Did You Know.....

[Warph]

Walking to America
By Jeffrey Lord on 7.3.12 @ 6:11AM

A Fourth of July remembrance of one boy's journey to the land of his dreams.

Schmuel knew.

Schmuel was Schmuel Gelbfisz, born in Warsaw, Poland, in July 1879.

He was the eldest child of Hannah and Aaron Gelbfisz, who were Hasidic Jews. The family had lived in Poland for generations. Schmuel was the oldest of six children.

Two years after Schmuel was born, the Russian Czar Alexander II was assassinated and the blame was laid -- falsely -- to Jews. The Russian pogroms began. Tens of thousands of Jews fled to Warsaw, then an outpost of the Russian Empire. While this provided a safe haven of sorts, pretty soon the wave of anti-Semitism that had so murderously swamped Russia itself spread to the Russian-ruled Poland. Polish Jews were subjected to violence, to restrictive laws and higher taxes specifically targeted at Jews.

The impoverished Gelbfisz family of eight lived in two rooms in the Jewish sector of Warsaw, survived on a diet of potatoes, frequently eating nothing but potatoes for an entire week. Schmuel would later remember his Polish childhood as both constantly fearful -- of anti-Jewish violence -- and "poor, poor, poor."

Aaron, the father, died at 43 when Schmuel was 15. Realizing his mother would survive with the support of his brothers and sisters, Schmuel began to nurse what he called a "fantasy."

"When I was a kid," Schmuel said much later in life, "the only place I wanted to go was to America. I had heard them talking about America, about how people were free in America.... Even then America, actually only the name of a faraway country, was a vision of paradise."

And so, at the age of 16, with his mother's blessing and nothing but the clothes on his back and a small amount of coins in his pocket, Schmuel left for America the only way he knew how.

He walked.

First he walked 300 miles to the Oder River. There he used some of his coins to get someone to ferry him across. Schmuel then walked another 200 miles to Hamburg, Germany. There he stayed for a bit, cried off and on, found a meager job through a Warsaw family that had long ago emigrated to Hamburg. Schmuel learned the trade of glove making -- and the head of the Jewish family who employed him canvassed the Jewish community to help raise the eighteen schillings Schmuel needed to afford passage on a boat train to London.

In London, still poor, Schmuel existed by stealing food and eating scraps, sleeping in the bushes of Hyde Park. Finally, he started walking again, this time 120 miles from London to the English Midlands. Finally, exhausted, he walked into Birmingham where he located his mother's sister and her husband. He was welcomed with open arms -- but they had no money to support a boy in his late teens. Scrawny, underweight, Schmuel was hired as a blacksmith's apprentice. He was fired, too weak to do the job. He tried again -- and again and again and again -- at jobs that, in industrial Birmingham, inevitably required backbreaking physical labor. Schmuel was fired from all of them. At night, in his aunt's home, he sobbed at his continued failures.

Not knowing what else to do, the aunt handed him over to another set of relatives, one of whom told him it would be necessary to Anglicize his name if he were to distance himself from his thoroughly Jewish heritage. Schmuel Gelbfisz was now known as Samuel Goldfish, and his relatives began calling him "Sam."

During this period, Great Britain was celebrating Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee -- marking the monarch's 60th year on throne. Just as Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee would be celebrated in June of 2012, Britain was awash in pomp and splendor. The impoverished Sam Goldfish, now selling sponges and not doing well with his sales, quietly took note of it all -- the displays of wealth and comfort, of fine clothes, perfect speech, the careful attention to physical appearance and the air of self-confidence from those associated with the British upper classes. He was so close to it all -- yet so far.

While Sam spoke some Polish and could read and write Hebrew, his mother tongue was Yiddish. That had to change, he decided, so he began to study English. He came across one particular quote in his English reader that would stick with him. The quote was from Benjamin Franklin, who had written it in an essay Franklin titled "Information for Those Who Would Remove to America." The quote?

America, where people do not inquire of a stranger, "What is he?" but "What can he do?"

