Madame Butterfly

Russian Mini-Sub Stuck on Sea Floor

U.S. Navy to Help With Effort to Rescue Seven Crew Members

By YEVGENY KULKOV, AP

VLADIVOSTOK, Russia (Aug. 5) -- The U.S. Navy will send an unmanned rescue vehicle to help efforts to save a Russian mini-submarine stuck on the floor of the Pacific with seven crew members on board, a Russian navy spokesman said Friday.

Capt. Igor Dygalo said in remarks broadcast on Russian television that a U.S. plane will fly to a base in San Diego to pick up a robotic rescue vehicle and then deliver it to the accident site off the Kamchatka Peninsula.

The Russian navy said the seamen had enough air to survive for one more day.

Pacific Fleet spokesman Capt. Alexander Kosolapov said contact had been made with the sailors, who were not hurt, and that authorities were preparing to send down a similar vessel to assess the situation.

The sub's propeller became entangled in a fishing net Thursday, trapping the craft, said Capt. Igor Dygalo, a spokesman with the Russian navy.

The mini-sub, called an AS-28, was too deep to allow the sailors to swim to the surface on their own or for divers to reach it, officials said.

Dygalo's statement about the amount of air remaining, which he said came after ''all the information was checked,'' followed conflicting statements from officials who said there was enough air for anything from one to five days. The range of estimates may have come because there were seven people aboard the vessel; the crafts usually carry three.

The accident occurred early Thursday after the mini-submarine was launched from a rescue ship during a combat training exercise, Kosolapov said.

Kosolapov said nine warships were in the area to aid the rescue operation.

Officials said the accident occurred in Beryozovaya Bay, approximately 100 miles south of Kamchatka's capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

The accident occurred almost exactly five years after the nuclear submarine Kursk sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea after explosions on board, killing all 118 seamen aboard in a painful blow to the Russian navy. Some of the Kursk's sailors survived for hours after the accident as oxygen ran out, and Russian authorities came under sharp criticism for their handling of the crisis.

The same type of vessel that is now stuck, called a Priz, was used in the rescue efforts that followed the Kursk disaster, Interfax reported.

The AS-28, which looks like a small submarine, was built in 1989. They are about 44 feet long and 19 feet high and can dive to depths of 1,640 feet.

Russian news agencies reported that Japan decided to send four ships in a response to a request for help. A Japanese Marine Self Defense Force spokesman, Mitsyasu Yokoe, said the press service had no information on such a dispatch and could not comment.

08/05/05 08:28 EDT

Yawning, rubbing my eyes, and wanting lots of quiet until I fully wake up.

Relaxing after going to the "cantina" instead of taking yoga.

I take you have small feet then, My Psychic?

Australia outlaws 'Grand Theft Auto'

Officials cite hidden sex scenes in game

MSN Tech & Gadgets

The Associated Press

Updated: 1:46 p.m. ET July 29, 2005

SYDNEY - Australian officials effectively banned the computer game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" and ordered it removed from stores Friday because it contains hidden sex scenes that can be viewed with a special Internet download.

The Office of Film and Literature Classification said in a statement it had outlawed sales of the game by stripping it of its official classification after learning of the explicit content.

"Revocation of a classification means the computer game cannot be legally sold, hired, advertised or exhibited in Australia from the date the decision is made," the statement said.

"Businesses that sell or hire computer games should remove existing stocks of this game from their shelves immediately," said Des Clark, director of the government-funded classification board.

The game involves a main character seeking bloody vengeance on gang-filled streets, firing automatic weapons and picking up women along the way.

After downloading and installing a modification to the game -- one of many "mods" available on Web sites maintained by video game enthusiasts -- a new world opens up in which the girlfriends appear nude and engage in explicit sex acts, according to the modification's author.

The classification board in October 2004 gave the game a MA15+ rating, meaning it could be sold only to people aged over age 15, and warned that it contained "medium level animated violence, medium level coarse language."

