Nitrogen

We already know the naked mole rat is an animal superhero: it is long-lived for an animal of its size, rarely gets cancer and shrugs off some kinds of pain. Now the East African rodent turns out to have a metabolic trick that allows it to survive very low oxygen levels with no apparent ill effects.

To investigate how well naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) tolerate low oxygen concentrations, a team of biologists first put them in a chamber with just 5 per cent oxygen, less than a quarter the amount found in air. Such conditions kill mice within 15 minutes (and we wouldn’t survive either).

But naked mole rats just carry on as normal. The first test was stopped after 5 hours when nothing happened, says Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “We were blown away.”

Next the team put mole rats in pure nitrogen, with no oxygen at all. This kills mice in about a minute. People pass out after a breath or two of pure nitrogen, and would probably die in under 10 minutes.

Miss Italy

A former Miss Italy finalist has gone on national TV three months after acid was thrown in her face, allegedly by an ex-boyfriend.

Gessica Notaro, 27, was badly scarred and is in danger of losing the sight of an eye. Her former boyfriend is in custody.

On the TV show, to be broadcast late on Thursday, the former model took off a scarf covering her face.

"I want you to see what he did to me. This isn't love," she said.

Ms Notaro was initially told by renowned talk show host Maurizio Costanzo that she could keep the scarf on if she preferred. But she said she would rather remove it and that everyone had to see.

Fraud

It looks like Nicki Minaj is claiming the throne as Queen of Rap. Just like male rappers regularly jocky for “King of New York” or the top spot as the GOAT, greatest of all time, it’s hard to deny the success the Trini rapper has had since bursting on the scene in 2010.

After dropping Pink Friday, the Queens-bred wordsmith has had more than 70 songs on Billboard’s Hot 100, and has been the hottest female rapper in the game–at least commercially–for years.

The crown doesn’t come easy, though. Last month she battled with fellow New Yorker Remy Ma for lyrical supremacy, suffering a near-fatal blow when the Bronx lyricist dropped “ShEther.”

Still, Minaj recovered, releasing a trio of tracks that not only took direct aim at Remy Ma, but sent her Barbz into a tizzy as well.

One of those songs, “No Frauds,” was the most full-throated attack on her rival and it’s also her latest video.

Read more at EBONY http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/nicki-minaj-no-frauds-video#ixzz4esMOwuEB
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Box

A Broome woman has been hospitalised after she was stung by an Irukandji jellyfish at Cable Beach on Thursday afternoon.

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It is understood the woman's friend contacted surf lifesavers when the 36-year-old said she was experiencing intense pain and problems breathing.

The popular tourist spot has since been closed to swimmers, and lifesavers will drag stinger nets on Friday morning before re-opening the beach.

Irukandji jellyfish, a type of box jellyfish, are extremely dangerous and potentially lethal, and there have been nearly 70 deaths attributed to the jellyfish in Australia since 1983.

Negin

Negin Khpalwak is in love with music. Her passion becomes immediately clear when she starts talking about how she felt the first time she played the sarod, a string instrument from India, or when she describes the excitement of conducting her orchestra in front of world leaders, like she did this past February at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We played in front of a lot of people in Davos and it was amazing, we were so happy,” says Khpalwak, who lives in Kabul.

But her love for music is a dangerous one: She has received death threats from close family members and from Islamist militants for refusing to put down her conductor’s baton.

At 13, Khpalwak was recruited for the Afghanistan National Institute for Music by Ahmad Naser Sarmast, a musicologist and the founder of the institute. At the time, Khpalwak was living and studying at the Afghan Child Education and Care Organization (AFCECO), an orphanage in Kabul where her father sent her to live at the age of nine because it was the only place she could get an education.

Asteroid

If a big asteroid, like the one whizzing by on Wednesday, slammed into the Earth, ferocious winds of up to 1,000 mph and intense shock waves would kill the most people, according to a study published Wednesday.

Researchers looked at seven effects associated with asteroid impacts — heat, pressure shock waves, flying debris, tsunamis, wind blasts, seismic shaking and cratering — and estimated how deadly each would be. The winds and the shock waves would be the worst.

In fact, these two effects would account for more than 60% of lives lost, said Clemens Rumpf, study lead author and a researcher at the University of Southampton in the U.K. Shock waves from a spike in atmospheric pressure would rupture internal organs, while wind blasts would hurl human bodies and flatten forests.

“This is the first study that looks at all seven impact effects generated by hazardous asteroids and estimates which are, in terms of human loss, most severe,” Rumpf said.

Shoah

Newly released documents provided by the United Nations revealed on Tuesday that the Allied Powers were well aware of the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi regime at least two and a half years earlier than commonly thought, according to The Independent.