America. A place where people would ask of him not "who are you" but "what can you do."

Sam made up his mind to keep going. In desperation, Sam simply left Birmingham and started walking yet again. To Liverpool, for a boat to America. And, so goes the tale, he took with him the money he had from selling sponges. A polite way of saying that he simply skipped town with the money.

On a passenger list -- "Schedule A --Names and Description of Passengers" -- there is a listing for a 19-year old laborer born in "Russia" -- i.e., Warsaw, Poland. Sam, whose English was rudimentary and handwriting poor, was marked down as "Sam Goldberg," passenger number 90 with the destination of "New York." On November 26, 1898, the Dominion Line's ship Labrador, with Sam Goldfish (Goldberg) on board, slipped away from the Liverpool docks, headed out into the Irish Sea, stopped briefly in Londonderry, Ireland, to pick up more passengers and finally headed due west -- to Canada.

Sam sailed steerage for fifteen dollars, the money giving him either an "iron berth, a hammock or... (a) cot." His clothes were his sheets and blanket. The belly of the Labrador was both airless and badly lit, the combination of little air and light with the storm-tossed North Atlantic in winter making most of the passengers sick.

At three-fifteen in the afternoon of December 4, 1898, the Labrador sailed into the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Whether "Sam Goldberg" jumped ship that day, or stayed aboard while the Labrador sailed on to St. John, New Brunswick, is unclear. What is clear is that Sam walked the rest of the way to his destination. On January 1, 1899, records his Declaration of Naturalization, he is believed to have crossed the U.S. border somewhere in the vicinity of Milltown, Maine. Yes, it is possible Sam even crossed illegally -- the records are incomplete. But quickly enough, after the requisite time, he made himself known to authorities and became, eventually, an American citizen.

The snow on the ground when Sam crossed the border that January 1st was deep, the air freezing cold. Sam would later recall, writes his biographer, that upon entering America "he literally got down on his hands and knees and kissed the ground. He did not know a soul within four thousand miles."

On he walked, trudging "through more snow than New England had seen in ten years. Sometime in late January 1899, he arrived in Manhattan, his head full of the stuff on which American dreams are made."

Sam had no money. But at last he was on his way to becoming what he had always dreamed of becoming.

An American.

THERE'S MORE to Sam's story. Much more. You might recognize Sam's name today not as Schmuel Gelbfisz or Sam Goldfish or Sam Goldberg but as Samuel Goldwyn. That's right, the Samuel Goldwyn of the legendary Hollywood movie studio MGM -- Metro Goldwyn Mayer. And of Samuel Goldwyn Productions. The Sam Goldwyn who made his way from New York to California to become in the 1930s the King of Hollywood. Author Scott Berg tells Sam's story in his book Goldwyn: A Biography. Out of companies bearing Sam's name poured film after film after film in the Great Depression lionizing America and American values.

It was Sam's company that made Mickey Rooney a star in that classic of American stories, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It was Sam's company that took Mickey Rooney from Huckleberry Finn to the serial of films immortalizing an American boy who lived with his All-American family in the All-American town of Carvel, Idaho -- Andy Hardy. It was Sam's company that told the tale to Americans of Dorothy (Judy Garland) believing "there's no place like home" in The Wizard of Oz. It was Sam's company that distributed Gone With the Wind.

In 1940, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, whom Sam was supporting over FDR's third-term bid, saw Sam's film The Pride of the Yankees. The film starred Gary Cooper as the fatally stricken New York Yankee great Lou Gehrig. Instead of simply focusing on Gehrig's baseball career, the film opened with the story of Lou Gehrig's immigrant parents, featuring Lou's mother, a cook who worked at a Columbia University fraternity to pay for her son's education so he could become an engineer. Gehrig became a baseball player instead -- when his mother needed an operation and he accepted an invitation to play for the Yankees, using his signing money to pay for her operation.

Said Willkie to Sam, both acutely aware that Europe was already engulfed in a war that was on the verge of bringing in America: "Sam, you have done something very important here. You help democracy everywhere by showing what opportunities there are in America." Replied the man who had trekked across half of Europe to realize his dream of coming to America:

"Why shouldn't I -- who knows better than I do the opportunities in America?"

