crow learned to use a tool to pull an object out of of a tube. It's impressive.

Crows are smart and adaptable. For example, they drop nuts on streets so cars run over them, then wait for the traffic signal to change so they can pick up the food. Other crows who see this happen quickly learn how to do this for themselves.

His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them.

So now he wants to train crows for search and rescue, picking up trash, and other mutually beneficial tasks.
 

Picture of the week

Below is the picture of the most dangerous road in the world

Commonly referred to as "Death Road", the only route western route into La Paz, Bolivia, the road gets its name from its extreme nature. Narrowing to only five or six feet in certain areas with a total elevation drop of 3000m in only 80km, Death Road has certainly earned its reputation. Fatalities can exceed over 100 annually. The road is frighteningly tight, slippery and extremely bumpy thanks to a scattering of rocks on its surface. Despite all of the danger, the scenery is breathtaking. The beautiful waterfalls easily draw the driver's attention away from the 400m drops over the edge. Surprisingly, the majority of the traffic fatalities are a result of head-on collisions rather than falls. At the height of its infamy, Death Road averaged 400 deaths per year.