On Friday, Clark advised parents to be on the alert for their children accessing the explicit scenes.

"Parents are strongly advised to exercise caution in allowing children continued access to the game," he said -- particularly if they have access to the Internet modification.

Chatting with a long time net friend on MSN

Relaxing after a busy day before I have a light meal before I go to my yoga class.

Still feeling really really cynical about life.

Feeling naughty and thinking I should have made the reproductive studies thread a poll regarding shoe size.

Shuttle Ups and Downs

Discovery succeeds, but NASA may have failed its mission.

By Mary Carmichael

Newsweek

Aug. 8, 2005 issue - It is NASA's old reliable, the craft the agency depends on when it needs to prove something big. Discovery was the shuttle that delivered the Hubble telescope and 77-year-old John Glenn into space, and revived NASA as the first ship to launch (in 1988) after the Challenger explosion two years earlier. The orbiter had two missions last week: to dock with the International Space Station, and to demonstrate, again, that the loss of a shuttle need not mean the loss of the entire program. As soon as the ship roared into the sky, it seemed to have met the latter goal. But jubilant spectators could not see what NASA's cameras did. In an eerie reflection of the Columbia disaster, chunks of insulating foam had broken off, despite a $1.5 billion attempt to prevent that kind of problem. Now, as Discovery sits docked in space, its brethren are grounded.

The shuttle's commander said Friday that she was "quite surprised" pieces had fallen off the ship, but not everyone was. After the Columbia flameout, an investigatory board told NASA to strengthen the shuttle. But the panel tracking the agency's progress reported publicly for the first time on June 28, a scant two weeks before Discovery's original launch date, and some in the space industry are wondering if NASA read its own findings carefully. While the report praised NASA for its new high-resolution cameras and emergency plans, it also criticized the agency on several counts—including the fact that "extensive work to develop debris models ... was, until recently, hampered by a lack of rigor in both development and testing." The fuel tank, it noted, still shed too much debris.

NASA's massive redesign project also neglected the PAL ramp, the area that lost foam last week. "We haven't seen a problem in the PAL-ramp area since 1983," an agency spokeswoman told NEWSWEEK. "We didn't think there was an issue there." But James McGuffin-Cawley, a materials engineer at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said the agency was sufficiently "concerned about that part" to test it in a local wind tunnel. And he pointed out that insulating foam has caused NASA difficulties since 1997, when the agency stopped using environmentally unfriendly Freon in its manufacture. In what now seems like a premonition, a NASA engineer reported in 1997 that the newly formulated foam could easily pop off the tank and damage the shuttle's heat-resistant tiles, as it did on Columbia.

Discovery's tiles are a bit dinged up, but overall it appears to have suffered little damage. As for the rest of the fleet, NASA head Michael Griffin said Friday he still hopes for another launch this year. Meanwhile, Discovery, the oldest shuttle still in service, is set to retire in 2010, which means NASA will lose one of its chief symbols of resilience in the face of tragedy. Here's hoping it won't need another one.

Hubble discovers galaxies galore

Space telescope finds wide cosmic diversity

Updated: 1:24 p.m. ET Aug. 4, 2005

The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted of a collection of galaxies with more variety than a candy store.

Some are big; some are small. Some are old; some are new. Some are nearby; some are far away.

But one thing many of the hundreds of galaxies have in common is that they’ve never been seen until Hubble recently captured their light.

The image shown above, which covers a patch of sky only a fraction of the area of a full moon, provides a typical view of the far-off places in the universe. As some of these galaxies are billions of light-years away in space, looking down this long corridor of galaxies is like looking billions of years back in time.

The larger, brighter galaxies in the image are large, fully formed galaxies that are relatively close to us. Several of them are spirals with flat disks that are oriented either edge-on, face-on, or somewhere in between to Hubble. You can also see elliptical galaxies and other more exotic shapes with bars or tidal tails.

The smaller galaxies are actually just further away and are faint because their light has taken billions of years to reach us. So, in fact, the light from these galaxies is coming from a much younger version than what exists – or doesn’t – today.