The opportunities in America.

In 1971, Sam Goldwyn was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the President of the United States.

Tomorrow will be the 236th Fourth of July since the first in 1776. It will be the 223rd Fourth of July since the United States was formed under the Constitution in 1789.

The appalling decision on Obamacare not withstanding, millions of Americans still understand in their bones not only what America was meant to be -- but what it can be again.

In 1979, my former boss, the late Jack Kemp, wrote a book called An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's. Billed at the time by his publisher as Kemp's "plan for a return to prosperity," Kemp quoted from his friend the writer and free-market champion George Gilder. Gilder had summed it up this way in a prescient article for Harper's in 1978 entitled "Prometheus Bound." Remember that in 1978 the Jimmy Carter presidency was already marking its depressing mid-point that would set the stage for Ronald Reagan and a rebirth of the American spirit. Neither Kemp nor Gilder, of course, could foresee the election of Reagan and what was to come. But without doubt both men knew their country well, and Gilder's words as cited back in 1979 are worth recalling this Fourth of July in 2012 in the Age of Obama. Wrote Gilder as quoted by Kemp:

"The most dire and fatal hubris for any leader is to cut his people off from providence, from the miraculous prodigality of chance, by substituting a closed system of human planning. Innovation is always unpredictable, and thus an effect of faith and freedom.

"In the United States today we are facing the usual calculus of impossibility, recited by the familiar aspirants to a master plan. It is said we must abandon economic freedom because our frontier is closed: because our biosphere is strained, because our resources are running out, because our technology is perverse, because our population is dense, because our horizons are closing in. We walk, it is said, in a shadow of death, depleted air, poisoned earth and water, a fallout of explosive growth showering from the clouds of our future in a quiet carcinogenic rain. In this extremity, we cannot afford the luxuries of competition and waste and freedom. We have reached the end of the open road; we are beating against the gates of an occluded frontier. We must tax and regulate and plan, redistribute our wealth and ration our consumption, because we have reached the end of openness.

"But quite to the contrary, these problems and crises are in themselves the new frontier, are themselves the mandate for individual and corporate competition and creativity, are themselves the reason why we cannot afford the consolations of planning and stasis.

"...To many people, the past seems inevitable and the future impossible. History is seen to have arisen not from unpredictable flows of genius and heroism, but more or less inevitably, from preordained patterns of natural resources and population. For those who doubt the decisive role of genius, courage, and chance in history, the future always appears impossible; they can see no way for free nations to escape a fate of decline, decay, and coercion, as their growing populations press against a closing frontier."

Jack Kemp picked it up from there, closing by saying:

The truth is, no frontier need be closed for long. Yes, the rich, bountiful earth is limited in what it can provide, but there are no natural bounds to the human spirit and its accomplishments, except insofar as we are cramped by human timidity and fear or by human institutions. In the 1980's, the first decade of the American renaissance, these are the bounds we must pit ourselves against, so it can be said of our nation in our time, "To her, and to her especially, belongs the future."

Jack Kemp and George Gilder presumably never met Sam Goldwyn, who died a wealthy, fabulously successful old man in 1974. At the age of 95.

But both men -- and Kemp's plan was the basis for the success of "Reaganomics" that produced 21 million jobs in the Reagan-era -- surely would have understood the boy Schmuel Gelbfisz had they met him when the sixteen year-old began walking...walking...walking.

Walking out of a past filled with poverty and religious persecution. Walking literally step-by-step-by-step to a dazzling future that would bring a renaissance to his own life -- and through his life's work in movies, wonderfully warm memories to millions. Not to mention jobs to all the thousands of people who made those movies.

Schmuel Gelbfisz was walking because without ever having read the Declaration of Independence he knew -- he knew -- that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."

So Schmuel Gelbfisz would walk to that place.

He would walk to America.

He made it. And, if the master planners of 2012 will only get out of the way, so will the rest of us be able to keep walking to our own American futures.

