Reckless Reality |

A South Florida teen died of a lethal drug overdose in front of a live online webcam audience 12 hours after he started blogging about his plan to commit suicide, an investigator said Friday.

Abraham Biggs, 19, died Wednesday from a toxic combination of opiates and benzodiazepine, a drug used to treat insomnia and depression, said Wendy Crane, an investigator with the Broward County medical examiner’s office. At least one of the drugs was prescribed to him and it’s unclear how he got the others, Crane said.

Some of those watching encouraged Biggs, others tried to talk him out of it, and a few were debating whether the dose he took was lethal, Crane said. It’s unclear how many people were watching. Read the rest of this entry »

CALGARY — Prairie astronomers are investigating following last night’s excitement about a ball of fire observed shooting from the northern sky.

Alan Dyer, an astronomer with Calgary’s Telus World of Science, said sky-watchers will gather all the photographs and videos taken from various observation points to study the mysterious celestial show last night.

People who saw the huge flaming ball reported it possibly fell somewhere between Alberta and Saskatchewan.

About 5:30 p.m., a huge flash of light briefly turned the dark sky into daylight. Read the rest of this entry »

New police officers demonstrate their martial arts skills during a graduation ceremony at a police academy in Najaf, 160 km (99 miles) south of Baghdad, November 20, 2008. About 969 police trainees graduated on Thursday from the police academy in Najaf after two months training, police said.

Needles are used to ensure correct posture during a training session at a military base in Shenyang, Liaoning province (China), Novembre 2008.

WARSAW, Poland – Researchers believe they have identified the remains of Nicolaus Copernicus.

The identification was done by comparing DNA from a skeleton they have found with that of hair retrieved from one of the 16th-century astronomer’s books.

Jerzy Gassowski, an academic at an archeology school in Poland, also says facial reconstruction of the skull his team found buried in a cathedral in Poland closely resembles existing portraits of Copernicus.

Gassowski and Marie Allen, a Swedish DNA expert, told reporters about their findings in Warsaw on Thursday. Read the rest of this entry »

Obese people have the right to two seats for the price of one on flights within Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Thursday.

The high court declined to hear an appeal by Canadian airlines of a decision by the Canadian Transportation Agency that people who are “functionally disabled by obesity” deserve to have two seats for one fare. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, it was revealed that two teams of scientists at the University of California were working on projects which had succeeded, to some extent, in bending light around objects in order to render them invisible.

The idea of being able to prowl around, unseen, concealed by some kind of magic garment was, understandably, more enticing than in-depth analyses of transformation optics.

But the work being done in California is the latest of a number of investigations into the manipulation of light, and specifically the ability to render objects invisible.

Two years ago, mathematicians in the UK, including John Pendry at Imperial College, in London, outlined the calculations required for an optical cloaking device; in April 2007 engineers at Purdue University, in the US, then followed these guidelines to come up with a theoretical arrangement of “nano-needles” that would be able to bend light around an object, in a similar way to water flowing around a stone. Read the rest of this entry »

Bulgaria plans to free thousands of minor offenders in an attempt to relieve its overcrowded jails and ease the work of the legal system, the government said Thursday.

Under a draft law approved by the Socialist-led government, about 3,300 inmates with light sentences or nearing the end of their terms will be released, the cabinet said in a statement.

Criminals serving time for murder or assault will stay in jail. The amnesty also aims at marking the 130th anniversary of the Justice Ministry in 2009 and is in line with prepared amendments to the penal code, the statement said. Read the rest of this entry »

German police searching nationwide for a convicted drug dealer who escaped from jail by hiding in a cardboard box to be taken away for recycling plan to issue an international arrest warrant for him.

A Viersen police spokesman said the 37-year-old Turkish national, whose seven-year prison sentence for drug dealing runs to 2011, had escaped from the Willich prison by hiding in a cardboard box about to be picked up by a recycling truck. Read the rest of this entry »

A South Carolina teenager said she felt like a “fake person” living for 118 days without a heart beating in her chest in-between heart transplants.