At least a dozen stars from our own Milky Way Galaxy dot the foreground of this image, the brightest of which is the large red object in the center. Stars are easily spotted by their diffraction spikes – the long cross hair lines that come from their centers. These are an image artifact caused when starlight travels through a telescope’s optical system.

This image is a composite of multiple single field exposures taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys in Sept. 2003. The image took nearly 40 hours to complete – one of the longest exposures ever taken by Hubble.

© 2005 Space.com. All rights reserved.

Penis size is stamped on men's shoes

2005/08/03

Women always recommended their friends to pay attention to men's foot size. The larger the foot size, the longer the reproductive organ of a man. An international group of researchers has recently discovered that the ancient supposition was actually true. Specialists conducted an extensive research among men in many countries including Russia. It turned out that there was a connection between the size of men's shoes and the length of penis. There is a very simple mathematical formula, which regulates the shoes-penis dependence: H=(L+5)/2. L stands for the foot length in centimeters, whereas H designates the sought length of manhood. There can be exceptions from the rule found of course, like it always happens, although the formula proved to be correct with 90 percent of the polled men. Thus, a man wearing shoe size 41 has a 15-centimeter long penis. The chart continues with shoe size 43 - 18.4 centimeters, shoe size 44 - 21.6 centimeters, shoe size 45 - 24.4 centimeters, etc.

The above-mentioned mathematical formula has a physiological significance too: a male fetus develops genitals and extremities at almost one and the same period of time. The growth of one organ stimulates the development of the other.

Researchers are currently studying another formula to calculate the diameter of the reproductive organ: the diameter is said to be linked with the width of man's feet.

Never before seen letters of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein found in London and Tokyo

08/04/2005 10:47

The letters contain a great message from Dr. Einstein to everyone who lives nowadays, when the fighting against nuclear weapons continues

The events, which happened on the different continents, are not only similar in their importance for the history of science but also curiously coincided in terms of time. While working with the catalogue of Isaac Newton's archival documents, researchers discovered several sheets of paper written by brilliant physicist and mathematician himself. They were considered lost for 70 years. Meanwhile in Japan eighty-year-old Nobuko Shinohara announced that she owned several Albert Einstein's letters, which had never been exposed to public.

The biographers of Isaac Newton have known for a long time that he was interested in the works of his contemporaries who were conjuring to convert base metals into gold and silver. After the author of "Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy" (1727) had died, notes on alchemy were left among his papers. However, for some unknown reasons they happened to be out of the whole scientist's written heritage and were bought by some collector for nothing but J15 in July 1936. Nobody heard of the notes since then.

And recently in the Royal Society's archives the researchers unexpectedly came across the papers, which were not registered in the catalogue and were written in English in familiar handwriting. They turned out to be the ones, which were lost for the Newton's biographers after that auction sale in London. Dr. John Young from the Newton Project says that thanks to this discovery we can now find out which alchemy theories were familiar to Newton and who were their authors. At the moment these notes are exhibited at the yearly Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition in London.

Meantime, Nobuko Shinohara, widow of philosopher and German-Japanese translator who died 4 years ago, made a sensational announcement that she has the unpublished letters of Albert Einstein. She told journalists that her husband's correspondence with the author of special relativity theory started in 1953 when Seiei Shinohara sent Einstein a letter sharply criticizing his role in developing nuclear weapons. On June 23 of the same year Albert Einstein wrote an answer in German without any greetings: "I have always condemned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan but I could not do anything at all to prevent that fateful decision."

Mrs. Shinohara says that Einstein's answer to that first letter her husband had written in a fit of anger was definitely full of irritation. But as correspondence continued they established friendly relationships. The couple sent to the famous artist a Japanese doll and several traditional-style drawings. In response they received his big signed photo. Shinohara dreamt of going overseas to discuss various philosophical questions with Einstein but never did that. After Einstein's death in 1955 he would repeat many times that he was missing this wonderful person.