Happy Fourth of July.

[Judy Harder]

What a wonderful testimony. Here is a great lesson and hopefully or (sadly) there can be another boy dreaming of life in America.!
I say sadly, only because of the struggle our America is going through now.

I know it is history repeating itself....but dreams are able to come true..........with Faith all things are possible.
Thanks Warph, you did it again.

[Warph]

                 

...that, Holy crash landing Batman! The crime-fighting caped crusader could fly but if he did, he would smash into the ground and probably die, a group of British physics students have calculated.

Dashing the dreams of comic fans across the world, four students from the University of Leicester said that while Batman could glide using his cape as he does in the 2005 film "Batman Begins", his landing would almost certainly prove fatal.

The superhero is back in cinemas later this month in "The Dark Knight Rises" and they suggested Batman should go shopping before trying a similar attempt to become airborne over Gotham City.

"If Batman wanted to survive the flight, he would definitely need a bigger cape," said David Marshall, 22, one of the students in the final year of their four-year Master of Physics degree.
"Or if he preferred to keep his style intact he could opt for using active propulsion, such as jets to keep himself aloft."

In a paper titled "Trajectory of a falling Batman", the group argued that if he jumped from a 150-metre (492-foot) high building, the 4.7 meter (15-foot) wingspan of Batman's cape would allow him to glide 350 meters (1148 feet).

However, he would reach a speed of 68 miles per hour (109 km per hour) before hitting the ground at a life-threatening speed of 50 mph.

[Warph]

...that there are Ten things you don't know about the Milky Way Galaxy. So you've lived here all your life — in fact, everyone has — but what do you really know about the Milky Way galaxy? Sure, you know it's a spiral, and it's 100,000 light years across. And of course, BABloggees are smarter, more well-read, and better looking than the average population, but be honest: do you know all ten of these things? Really?

Liar.

So let's see if these really are Ten Things You Don't Know About the Milky Way Galaxy:


           


1) It's a barred spiral.

You might know that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, perhaps the most beautiful galaxy type. You've seen 'em: majestic arms sweeping out from a central hub or bulge of glowing stars. That's us. But a lot of spirals have a weird feature: a rectangular block of stars at the center instead of a sphere, and the arms radiate away from the ends of the block. Astronomers call this block a bar, and, you guessed it: we have one.

Is fact, ours is pretty big. At 27,000 light years end-to-end, it's beefier than most bars. Of course, space is a rough neighborhood. Who wouldn't want a huge bar located right downtown?

By the way, the image above is not a photograph, it's a drawing– there's no way to get outside the galaxy and take a picture like this looking back. It would be a loooong walk home! Click the picture to embiggen and get more details (which is true for all the pictures in this post).


2) There's a supermassive black hole at its heart.

At the very center of the Galaxy, right at its very core, lies a monster: a supermassive black hole.

We know it's there due to the effect of its gravity. Stars very near the center — some only a few dozen billion kilometers out — orbit the center at fantastic speeds. They scream around their orbits at thousands of kilometers per second, and their phenomenal speed betrays the mass of the object to which they're enthralled. Applying some fairly basic math, it's possible to determine that the mass needed to accelerate the stars to those speeds must tip the cosmic scales at four million times the mass of the Sun! Yet in the images, nothing can be seen. So what can be as massive as 4,000,000 Suns and yet not emit any light?

Right. A black hole.

Even though it's huge, bear in mind that the Galaxy itself is something like 200 billion solar masses strong, so in reality the black hole at the center is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of the Galaxy. And we're in no danger of plunging into it: after all, it's 250,000,000,000,000,000 kilometers away.

It's thought now that a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy forms along with the galaxy itself, and in facts winds blown outward as material falls in affects the formation of stars in the galaxy. So black holes may be dangerous, but it's entirely possible the Sun's eventual birth — and the Earth's along with it — may have been lent a hand by the four million solar mass killer so far away.


3) It's a cannibal.