D’Zhana Simmons, 14, was released Wednesday from a Miami hospital after being kept alive on a custom-built artificial blood-pumping device.

“You never knew when it would malfunction,” Simmons said, her voice barely above a whisper, at a news conference at the University of Miami/Jackson Memorial Medical Center.

“It was like I was a fake person, like I didn’t really exist. I was just here,” she said, referring to the time without a heart. Read the rest of this entry »

A primate species that looks like a living, breathing version of the Furby electronic toy has been found alive in the forested highlands of an Indonesian island for the first time in more than 70 years, scientists announced Tuesday.

Three specimens of the pygmy tarsier, a nocturnal creature about the size of a small mouse, were trapped and tracked this summer on Mount Rorekatimbo in Lore Lindu National Park in Central Sulawesi, Texas A&M University reported.

Texas A&M anthropologist Sharon Gursky-Doyen, leader of the expedition, said the tarsiers were found on mountainsides above 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) in elevation, amid damp, dangerous terrain. “I actually broke my fibula walking around there,” she told msnbc.com.

Read the rest of this entry »

A Colombian woman has received the world’s first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported on Wednesday.

The success of the operation, performed in June using tissue generated from the woman’s own bone marrow, raises the prospect that transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system, they said.

Doctors work hard to match tissue type when transplanting organs so that the body does not completely reject the new organ, but patients usually have to take immunosuppressants for the rest of their lives.

Claudia Castillo sought help after a case of tuberculosis destroyed part of her trachea — the windpipe connected to the lungs — and left her with breathing difficulties, prone to infections and unable to care for her two children. Read the rest of this entry »

A senior Tokyo police official tasked with keeping the city’s roads clear of drunk drivers has been arrested for driving under the influence, police said on Tuesday.

The deputy inspector, on his way home from a camping site, was caught late on Monday after bumping into another car and veering off the road, said a police official in Ibaraki.

“He smelled of alcohol and he couldn’t walk straight,” the official said.

Local media said the arrested official had been in charge of a campaign to stop drunk driving, handing out stickers to bars and restaurants around the city. Read the rest of this entry »

This 200-year-old vampire killing kit was recently sold at an auction in Missisippi, where the bid ended at a staggering $14,850. “This is a complete kit that comes fully equipped – stakes, mirrors, a gun with silver bullets, crosses, a Bible, holy water, candles and garlic.” The whole kit is housed in a beautifully decorated American walnut carrying-case.

The first ankle replacements of the 1970s were abandoned when they couldn’t withstand the pounding of daily life. A second generation in the ’90s lasted longer but never became really popular.

Now the nation is embarking on a new generation of artificial ankles designed to work more like the joint you’re born with, a move specialists hope finally will offer less pain and more function to thousands who hobble — although it’s too soon to be sure.

“These third-generation prostheses really mimic a natural ankle, which is really what makes them different,” says ankle specialist Dr. Steven L. Haddad of the Illinois Bone and Joint Institute and an orthopedic surgery professor at Northwestern University. Read the rest of this entry »

Multan, Pakistan–Hundreds of Sunni Muslims pack onto a train at the end of the three-day religious congregation of Dawat-e-Islami.

Australia’s kangaroos are genetically similar to humans and may have first evolved in China, Australian researchers said Tuesday.

Scientists said they had for the first time mapped the genetic code of the Australian marsupials and found much of it was similar to the genome for humans, the government-backed Center of Excellence for Kangaroo Genomics said.

“There are a few differences, we have a few more of this, a few less of that, but they are the same genes and a lot of them are in the same order,” center Director Jenny Graves told reporters in Melbourne. Read the rest of this entry »

A young Nepali climber is seeking to popularize a toilet fashioned from a plastic bucket with a lid to promote eco-friendly climbing on Mount Everest.

Hundreds of climbers flock to the world’s tallest peak at 8,850 meters (29,035 feet) every year, with many simply squatting in the open or hunching behind rocks as the Everest base camp has no proper toilet facilities.