The correspondence helps us understand better the outlook of the scientist who was far from "convicted advocate of principle of non-resistance to evil" as he was sometimes pictured in ideological disputes during the period of the Cold War. Understanding Einstein's moral authority in the world, the Soviet propaganda added him to aggressive opponents of war. However, Einstein's views on this problem were not so primitive.

"The only consolation, it seems to me, in the development of nuclear bombs is that this time the deterrent effect will prevail and the development of international security will accelerate," Einstein wrote in one of his letters to Shinohara.

Still, he makes quite an important reservation: "I didn't write that I was an absolute pacifist but that I have always been a convinced pacifist. That means there are circumstances in which in my opinion it is necessary to use force." "Such a case would be when I face an opponent whose unconditional aim is to destroy me and my people," he said clearly pointing to his Jewish origins and Hitler's racism, which forced him to leave the country. "Therefore, the use of force against Nazi Germany was in my opinion justified and necessary."

The Shinohara-Einstein correspondence broke off in July 1954 several years before the death of the American scientist. Seiei Shinohara died of stroke in 2001 just a year before reaching his 90th birthday. All this time the widow was keeping the letters in her home archive. But this time she has chosen to go public with the letters on the threshold of the 60th anniversary of the world's only nuclear attacks and on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the relativity theory. "I came to conclusion that these letters contain a great message of Dr. Einstein to everyone who lives nowadays, when the fighting against nuclear weapons is going on, said she."

King and his cousin gave me the link.

I for one am quite pleased that Men already have well developed Nipples good Eye Candy to look at and touch.

 

 

     

345370[/snapback]

Oh and lots more.

I'd have to say what it was yesterday.

I got up early and went down to the dock.

And there was a beautiful fog all over the lake.

And the loons were doing their calls to one another.

A mother duck swam by with 6 young chicks, and the huge flock of Canadian geese came up onto shore while I was there, and sat down on the sand for a bit of a rest.

green shorts

blue floral shirt, empire waisted

topaz dangle earrings.

Zahi Hawass wants the Rosetta Stone back—among other things

By Henry Huttinger

Egypt is once again calling for the return of several celebrated antiquities currently on display in museums across Europe and America, including the Rosetta stone, the famous granite slab that was crucial in deciphering hieroglyphics.

The campaign to recuperate priceless artifacts taken by colonial powers is not new. But in recent weeks Zahi Hawass, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities and the public face of archaeology in Egypt, has grown more strident in his demands in a campaign that coincides with a world tour of Egyptology’s favorite son, King Tutankhamun. Hawass has even threatened to shut down British and Belgian archaeological digs in Egypt if the artifacts are not returned.

“The Rosetta stone is one of the most important pieces in the British Museum, but it is more important for Egypt,” Hawass said. “It is an essential piece of our Egyptian national and historical identity and was disgracefully smuggled out of the country.”

The Rosetta stone—a dark slab on which a Ptolemaic decree is written in Greek, hieroglyphics and Demotic script—was discovered in 1799 by the French military. When the French surrendered to British forces in 1801, they tried to smuggle the 1,609-pound stone out of the country. It was intercepted by British troops and promptly delivered to the British Museum, where it has remained on display ever since.

Past efforts to retrieve Egyptian antiquities on display abroad have proven largely ineffective. Speaking at the 250th anniversary of the British Museum in London in 2003, Hawass demanded the return of the Rosetta stone. His call fell on unsympathetic ears, and he expressed his indignation to reporters following the event.

“If the British want to be remembered, if they want to restore their reputation, they should volunteer to return the Rosetta Stone because it is the icon of our Egyptian identity,” he said at the time.

Hawass has appealed to UNESCO to mediate the dispute and has encouraged 21 other countries also seeking the return of plundered artifacts to do the same.

“Our previous attempts at returning the Rosetta stone were ineffectual, but we hope that by organizing an international lobby, we can pressure with greater force the countries and museums in possession of such artifacts,” Hawass said.