Galaxies are big, and have lots of mass. If another, smaller galaxy passes too close by, the bigger galaxy can rip it to shreds and ingest its stars and gas.

The Milky Way is pretty, but it's savage, too. It's currently eating several other galaxies. They've been ripped into long, curving arcs of stars that orbit the center of the Milky Way. Eventually they'll merge completely with us, and we'll be a slightly larger galaxy. Ironically though, the galaxies add their mass to ours, making it more likely we'll feed again. Eating only makes galaxies hungrier.


4) We live in a nice neighborhood...

The Milky Way is not alone in space. We're part of a small group of nearby galaxies called — get ready to be shocked — the Local Group. We're the heaviest guy on the block, and the Andromeda galaxy is maybe a bit less massive, though it's actually spread out more. The Triangulum galaxy is also a spiral, but not terribly big, and there are other assorted galaxies dotted here and there in the Group. All together, there are something like three dozen galaxies in the Local Group, with most being dinky dwarf galaxies that are incredibly faint and difficult to detect.


5) ... and we're in the suburbs.

The Local Group is small and cozy, and everyone makes sure their lawns are mowed and houses painted nicely. That's because if you take the long view, we live in the suburbs. The big city in this picture is the Virgo Cluster, a huge collection of about 2000 galaxies, many of which are as large or larger than the Milky Way. It's the nearest big cluster; the center of it is about 60 million light years away. We appear to be gravitationally bound to it; in other words, we're a part of it, just far-flung. The total mass of the cluster may be as high as a quadrillion times the mass of the Sun.


6) You can only see 0.000003% percent of it.

When you got out on a dark night, you can see thousands of stars. But the Milky Way has two hundred billion stars in it. You're only seeing a tiny tiny fraction of the number of stars tooling around the galaxy. In fact, with only a handful of exceptions, the most distant stars you can readily see are 1000 light years away. Worse, most stars are so faint that they are invisible much closer than that; the Sun is too dim to see from farther than about 60 light years away... and the Sun is pretty bright compared to most stars. So the little bubble of stars we can see around us is just a drop in the ocean of the Milky Way.


7) 90% of it is invisible.

When you look at the motions of the stars in our galaxy, you can apply some math and physics and determine how much mass the galaxy has (more mass means more gravity, which means stars will move faster under its influence). You can also count up the number of stars in the galaxy and figure out how much mass they have. Problem is, the two numbers don't match: stars (and other visible things like gas and dust) make up only 10% of the mass of the galaxy. Where's the other 90%?

Whatever it is, it has mass, but doesn't glow. So we call it Dark Matter, for lack of a better term (and it's actually pretty accurate). We know it's not black holes, dead stars, ejected planets, cold gas — those have all been searched for, and marked off the list — and the candidates that remain get pretty weird (like WIMPs). But we know it's real, and we know it's out there. We just don't know what it is. Smart people are trying to figure that out, and given the findings in recent years, I bet we're less than a decade from their success.


8 ) Spiral arms are an illusion.

Well, they're not an illusion per se, but the number of stars in the spiral arms of our galaxy isn't really very different than the number between the arms! The arms are like cosmic traffic jams, regions where the local density is enhanced. Like a traffic jam on a highway, cars enter and leave the jam, but the jam itself stays. The arms have stars entering and leaving, but the arms themselves persist (that's why they don't wind up like twine on a spindle).

Just like on highways, too, there are fender benders. Giant gas clouds can collide in the arms, which makes them collapse and form stars. The vast majority of these stars are faint, low mass, and very long-lived, so they eventually wander out of the arms. But some rare stars are very massive, hot, and bright, and they illuminate the surrounding gas. These stars don't live very long, and they die (bang!) before they can move out of the arms. Since the gas clouds in the arms light up this way, it makes the spiral arms more obvious.

We see the arms because the light is better there, not because that's where all the stars are.


9) It's seriously warped.

The Milky Way is a flat disk roughly 100,000 light years across and a few thousand light years thick (depending on how you measure it). It has the same proportion as a stack of four DVDs, if that helps.

