Mexicans return beached whale to sea

MEXICO CITY: Volunteers and Navy personnel returned a 12-tonne whale to the sea after it became stranded on a beach in the southwestern Mexican city of Oaxaca, officials said Saturday.

About 150 volunteers worked with over 40 Marines for 12 hours Friday on the Pacific Coast beach to keep the whale alive and maneuver it back into the water.

Local military commanders ordered marine environmental protection officers, underwater specialists and other Navy personnel "to help the whale return to the sea," the Navy said in a statement.

The marines used two patrol boats, a smaller boat and vehicles to move the whale off the beach and back into the ocean.

The nine-meter (30-foot) whale suffered injuries to its right flipper, apparently from lying on its side on the beach, the Navy statement said. (AFP)

Tokyo chefs swell with anger over new blowfish laws

TOKYO: With a scoop of a net Tokyo chef Naohito Hashimoto selects a poisonous blowfish, considered a delicacy in Japan, and with a few deft strokes of his gleaming knife starts the delicate process of preparing it for a customer.

In moments, Hashimoto has separated the edible parts of the fish from organs filled with a poison more deadly than cyanide.

For more than six decades, dicing blowfish in Tokyo has been the preserve of a small band of strictly regulated and licensed chefs, usually in exclusive restaurants.

But new laws coming into effect from October are opening the lucrative trade to restaurants without a license, making chefs like Hashimoto see red.

"We have spent time and money in order to obtain and use the blowfish license, but with these new rules anybody can handle blowfish even without a license," said Hashimoto, a blowfish chef for some 30 years.

"They're saying it's now okay to serve blowfish. We licensed chefs feel this way of thinking is a bit strange."

The poison known as tetrododoxin is found in parts of the blowfish, including the liver, heart, intestines and eyes, and is so intense that a tiny amount will kill. Every year there are reports of people dying after preparing blowfish at home.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government says city laws covering the serving of blowfish should be changed to reflect changing times and hope that relaxing the rules will cut prices and bring Tokyo in line with the rest of the nation.

"Outside of Tokyo, the regulations for blowfish are even more relaxed and yet there are hardly any poison-related accidents," said Hironobu Kondo, an official at the city's Food Control Department.

"There is the hope that the number of restaurants with unlicensed chefs serving blowfish will rise, and that blowfish as an ingredient will be used not only for traditional Japanese foods but also others such as Chinese and Western foods."

A full course meal of blowfish, known as fugu in Japanese, features delicacies such as blowfish tempura, slices of raw fish thin enough to see through fanned out across a plate like chrysanthemum petals, and toasted fins in cups of hot sake.

But the meal is far from cheap, as diners pay for the safety of a licensed chef. At Hashimoto's restaurant, a meal costs at least 10,000 yen ($120) a person.

Though thrill seeking diners are reputed to seek out chefs who leave just enough of the poison to make the lips tingle, blowfish professionals scoff at this as urban legend, noting that ingesting even that much of the poison would be hazardous.

Apprentice blowfish chefs must train with a veteran for a minimum of two years before they can take rigorous written and practical exams. In Tokyo, the exam fee runs to 17,900 yen.

Customers outside a Tokyo sushi restaurant, one of the places where blowfish could be served under the new rules, said there was no substitute for the skill of a trained chef.

"Cooking blowfish is an art form that requires technique and skills," said screenwriter Shoji Imai. "That's why we pay good money for blowfish."

Hashimoto's years of training means it takes him just two minutes to gut a blowfish, and he says there is no substitute for this kind of experience.

"I don't want people to forget that you can actually die from eating blowfish," he said. "I feel the government's awareness of this has diminished." (Reuters)

Disneyland Paris celebrates 20th anniversary

PARIS: Disneyland Paris has celebrated its 20th birthday in spectacular style, with an extravaganza replete with celebrities, parades and a new state-of-the-art show.

The resort 35 kilometres east of Paris has a lot to celebrate. After overcoming a rocky childhood, the Magic Kingdom now makes up a chunk of the French economy and of Disney's own revenues.

Mexican actress Salma Hayek and retired French soccer great Zinedine Zidane led celebrations at the park featuring a high-energy projection of Disney cartoon characters onto Sleeping Beauty's castle crowning Main Street, USA. Also starring in the event, marked with fireworks and water displays, were Peter Pan and other Disney characters.