In London, British Museum Communications Manager Hanna Bolton told Cairo, “The British Museum has not received an official request for the return of the Rosetta Stone.” Bolton refused to elaborate further, saying she was “confused” by Hawass’ statement.

Even with the backing of UNESCO and the collective voices of two dozen states, Egypt’s ability to convince Western museums to return priceless artifacts taken long before the concept of international property rights is uncertain.

There have, however, been some successes. On 19 July, the Australian government handed over several 2,500-year-old funerary statuettes, a bronze axe head and amulets that were confiscated in Melbourne. The artifacts had been smuggled out of Egypt under false papers as reproductions and were subsequently sold.

The Greek government and numerous international action groups have been campaigning for decades for the return of the Elgin marbles from the British Museum. The collection of marble sculptures was removed from the Parthenon in Athens in 1801 and taken to the British Museum, where it has been housed ever since. The museum has been notoriously unresponsive to Greece’s and other countries’ appeals, perhaps because artifacts such as the Rosetta stone and the Elgin marbles are a major draw for the British Museum’s five million annual visitors.

The principal obstacle facing countries like Egypt and Greece is the lack of any international legal framework that would allow countries to file suit against museums in possession of such artifacts.

UNESCO mainly serves as a negotiating forum. It lacks the teeth necessary to force governments to return plundered antiquities. “It is not an international court of justice or arbitration court,” said Mounir Bouchenaki, assistant director general of UNESCO’s Culture Sector.

Hawass, ever the flamboyant face of Egyptian archeology, is undeterred. He told Cairo, “If UNESCO fails, I will do it without them!”

A yellow bikini with royal blue flowers, but I'm wrapped in a large beach towel to stay warm until I change into my jammies.

I know plenty of people who'd like that shirt.

New book answers why men have nipples

Humorous tome addresses unusual medical questions

Updated: 10:47 a.m. ET Aug. 3, 2005

NEW YORK - Have you ever wondered why your teeth chatter when you’re cold, or if you could really catch a disease from sitting on a toilet seat?

New York physician Billy Goldberg, pestered by unusual questions at cocktail parties and other social gatherings over the years, puts the public’s mind at ease in his book “Why Do Men Have Nipples?”

“It’s really remarkable how often you get accosted,” said Goldberg, 39. “There are the medical questions from family and friends, and then there are the drunk and outrageous questions where somebody wants to drop their pants and show you a rash or something.”

The book, subtitled, “Hundreds of Questions You’d Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini,” (Three Rivers Press), is co-authored by humorist Mark Leyner.

“People tend to know so little about their bodies as compared to their cars or their laptops,” said Leyner, 49, of Hoboken, New Jersey. “When I worked in a pharmacy in Washington, D.C., people would ask me medical questions all the time. I was just a 22-year-old cashier at Rite Aid.”

Chattering teeth is one way the body tries to generate heat.

When the body gets too cold, the area of the brain called the hypothalamus alerts the rest of the body to begin warming up. Shivering, the rapid muscle movement that generates heat, then begins. Teeth chattering represents localized shivering.

During the course of their research, Goldberg and Leyner found reports of gonorrhea, pinworm and roundworm found on toilet seats -- but catching something from it isn’t common.

The authors discovered that an office setting might be worse for your health than toilet seats. Charles Gerba, a microbiologist at the University of Arizona, found the typical office desk harbors some 400 times more disease-causing bacteria than the average toilet seat.

Goldberg had compiled a list of nagging questions for several years before embarking on the book after meeting Leyner. The two met while working on a short-lived ABC-TV medical drama, “Wonderland,” in which Leyner served as a writer, while Goldberg was its medical advisor.

Burning questions

Some of the burning questions answered in the humorous book include “What causes morning breath?” and “Why do beans give you gas?”

Goldberg says morning breath results from anaerobic bacteria, the xerostomia (dry mouth) or the volatile sulfur compounds (which are waste products from the bacteria). Other contributing factors to foul oral odor includes medication, alcohol, sugar, smoking, caffeine, and eating dairy products.

