SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The San Diego Zoo's 5-month-old panda cub, Su Lin, slept through most of her first days on public display this week, but behind the scenes, the fuzzy 15.6-pound (7 kg) panda is performing headstands and nibbling on her mother's ears, a zookeeper said on Friday.
Gunmen in Gaza and parts of the West Bank repeatedly take over government buildings and election offices, demanding jobs and changes to election policies ahead of a January parliamentary vote. The almost daily standoffs are a sign of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' inability to bring law and order to his towns and cities.
ENGLEWOOD, Pa. - Mary Kathleen O'Connor, 16, doing some studying for school about 6 a.m. Tuesday, said she was the first to be startled by an apparent Christmas tree stowaway.
"I'm looking at the tree and the angel just pops off," she said. "And a second later, this head just popped up. The eyes were, like, glowing. I was thinking, 'Oh my God!' And I screamed."
Global Language Monitor head Paul JJ Payack said refugee, which was was used five times more often than other words to describe those made homeless by Katrina, triggered a debate on race and political correctness.I hope the word does not forever suffer because of a stupid hurricane. Animosity toward the use of "refugee" was, and is, anger misplaced. Frustation because of the original Katrina situation is understandable. Impatience with a French word that refers to one who seeks shelter from danger isn't.
TOKYO (AFP) - A Japanese spacecraft is likely to have failed in its landmark mission to collect the first-ever samples from an asteroid and faces trouble returning to Earth.
If they get rid of just these toll equipment [sic] not to mention the toll lanes (that only half of all motorists can use) and just build what's needed, the road is 40-100% less money to build and EVERYONE can drive on it. [emphasis added, except for the all-capped word]
I did not know that. Did you?Electricity from power stations along the route is supposed to flow through the overhead traction wire to the train motor, then into one of the rails and back to the power station.
If rails, bridges or switches are not well insulated, power will leak into the ground and can damage metal objects such as pipes and structural steel near the rails, although such damage is generally quite slow.
"What we have ... is a technology-free organism that you can quickly program and use in a highly mobile way," said [U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist Joe] Lewis, who believes the Wasp Hound could be used to search for explosives at airports, locate bodies, monitor crops for toxins and detect diseases such as cancer from the odors in a person's breath.
"They're very cheap to produce and very sensitive," [University of Georgia agricultural engineer Glen] Rains said of the wasps. "Dogs take months to train and they need a specific handler. Wasps can be trained on the spot." [ellipsis in original]
NASA announced two new cash prizes Friday, each with a weighty $250,000 purse, in a pair of contests aimed at developing robotic systems for space exploration.
The space agency is challenging innovators to build an autonomous aerial vehicle to navigate a tricky flight path or robots capable of building complex structures with only limited guidance from their human handlers, NASA officials said.
The contests - dubbed the Planetary Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Telerobotic Construction challenges, respectively - are part of the agency's Centennial Challenges program to spur interest in commercializing space technologies. Both challenges will make their competitive debut in 2007, NASA officials said.
