Passengers safe with help of pilot

January 17, 2009 at 9:39 am (Uncategorized)
Tags:

All 155 passengers and crew aboard a US Airways Airbus A320 had a miraculous escape after the plane ditched into a frigid Hudson river off westside Manhattan within seconds of take-off, apparently after it ran into a flock of geese.

Federal investigators were examining the plane to pinpoint the cause of failure of the engines within seconds of its taking off from La Guardia airport in New York.

“We’ve had a miracle on the Hudson,” New York governor David Paterson told in a news conference and called the pilot a hero for landing the plane in the fast-flowing river.

“The pilot somehow, without any engines, was able to land this plane” and there were no serious injuries, he said.

Officials said bird hit, caught on radar, looks to be the most plausible cause but they would finally announce it after investigations are complete.

Passengers said the pilots had declared an emergency and had taken one round to ensure that they were following safety instructions before asking them to “prepare for impact.”

Reports said the pilot originally wanted to take the plane back to the airport but decided to crashland on water apparently after he realised it might not be possible.

Within minutes, ferries that normally take tourists round the Manhattan Island, and water taxis reached the scene and started rescuing passengers.

Later, other rescue workers, including firemen and police, joined them. The water was freezing and temperature minus 7 degrees C when the accident occurred and those who had jumped into water were taken to hospitals for check-up.

Fortunately, the plane did not sink and remained afloat.

Announcing that all the passengers, including a baby, were safe, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised the pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, for doing a “masterful job” of landing the plane on the river and then making sure that all had been rescued before getting out of it.

Leave a Comment

Santorini Panorama

January 15, 2009 at 4:10 am (DIscovery)

This panorama shows the vista from which NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity spent five weeks in November and December 2008 while the sun was nearly directly in between Mars and Earth.

Opportunity is approaching the fifth anniversary of its landing on Mars, continuing a surface mission that was initially scheduled to last three months. The rover landed on Jan. 24, 2004.

Opportunity has driven 1.14 miles since it exited Victoria Crater on Sol 1634 (Aug. 28, 2008). It skirted the west rim of Victoria and, at the point from which this panorama was taken, had reached a position about six-tenths of a mile southwest of the crater’s southern rim.

Opportunity is on a 7-mile trek toward Endeavour crater, a crater more than 20 times the size of Victoria Crater, which it studied for about two years. On the way toward Endeavour the rover is pausing to examine selected loose rocks on the surface. At the location from which this panorama was taken, the rover used the spectrometers on its robotic arm to examine a cobble informally called “Santorini,” a dark rock about 3 inches long, which the inspection indicates is probably a meteorite. The rock is too close to the rover to be visible in this panorama.

Opportunity began driving again on Sol 1748 (Dec. 23, 2008).

This is an approximate true-color composite panorama generated from images taken through the Pancam’s 750-nanometer, 530-nanometer and 430-nanometer filters. This “natural color” view is the rover team’s best estimate of what the scene would look like if we were there and able to see it with our own eyes.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell University 302136main_image_1260_946-710

Leave a Comment

Trees That Actually Do Walk

January 15, 2009 at 4:06 am (Uncategorized)
Tags:

That is a photo taken by Listener Emily. It is tree that walks veeeeeeeeeeeeery slowly. It is called a “Socratea Exorrhiza” aka “Walking Palm”.

And this is from Listener Daniel who’s also seen one:

“Basically, the trunk of the tree stops/starts above the soil. Then at the base of the trunk, there are lots of shoots that come out and go into the soil. The tree “walks” by growing more or better shoots towards the better soil and letting those in bad soil die away. So the trunk sort of floats over the soil on this moving base of shoots. They said that it could move perhaps ten feet over the course of its lifetime like this.”

Emily and Daniel thank you for being so smart and on top of things.

Leave a Comment

Remote control toy helicopter ‘used to fly drugs into prison’

January 15, 2009 at 4:05 am (Uncategorized)
Tags:

A toy helicopter is believed to have been used in an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison.

Guards at Elmley Prison in Sheerness, Kent, spotted the remote control miniature aircraft flying over the walls of the jail and heading for the accommodation blocks one night after it was picked up by CCTV cameras.

It had a small load beneath the fuselage, thought to contain drugs.

The toy or its cargo was not found.
However, staff could not find any trace of either the helicopter or the package which it appeared to be carrying underneath it when they searched the Category C jail.

‘Using a mini-helicopter to get contraband into jails is unprecedented. When officers spotted it they nearly fell off their chairs’, a prison source told the Sun.