Beans contain high percentages of sugars that our bodies are unable to digest, Goldberg explains. When the sugars make it to the intestines, bacteria go to work and start producing large amounts of gas.

And if you’re ever bitten by a poisonous snake, sucking at the bite to remove the poison, as often shown in the movies and on TV is not only ineffective, but could lead to an infection.

Instead, the bite should be washed with soap and water and immobilized. The bitten area should also be kept lower than the heart. Medical help should be sought immediately.

And why do men have nipples?

While only females have mammary glands, we all start out in a similar way in the embryo, the authors explain. The embryo follows a female template until about six weeks, when the male sex chromosome kicks in.

Men, however, have already developed nipples.

Astronomers finally find hidden black holes

Discovery confirms suspicions that universe is loaded with undetected wells

Space.com

By Robert Roy Britt

Updated: 1:35 p.m. ET Aug. 3, 2005

A host of hidden black holes have been revealed in a narrow region of the sky, confirming astronomers' suspicions that the universe is loaded with many undetected gravity wells.

Black holes cannot be seen directly, because they trap light and anything else that gets too close. But astronomers infer their presence by noting the behavior of material nearby: gas is superheated and accelerated to a significant fraction of light-speed just before it is consumed.

The activity releases X-rays that escape the black hole's clutches and reveal its presence.

The most active black holes eat so voraciously that they create a colossal cloud of gas and dust around them, through which astronomers cannot peer. That sometimes prevents observations of the region nearest the black hole, making it impossible to verify what's actually there.

These hyperactive black holes are called quasars. They can consume the mass of a thousand stars a year and are thought to be precursers to large, normal galaxies. The exist primarily at great distances, seen as they existed when the universe was young.

A few quasars have been identified, but many more are thought to await discovery, based on the total number of X-rays detected in broad sky surveys.

"From past studies using X-rays, we expected there were a lot of hidden quasars, but we couldn't find them," said study leader Alejo Martínez-Sansigre of the University of Oxford, England.

New observations with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope cut through dust to spot quasars blocked by their own clouds, as well as other quasars hidden inside galactic dust.

Spitzer records infrared light, which penetrates dust. It found 21 quasars in a small patch of sky.

"If you extrapolate our 21 quasars out to the rest of the sky, you get a whole lot of quasars," said study team member Mark Lacy of the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. "This means that, as suspected, most super-massive black hole growth is hidden by dust."

The results are detailed in the Aug. 4 issue of the journal Nature.

© 2005 Space.com. All rights reserved

Earth 'air' found on Moon

August 03 2005 at 07:53PM

Paris - The Moon's soil is impregnated with nitrogen that came from Earth's atmosphere, according to Japanese scientists writing on Thursday in Nature, the weekly British science journal.

The researchers, giving a new interpretative spin on analysis of lunar soil brought home by the Apollo missions, believe that the nitrogen escaped from Earth's upper atmosphere as charged atoms.

These ions then washed over the Moon, soon after Earth and its satellite were formed and were close together.

However, this could only have happened before Earth acquired its magnetic field, a phenomenon caused by a "dynamo" of liquid iron that began to circulate in the planet's core, they theorise.

The hypothesis could explain a long-running mystery about the Moon's surface.

The Moon was formed at high temperatures, and should thus be depleted in volatile elements, including nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen and the six "noble" gases, helium, neon, argon, krypton, radon and xenon.

However, all these elements have been found in the lunar soil, which suggests that the source came from elsewhere.

The paper is lead-authored by Minoru Ozima of the Graduate School of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of Tokyo.

Oldest dinosaur embryos found

Thursday, July 28, 2005 Updated at 2:21 PM EDT

Associated Press

Washington — Scientists have uncovered the oldest dinosaur embryos ever found, dating to the beginning of the Jurassic age 190 million years ago.

The find, which has taken years to decipher, is helping them understand the development of a long-necked, plant-eating giant called Massospondylus carinatus.