Five years ago, the resort finally started to make operating profits. Building on its fortune, Disneyland Paris became the most visited tourist destination in Europe in 2008. It broke its record for ticket sales last year, marking its 250 millionth visitor since its creation. (Monitoring Desk)

Ice dam collapses at Argentine glacier

BUENOS AIRES: An ice dam at Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier collapsed early Sunday, creating an impressive spectacle not seen since July 2008, although few tourists were actually awake to experience the moment.

Several tons of ice fell off the 60-meter (200 foot) ice dam into Lago Argentina at the national park in southern Santa Cruz province.

Some 5,000 tourists had been in the park Saturday awaiting the ice show, park rangers said, but the slight movement of ice which began Wednesday turned into an avalanche at around 4:00 am (0700 GMT), leaving visitors disappointed.

Only a group of rangers witnessed the collapse, which created a crash heard several kilometers away, accelerated by heavy rainfall overnight.

"The noise was very great, it was coming down in buckets," said park ranger Carlos Corvalan.

Perito Moreno, one of the biggest tourist attractions in Argentina, is one of the largest glaciers on the Patagonian ice cap.

The glacier has a travel speed of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet) per day in its central part and periodically creates an ice dam which collapses from the pressure of the advancing glacier.

The glacier was named after one of the first explorers in Argentine Patagonia.

US state's biggest lobster returned to Atlantic Ocean

PORTLAND: The biggest lobster ever caught in Maine, a 27-pounder (12.25 kg) nicknamed "Rocky" with claws tough enough to snap a man's arm, was released back into the ocean after being trapped in a shrimp net last week, marine officials said.

The 40-inch (one-meter) male crustacean, about the size of a 3-year-old child, was freed in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, said Elaine Jones, education director for the state's Department of Marine Resources.

"All the weight is in the claws," Jones said. "It would break your arm."

The lobster was caught near the seaside village of Cushing and brought to the Maine State Aquarium in West Boothbay. The state restricts fishermen from keeping lobsters that measure more than 5 inches from the eye to the start of the tail.

Because he became acclimated to the water near the aquarium, the lobster was released in West Boothbay rather than where he was caught.

Scientists are unable to accurately estimate the age of lobsters of this size, said Jones.

The marine lab has no record of a larger lobster being caught in the state, she said. The world's largest recorded lobster was a 44-pounder (20-kg) caught off Nova Scotia in 1977, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Maine lobstermen hauled in a record 100 million pounds (45.4 tons) of lobsters last year, due in part to overfishing of predators such as haddock, cod and monkfish.

Stressed Chinese fight back with pillows

SHANGHAI:A whirlwind of pillows bearing the names of bosses and teachers filled the air as hundreds of Chinese gathered to blow off stress in Shanghai, staging a massive pillow battle.

The annual event marked its fifth year with such a surge in interest from stressed young office workers and students that organizers held two nights of pillow fighting before Christmas Day and plan another for Dec 30.

"Nowadays there are many white collar workers and students that are facing huge pressures at work and at school, so we hope to give them an outlet to release their stress before the end of the year," said Eleven Wang, the founder and mastermind behind the epic pillow fights.

"Sometimes we have pressure on us by our bosses, teachers and exams, so today we can go crazy. Everyone will get to write onto the pillows the names of their bosses, teachers and exam subjects, and enjoy and vent to the maximum," he added.

"After releasing the stress, we can once again face our daily life with joy."

Pillows were handed out at the door as participants entered, then emotion stoked by a rock concert, with many on the floor of the huge event space rocking and waving their pillows in time to the music.

Then came the fighting.

Pillows filled the air, with many combatants opting for throwing rather than using them to whack opponents. A few hapless participants shielded their heads with as many pillows as they could hold, but most ventured eagerly in to the fray.

"I really enjoyed the fight, but my friend was useless. He joined in for two ticks and could not go on, he was afraid of getting beaten by other people," said 24-year-old Chen Yi.

"I thought it was pretty meaningful. I've just been working so much (at the office) and never get to break out in a sweat, so it felt really good."

Others gamely said they enjoyed the experience even though they ended up as attackees rather than attackers.

"I don't know who pushed me, but all of a sudden I was in the pile of pillows, where I became the target of many people, and was beaten by all sorts of people," said university student Zhu Shishan. "Very meaningful." (Reuters)

NORAD's Santa tracking set to launch on Christmas Eve

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colorado: With Santa's departure from the North Pole imminent, preparations to track his global trek were underway on Friday at an aerospace command center in Colorado.

Children eager for Santa's take-off can count down the hours on the track Santa clock on the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) Tracks Santa website.

