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.