‘It could have been drugs or a mobile phone in the package. It is possible it was a dummy run.’

The Prison Service confirmed the incident took place.

A spokesman said: ‘A remote control helicopter was flown into the grounds of HMP Elmley on December 23.

‘As a result of this, a search of the prison grounds and an accommodation block were carried out and nothing was found.’

Leave a Comment

Hug at McDonald’s costs woman $100,000

January 15, 2009 at 4:01 am (Uncategorized)

Wisconsinites apparently will stoop low enough to scam old ladies who just go out to get a quick bite to eat at their local McDonald’s. These thieves lucked out with their pick, scoring $100,000 after breaking into the woman’s home.

We shouldn’t be surprised.

A 75-year-old Milwaukee woman visited a McDonald’s at 1:30 p.m. Dec. 30 for lunch. As she was leaving, a stranger approached her to give her a hug. After asking her if they knew each other, the strange woman insisted they had met before and continued to small talk. The victim told the woman that her mother had just died. The suspect then asked her for her address because she said she wanted to send the woman flowers.

More from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

That hug was the beginning of a scam that resulted in the theft of $100,000, cash the victim’s recently deceased mother kept in a closet at home, Milwaukee police said Sunday.

Police are looking for help in finding four people suspected of participating in the scam.

Detectives think the crew was trolling for a target that day at McDonald’s, but the criminals would have no way of knowing the woman they found had that kind of cash at home.

“They just hit the jackpot,” said Milwaukee police Detective Robert St. Onge.

When the woman returned to her home, she saw two people leaving her backyard. She then discovered her mother’s bedroom ransacked and the $100,000 missing. The victim said she kept the money in her home because she didn’t trust the bank.

Lessons to learn: Don’t hug or interact with strangers, particularly at McDonald’s. And don’t leave $100,000 just sitting in a metal box.

Leave a Comment

The 10 Most Unnecessarily Horrible and Horribly Unnecessary Cartoon Sidekicks

January 15, 2009 at 3:59 am (Uncategorized)

If last summer’s movie ticket sales have shown anything, it’s that superheroes are popular enough to be enjoyed by more than just children and nerds. We are finally at a point where Hollywood is taking superheroes seriously–but there was a time not long ago when soulless executives thought that the wee children couldn’t handle a pure superhero tale, and made sure to include a goofy sidekick character with every superhero cartoon. These executives could not have been more wrong, and we hope they’re all dead now. A few of these unnecessary characters were reasonably harmless to their series, although none of them were actually funny. Some were terrible, dumbing down the show far past the point execs thought the cartoons had already dumbed down the show (cartoon makers assumed children were gibbering idiots in the ’70s and ’80s, who would shove a toothbrush up our nose and straight into our brain unless told otherwise by our cartoon heroes). And then some of these sidekicks can be used to prove that there is no God, as no loving God would ever have let innocent children suffer through the horror of their mincing antics and rampant imbecility. Here are those 10.

Leave a Comment

Verizon Wins Suit Over Internet Addresses

January 2, 2009 at 3:50 am (Uncategorized)
Tags:

Verizon Communications Inc. said it has been awarded $33.2 million in a “cybersquatting” case against a San Francisco company that registered Internet domain names purposely similar to the telecommunications giant’s trademarks.

Verizon, however, may not see any money, as the registrar, OnlineNIC, never appeared in federal court for the Northern District of California to defend itself.

The default ruling said the company “unlawfully registered at least 663 domain names that were either identical to or confusingly similar to Verizon trademarks,” according to Verizon. The telecommunications company was awarded $50,000 per name for OnlineNIC’s “bad-faith registrations” that were intended to steer traffic away from Verizon’s sites, it said.

“This case should send a clear message and serve to deter cybersquatters who continue to run businesses for the primary purpose of misleading consumers,” said Sarah Deutsch, Verizon associate general counsel. “Verizon intends to continue to take all steps necessary to protect our brand and consumers from Internet frauds and abuses.”

The company has won several similar cases.

Complaints about cybersquatting — or setting up a Web site using a trademarked name and then profiting by selling the name to the trademark owner — surged to a record in 2007, according to World Intellectual Property Organization, a watchdog group.

Anyone can register domain names for a nominal fee, but cybersquatters claim popular domain names with the intention of selling them at a profit when the real owners of the names come calling. More recently, Internet entrepreneurs have set up Web sites using famous names — or even versions with typos in them — and setting up per-click ads leading to the entity’s official site.

The practice was barred in the U.S. in 1999. After declining for several years, incidents began to rise in 2004 and have been climbing in recent years.

Leave a Comment