The discovery is producing three important results, Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto's Mississauga campus said in a telephone interview.

The first, he said, is the “gee whiz, Guinness world record that we have found the oldest dinosaur embryo. That's cool and they are beautiful.”

The second is the hard science, Mr. Reisz said. Scientists are now able to look at the growth pattern of the animal from embryo to adult, because they now have skeletons from various states of its life and can compare changes as the animal grew.

The third area, he said, is the most speculative. Some of the embryos were clearly ready to hatch, he said, but they have no teeth, “and that suggests to us that some form of parental care was required ... not just protecting but active feeding.”

The report by Mr. Reisz and others at the University of Toronto, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, is published in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

James Clark of George Washington University in Washington, who was not part of the research group, concurred that these are the oldest dinosaur embryos yet found.

“The importance of the discovery is that they are from a primitive member of the sauropodomorphs, a large group that includes the largest land animals that ever lived. Sauropodomorph embryos are rare, and the only previously known embryos of this group, from Argentina, are from a much later and more specialized form,” Mr. Clark said.

The find enables researchers to study the animal's growth and development because they now can compare skeletons at different ages.

“Surprisingly, the proportions of the limbs, neck and head suggest that as a baby and young animal this species walked on four legs, but as an adult it was able to walk on two legs some of the time. This kind of change in posture hasn't been documented in any other dinosaur,” Mr. Clark noted.

Indeed, Mr. Reisz and colleagues reported that the Massospondylus hatchling was born four-legged with a relatively short tail, a horizontally held neck, long forelimbs and a huge head. As the animal matured, the neck grew faster than the rest of the body, but the forelimbs and head grew more slowly. The end result was a two-legged animal that looked very different from the four-legged embryo.

Mr. Reisz suggested that the change from four- to two-legged could be a matter of balance related to the development of the animal's neck.

An adult Massospondylus could grow more than five metres long.

The eggs were discovered in South Africa in 1978 during road building in the Golden Gate Highlands National Park, but had not come under study until three years ago, when Mr. Reisz's team began to analyze them.

The research was funded by the University of Toronto, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada, the National Geographic Society and the Paleo-Anthropology Scientific Trust of South Africa.

Royal Seal Unearthed in City of David

12:48 Aug 02, '05 / 26 Tammuz 5765

(IsraelNN.com) A royal seal dating to the period of the First Temple has been found in an archeological dig in the City of David, adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem. The seal’s inscription has the name of Jehudi, son of Shelemiah, one of the top officials in the court of the last Judean king prior to the destruction of the First Temple, King Zedekiah. He is mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah. The seal dates from about 580 B.C.E.

The seal was found at the site which the is the site of the palace of the Judean kings, according to archaeologists under the supervision of Dr. Eilat Mazar of the Hebrew University. Several years ago, another circa-580 B.C.E. royal seal was found in the same site. It had the name of Gemaryahu, son of Shafan, who is also mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah, and was a top official in the court of King Zedekiah's predecessor, King Yehoyachim.

These findings support the description in the Bible of the importance of Jerusalem in Jewish history. The First Temple was the center of Judean political and religious life and is at the center of Jewish claims to historical links to Jerusalem, as repeated by Jews throughout the generations who pray for "Next year in Jerusalem."

Emotional IQ

Your score = 116

What does your score mean?

Your Emotional IQ is excellent - much higher than average. This means that, in general, you are able to express your feelings clearly in appropriate situations. You are optimistic and positive, and adapt well to changed circumstances. You deal effectively with stress, interact with others and communicate adequately. You are comfortable with yourself, and you know and appreciate your talents and strong points as well as your weaknesses. You are able to motivate yourself, find the energy and the strength necessary to complete what you need to do to reach your goals. You are one of the resilient people who bounce back after major drawbacks, survive hardship without bitterness, and still manage to empathize with others. These skills will certainly bring you long-term benefits such as stronger relationships, better health and personal happiness.