Dawa Steven Sherpa, who led an eco-Everest expedition in May to collect trash dumped by previous climbers, said his team used a plastic bucket as well as a gas-impervious bag designed to safely contain and neutralize human waste and keep in odor.

“It is portable and very secure,” Sherpa, 25. Read the rest of this entry »

A sealed space in Egypt’s Great Pyramid may help solve a centuries-old mystery: How did the ancient Egyptians move two million 2.5-ton blocks to build the ancient wonder?

The little-known cavity may support the theory that the 4,500-year-old monument to Pharaoh Khufu was constructed inside out, via a spiraling, inclined interior tunnel—an idea that contradicts the prevailing wisdom that the monuments were built using an external ramp.

The inside-out theory’s key proponent, French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, says for centuries Egyptologists have ignored evidence staring them in the face.

New evidence uncovered about two-thirds of the way up the Great Pyramid supports the inside-out theory, said Houdin, the architect.

At about the 300-foot (90-meter) mark on the northeastern edge lies an open notch. Ducking inside the notch, Houdin entered a small L-shaped room. Read the rest of this entry »

Saturn has given scientists a light show like nothing they’ve ever seen, NASA announced Wednesday.

The Cassini orbiter has captured a unique aurora (shown in blue) on the ringed planet that illuminates much of its northern polar cap.

Auroras occur when charged particles stream across a planet’s magnetic field lines and into its atmosphere.

But they don’t usually light up such a wide area.

“It’s not just a ring of auroras like those we’ve seen at Jupiter or Earth,” Tom Stallard, a scientist at the University of Leichester, U.K., said in a statement. He added that “finding such a bright aurora here is a fantastic surprise.” Read the rest of this entry »

The oldest known burial of a nuclear family, which includes a mother, father, and two boys, has been unearthed in Germany.

The 4,600-year-old family, which was buried together in a deliberate huddle, may have died during a violent massacre.

he find also gives scientists clues about the social organization of the late Stone Age period, which started around 10,000 B.C.

The skeletons were uncovered in 2005 in a group of graves at an archeological site in the Eulau region.

The excavation revealed four separate graves containing 13 bodies—5 adults and 8 children. Within the group, DNA analysis confirmed a family of four, with the two children between 4 to 5 and 8 to 9 years old, respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

A vampire moth in Siberia sucks blood from a researcher’s hand. Scientists have found a previously unknown population of vampire moths that may have evolved from a fruit-eating species. Only slight variations in wing patterns distinguish the Russian population from a widely distributed moth species, Calyptra thalictri, in Central and Southern Europe known to feed only on fruit.

Astronauts aboard the international space station and the newly arrived shuttle Endeavour planned Monday to start unpacking a new toilet and a contraption that purifies urine and sweat into drinkable water at the orbiting outpost.

The main business of the day is unloading a cargo container nicknamed “Leonardo” from space shuttle Endeavour’s belly and attaching it to the international space station. Inside the 21-foot-long container is almost 15,000 pounds of equipment that will allow the space station to expand from three to six crew members next year.

“Things are going exceedingly well,” said LeRoy Cain, chairman of the mission management team. Read the rest of this entry »

GENEVA – Fixing the world’s largest atom smasher will cost at least $25 million Cdn and may take until early summer.

An electrical failure shut down the Large Hadron Collider on Sept. 19, nine days after the $12 billion machine started up with great fanfare.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research recently said Monday that the repairs would be completed by May or early June. Read the rest of this entry »

CALGARY — A driver stopped his car to talk on a cellphone yesterday but picked a bad place to do it.

Despite the efforts of other motorists to warn him he was stopped on a set of C-Train tracks, the man apparently didn’t hear their honks and shouts and was broadsided by the train.

Roberto Gonzalez, 31, and two co-workers were stopped at a red light behind the Toyota Corolla when he saw the car was on the tracks.

“He had his hazards on and I thought, ‘Oh no, I think the train is coming,’ ” said Gonzalez. Read the rest of this entry »