A full year before America entered World War II, the West knew that the Third Reich had already massacred two million European Jews and were planning to eliminate five million more in concentration camps spread throughout the continent, the records showed. 

Despite this, the Allied Powers did little to stop the genocide, with one minister in the UK war department, Viscount Cranborne, commenting that Jews were not a special case and that Britain was burdened with too many refugees as it was.

The documents, not seen for more than 70 years, showed at the same time that the Allies, made up of the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, had prepared war crime indictments against Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and his top subordinates.

Kabul

This was never more true than when I looked out at the crowd assembled for the conference,

students and women in business, many of them entrepreneurs.  I told them how many in America thought I was brave to go to Kabul during such a turbulent time.  But the truth is the real courage was within that room.  Those women not only had the tenacity to earn a higher education, but to start businesses and to dream of an Afghanistan that they may one day run themselves.

 It struck me then what it really means to have a “war on women.”  If it exists anywhere, it is certainly there. Both ISIS and the Taliban despise everything that the women I spoke to represent: strong, educated women whose achievements and ambition are not limited to the circumstances in which they were born.

In the Middle East and Southeast Asia, our 16+ year fight against  Al Qaeda, ISIS and the Taliban can be complex and sometimes confusing, and to those of us in the field of counterterrorism it can feel like a game of whack-a-mole. 

Hashtags and platitudes will not stop the enemies of freedom. We’ve seen how ineffective they are. And while the might and power of the American and coalition forces cannot be underestimated, neither should the quiet determination of the women of Afghanistan, who I truly believe will be major contributors to winning the long war.  For these women,  it is not a question of debating foreign policy themes of intervention, realism, globalism, or nation building.  For them it is a very basic question of  their binary fate: defeat the extremists or go back to an Afghanistan where they are faceless and nameless.

Big Red

It’s not every day you see a big red squid alive on a beach in Carteret County. If it were, folks might be a bit alarmed. They are, uh, different-looking when they’re big. Maybe not the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” different. Weird enough, though.

But Winterville resident Carey Walker, who was driving down Portsmouth Island in late March, wasn’t alarmed, just curious, when he saw the unusual specimen. He picked it up, and like any good visitor to Core Banks, cared enough about marine life to put it back in the water, after getting a photo or two, of course.

He never saw the squid come back. But he has wondered what it was. And so have many others who’ve seen the photos.

“It was low tide, and we were coming back to the cabins at about 5:30 p.m., and I just saw this thing out of the corner of my eye down at the edge of the water,” Walker recalled. “I actually went past it. But I wanted to see what it was, so I backed the truck up and got out and saw that it was still alive. So I picked up and we got a couple of pictures, and then I put it back in the water.”

Walker and his companions were there for a few more days, and never saw the squid on the beach again. Nor did anyone else they talked to.

Kavachi

Scientists are using specially constructed underwater robots to study extremely rare sharks that live in one of the harshest environments on planet Earth - inside a submarine volcano.

The incredible sharks were discovered by chance as recently as 2015 in the violent Kavachi volcano in a remote part of the Solomon Islands.

Scientists observing volcanic activity spotted the sharks in the deep sea near the islands in the South Pacific. What first appeared to be an unidentifiable large brown blob was later revealed to be a Pacific sleeper shark. The sighting is the southernmost of the species ever documented.

At first researchers were baffled by what they’d found as they didn’t think anything other than bacteria could live in such extreme conditions.

Komodo

Komodo dragons, fearsome giant lizards found in Indonesia, may be a source of a potent antibiotic. If so, researchers say the agent could be an answer to the growing, global health problem of antibiotic resistance.

Huge, toothy and aggressive, Komodo dragons are surrounded by filth in their daily lives. As a result, Barney Bishop, a biochemist at George Mason University near Washington, said Komodo dragons have developed what he called a "robust" immune system.

Bishop studies molecules produced by the immune system as a front-line defense against infection. That, he said, is the reason for the interest in Komodos.

"They are known to eat carrion; they live in an unsanitary environment; they have been recorded to have up to 57 bacterial strains in their mouths," some of which can cause disease, he said. "Yet the reptiles themselves are not harmed by these bacteria, whether it's in their mouths or wounds inflicted by other lizards."

Stalker

A New York man was detained by the U.S. Secret Service last week for allegedly stalking and harassing former first daughter Malia Obama.

Jair Nilton Cardoso allegedly showed up at Malia Obama's internship in Tribeca and begged her to marry him, according to a new report from New York Daily News. Secret Service agents detained Cardoso, 30, after he stalked the 18-year-old at several locations around New York City.

Agents reportedly recognized him as a longtime stalker of the former first daughters, and revealed he had attempted to get into the White House in the past.

Dramatic

The establishment media is hiding the dramatic news that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has announced a national campaign to eradicate the imported practice of Female Genital Mutilation.