Also on the website, kids can watch Santa prepare for his flight, check out the bustling shops in the North Pole and then watch online "Santa cams" as the big bearded guy in the red suit visits kids around the world.

Year-round, NORAD is tasked with protecting the skies of North America, monitoring man-made objects in space and detecting any potential attack by aircraft, missiles or space vehicles.

Tracking Santa seems to be a natural seasonal extension of NORAD's typical duties.

"His flight is something that we absolutely would track," said Lieutenant Commander Bill Lewis, a NORAD spokesman.

"Rudolph's nose helps us quite a bit with that. His nose puts off quite the heat signature," Lewis said.

The origins of tracking Santa date back to 1955, Lewis said, when a local ad to speak directly with Santa printed the wrong phone number -- instead directing children to a military defense operations center.

Tracking Santa grew from there after officers on duty actually fielded the kids questions, he said.

For more than 50 years NORAD has followed the flight path of jolly old Saint Nick, but these days technology helps children and families pinpoint Santa's more exact route to their own homes.

This year, kids can download mobile device apps to watch Santa and the reindeer traverse the globe.

Otherwise, they can call or email the command center for Santa's coordinates.

Last year, 1,250 military families, civilians and local volunteers from around Colorado Springs took shifts at NORAD's facility to field more than 80,000 calls and countless emails from children asking where Santa is and when he might be coming down their chimney.

But as all good youngsters know, and volunteers remind them when they call in, Santa won't be able to stop by your home until you are sound asleep.

Superman comic soars to new $2.16 million record

      (batkhela.tk) NEW YORK: A pristine first edition of the inaugural Superman comic book, originally costing just 10 cents, has sold at auction for a record-breaking $2.16 million.

The 1938 copy of Action Comics #1, in which Superman debuted, sold Wednesday, smashing a $1.5 million record set for a slightly less well-preserved copy of the first edition auctioned last year.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the rare item had belonged to actor Nicolas Cage, who lost it in a 2000 robbery, only for it to be recovered a decade later.

Auctioneers ComicConnect.com said it was "the most important comic book in the history of comics" and the "introduction of the archetype of all other heroes to come."

The comic's cover features the red-caped superhero lifting a green car, while bystanders run in panic.

One reason for the unusually good condition of the book is that for 50 years it lay unnoticed tucked inside an old movie magazine.

Comic.Connect.com would not confirm Cage's ownership, only saying that the pop culture treasure had belonged to a "West Coast comic collector." (AFP

Weightless US teachers eye giant science leap

LONG BEACH: "Excited," "nervous," "terrified" - just three emotions described by a group of US teachers about to take a dizzying "weightless" flight all for the cause of science, naturally.

The 30 classroom professionals donned blue "astronaut" jumpsuits to defy gravity in the skies above California, in a project designed to help them capture the imagination of young science students.

On the back of her jumpsuit, teacher Michelle Luke taped a drawing made by her pupils at Manhattan Beach Middle School, southwest of Los Angeles, showing two figures taking a giant weightless leap into space. 

But with only a couple of hours to go before the flight, her smile was still a little tense.

During the flight - in which a specially-decked out plane does a series of parabolic climbs and dives, the only way to experience weightlessness without going into space -- the body is subject to 1.8 G forces.

That makes the body feel nearly twice as heavy as it is - the downside in the steep climb phase, before participants fly up off the floor, shrieking as they float around the cabin like astronauts in the International Space Station. (AFP)

Cave painters were realists'

(batkhela-movies)LOS ANGELES: Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.

It's not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.

The latest analysis published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots.

Past studies of ancient DNA have only turned up evidence of brown and black horses during that time. That led scientists to question whether the spotted horses were real or fantasy.

To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula.

It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses.

Researchers who were not part of the study praised the use of genetics, saying it supports their observations.

Paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York said he was not surprised that cave artists were in tune with their surroundings since they needed to know all they could about their prey to hunt them.

"These artists were better observers of their natural environment than many humans are today," Shea said in an email.

Just because cave art was rooted in reality doesn't mean Ice Age painters lacked creativity.

Archaeologist Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield in England said ancient artists were "immensely creative," using techniques such as charcoal shading that are still found in modern art. (AP)

Quandary of the kilo triggers a weighty reflexion

(batkhela-movies.)PARIS: The guardians of the world's most important standards of weights and measures have turned to the weird universe of quantum physics to try to resolve a dilemma.

To the bafflement of scientists, a cylinder of metal sitting in a closely-guarded strongbox that is the global benchmark for the kilogram is changing mass.