By ignoring the imported FGM practice, the TV networks “are guilty of aiding and abetting violence against women out of a politically correct fueled fear of offending Muslims,” says an April 18 statement by the Media Research Center and ACT for America. 

The federal government’s dramatic policy announcement was made April 13 when officials revealed they had charged a Muslim doctor for performing FGM on two American girls from Minnesota. The doctor and the two girls have immigrant parents from Muslim countries, where Islamic leaders endorse the peculiar institution to keep women subordinate to men. Officials also said they had found additional child victims in Michigan.

The Arsonists

Arson

Two Maryland women have been charged with a hate crime in connection with the burning of a Donald Trump presidential campaign sign, according to fire and police officials.
The State Fire Marshal’s Office said Monday that a second arrest was made in connection with the April 14 incident on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The office has identified the suspect as Joy M. Shuford, 19, of Owings Mills, Md.

Shuford surrendered to authorities one day after the incident and faces multiple charges including second-degree arson, malicious destruction of property and the commission of a hate crime.

The second suspect has been identified as D'Asia R. Perry, 19, of Baltimore. Perry was found on the University of Maryland Eastern Shore campus and taken into custody. She faces 14 charges in connection with the incident including arson and commission of a hate crime, according to police.

Tiger Stripes

According to NASA’s official press release, they made the discovery using the Cassini space probe which has been studying the icy surface of Saturn's moon. In Saturn’s sixth largest moon, Enceladus, Cassini spacecraft detected four “tiger stripes” near its south pole, which spews out water. The spacecraft found an abundance of hydrogen molecules in the water plumes. 

That's not all, the Cassini mission also found evidence for a subsurface ocean underneath the icy crust of the moon.

Giant Plant

After she captures her opponents in “Injustice 2,” Poison Ivy brings back memories of the film “Little Shop of Horrors” because she throws her enemy to a giant plant monster which eats her foes, GameRant reports. The gaming website notes the villainess’ excellence in almost all aspects of the game’s combat system. She releases toxic blasts by using long- to mid-range projectile, successive punches and kicks, close-range grapples that stun and incapacitate her foes, and assists based on fauna which adds multipliers to combos.
Radical Botanical Biochemist
According to the new trailer for “Injustice 2,” Poison Ivy is Dr. Pamela Isley. She used to be an innovative and radical botanical biochemist whose primary goal was to make the world a safe planet for plant life to flourish, PlayStation Lifestyle reports. She is one of the 27 characters so far introduced by the studio. However, more characters are expected to be introduced before the new game would be released on May 16 on PlayStation 4 and other platforms.

Leader

North Korea's state television aired footage of a choral performance attended by Kim Jong Un, the elder Kim's grandson, on Sunday, a day after a huge military parade in Pyongyang, which also marked the 105th birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung.

The singing was followed by footage of its test-firing of a missile in February which, in the video, was joined by other missiles shooting into sky, passing over the Pacific and exploding in giant balls of flames in the United States.

The video ended with a picture of the American flag in flames, overlapping row after row of white crosses in a cemetery.

"When the performance was over, all the performers and participants in the military parade broke into enthusiastic cheers of "hurrah!" state run KCNA news agency said.

State TV footage showed leader Kim smiling and waving in return.

"The Dear Supreme Leader waved back to them and congratulated the artistes on their successful performance," KCNA said.

Golem

Golem 1927's critically acclaimed Golem is to return for a tour of the UK, Europe and Asia. The production, a mix of live performance, music, film and animation, is about a normal man whose life is changed when he buys a creature to help with his daily affairs. 

Written and directed by Suzanne Andrade, Golem is loosely based on Gustav Meyrink's dark thriller Der Golem and challenges and satirises a world increasingly obsessed with technology. 

After its world premiere at the Salzburg Festival in 2014, it ran for two months at the Young Vic before transferring to the West End. It has since toured the world and won a Critics' Circle Award for design in 2015.

In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being that is magically created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing.

The Golem is a novel written by Gustav Meyrink in 1914. First published in serial form as Der Golem in 1913-14 in the periodical Die weissen Blätter, The Golem was published in book form in 1915 by Kurt Wolff, Leipzig. 

Ferryland

The town of Ferryland has a prime view of Iceberg Alley, so called because from spring to September, icebergs regularly break off in the Arctic and float down past the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Over 600 icebergs have already floated into the North Atlantic this year, compared to a total of 687 over the whole season. Experts believe that this year’s bumper crop is down to strong counter-clockwise winds, as well as global warming.

Although most of the icebergs pass happily down the coast, Ferryland’s new visitor appears to be grounded, mayor Adrian Kavanagh told The Canadian Press. And while the coast alongside it was packed over the weekend, if, as predicted, it sticks around, the number of visitors is expected to grow.