The enigma doesn't affect anyone who wants to buy 500-milligramme tablets of aspirin, half a kilo of carrots or a 50,000-tonne cruise ship.

But it poses a hefty theoretical challenge to physicists, and complicates the work of labs which need ultra-precise, always-standard measurement.

Since 1889, the kilogram has been internationally defined in accordance with a piece of metal kept at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (known by its French acronym of BIPM), in the Paris suburb of Sevres.

Ninety-percent platinum and 10-percent iridium, the British-made cylinder was proudly deemed at its founding to be as inalienable as the stars in the sky.

It is kept under three glass cases in a safe in a protected building, the Pavillon de Breteuil.

In 1992 came a shock: the famous kilo was no longer what it should be.

Measurements made over a century showed that the prototype had changed by around 50 microgrammes -- the equivalent of a tiny grain of sand 0.4 millimetres (0.015 inches) in diameter -- compared to six other kilos also stored in Sevres.

"Actually, we're not sure whether it lost mass or gained it," Alain Picard, director of the BIPM's Mass Department, told AFP.

"The change may be to due to surface effects, loss of gas from the metal or a buildup of contaminant."

The skinnier (or fatter) kilo became more than a scientific curiosity.

-- Kilo will still be a kilo --

It is a bedrock of the International System of Units (SI), the world's most widely-used system of measurement units for daily life, precision engineering, science and trade. 

The SI has seven "base units" -- the kilo, metre, second, ampere, kelvin, mole and candela -- from which all other units are derived.

But unlike its counterparts, the kilo is the last unit that is still defined by a material object.

There used to be a platinum ruler that was the world's standard metre until its role was replaced by a fundamental constant, the time that light takes to travel 100 centimetres. The metal metre still resides in Sevres, but as a museum piece.

Moving at a pace best described as ponderous, the masters of the SI have now decided to phase out the kilo cylinder.

If all goes well, it will be replaced by a fixed value based on the Planck Constant, named after Max Planck, the granddaddy of quantum physics, who 
discovered it in 1899.

The Planck Constant, which uses the letter "h" in equations, corresponds to the smallest packet of energy, or quanta, that two particles can exchange.

On October 21, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) agreed to use the constant to calculate the value of the kilo.

But adopting this "will not be before 2014," after experiments to assess the accuracy of measurement techniques to ensure accuracy to within 20 parts per billion.

If the Planck Constant is adopted, nothing in everyday life will change. The kilo will still be a kilo.

"However, the changes will have immediate impact in the excruciatingly accurate measurements carried out by highly specialised laboratories," the conference said in a press release. (AFP)

Mars crew "lands" after 520 days in isolation

 (BATKHELA-MOVIES)MOSCOW: Pale-faced but smiling, the crew of a long-duration isolation study emerged bleary-eyed to daylight and applause Friday after 520 days locked away in windowless, cramped cells to simulate the length of a journey to Mars.

The $15 million Mars500 experiment aims to answer one of the big unknowns of deep-space travel: can people stay healthy and sane during six months rocketing to the Red Planet?

The six male volunteers were allowed to briefly embrace family and friends before being ushered into a three-day quarantine period at the end of an experiment to recreate the psychological strain of a real Mars mission as closely as possible.

Clothed in blue jumpsuits, the would-be astronauts from Europe, Russia and China grinned and waved as the heavy metal door was shut on their home of the last 17 months in a mock spaceship at a Moscow research institute.

"It's really, really great to see you all again, rather heartwarming," said Diego Urbina, an Italian-Colombian participant, who was shaky and red-eyed.

"On this mission we've achieved the longest isolation ever so that humankind can go to a distant but reachable planet."

Psychologists fear a return to the noise and activity of ordinary life will come as a shock to the men.

"Time seems to have flown by since we closed the hatch last year. But how time really felt to the crew we'll soon know. Probably we'll have a very big difference of opinion," said Igor Ushakov, head of the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems, which runs the "spaceship."

The crew were firmly anchored by gravity, despite the pretence of long months shuttling through space. But that did not stop them from feeling thousands of miles from home.

"I really felt a physical distance between our crew and the people in Mission Control. My reason knows that they're just 20 m (65 ft) away from us but my mind can't accept it," Frenchman Romain Charles wrote to Reuters on the eve of his return.

The men have fed on rations like those of real astronauts, rarely showered, taken daily urine and blood samples all while under 24-hour surveillance everywhere but in the toilets, earning the study comparisons to a reality TV show