Have you ever left a DVD out in the Sun? It can warp as it heats up, getting twisted (old vinyl LPs used to be very prone to this). The Milky Way has a similar warp!

The disk is bent, warped, probably due to the gravitational influence of a pair of orbiting satellite galaxies. One side of the disk is bent up, if you will, and the other down. In a sense, it's like a ripple in the plane of the Milky Way. It's not hard to spot in other galaxies; grab an image of the Andromeda galaxy and take a look. At first it's hard to see, but if you cover the inner part you'll suddenly notice the disk is flared up on the left and down on the right. Andromeda has satellite galaxies too, and they warp its disk just like our satellite galaxies warp ours.

As far as I can tell, the warp doesn't really affect us at all. It's just a cool thing you may not know about the Milky Way. Hey, that would make a good blog entry!


10) We're going to get to know the Andromeda galaxy a lot better.

Speaking of Andromeda, have you ever seen it in the sky? It's visible to the naked eye on a clear, dark, moonless night (check your local listings). It's faint, but big; it's four or more degrees across, eight times the apparent size of the Moon on the sky.

If that doesn't seem too big, then give it, oh, say, two billion years. Then you'll have a much better view.

The Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way are approaching each other, two cosmic steam engines chugging down the tracks at each other at 200 kilometers per second. Remember when I said big galaxies eat small ones? Well, when two big galaxies smack into each other, you get real fireworks. Stars don't physically collide; they're way too small on this scale. But gas clouds can, and like I said before, when they do they form stars. So you get a burst of star formation, lighting up the two galaxies.

In the meantime, the mutual gravity of the two galaxies draw out long tendrils from the other, making weird, delicate arcs and filaments of stars and gas. It's beautiful, really, but it indicates violence on an epic scale.

Eventually (it takes a few billion years), the two galaxies will merge, and will become, what, Milkomeda? Andromeway? Well, whatever, they form a giant elliptical galaxy when they finally settle down. In fact, the Sun will still be around when this happens; it won't have yet become a red giant. Will our descendants witness the biggest collision in the history of the galaxy?

That's cool to think about. Incidentally, I talk about this event a whole lot more, and in a lot more detail, in my upcoming book Death from the Skies! In case you forgot about that.

Until then, these Ten Things should keep you occupied. And of course, I only wanted to list ten things so I could give this post the cool title. But if there's something you find surprising about the Milky Way, leave a comment! I don't want to hog all the fun.

[Warph]

...that this was written by a dog.


20 Things You Didn't Know About... Dogs The first ones, the ones that share bacteria with people, and the ones that look like Groucho Marx.


1  The sultry "dog days of summer" get their name from ancient astronomers who noticed that those days coincide with the period when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun.

2  Bad astronomy: Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but it is just one 10-billionth as bright as the sun and has no effect on our weather.

3  Nerd. Fido will touch his nose to a computer screen if it has a picture of a dog on it but not if it shows a landscape, University of Vienna researchers have found.

4  Austrian scientists have also demonstrated that a dog seems to feel "inequity aversion" when another dog gets a better treat as a reward. The envious dog plays hard to get.

5  South Korean scientists cloned four beagle puppies with a gene that produces a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light. (The red color is visible in the pups' bellies and nails even under normal light, but it doesn't glow.)

6  Maybe they should have offered a Day-Glo option. BioArts, a California company, recently closed its dog-cloning business. One reason: The market was too small.

7  Another problem: "unpredictable results," according to BioArts. In one case, the clone of a black-and-white dog came out looking greenish yellow.

8  The number of dogs worldwide is estimated at 400 million, roughly the human population of the United States and Mexico combined.

9  They really do look like their owners. In a study conducted at England's Bath Spa University, people matching photos of dog owners and dogs chose the right breed (out of three) more than half the time.

10  Half of all owners allow their dogs to lick them on the face, but only 10 percent share E. coli strains with their pets. The real factor in germ transmission may be whether an owner washes his hands after playing fetch.

11  Fighting a hangover by drinking "the hair of the dog that bit you" may have originated in an ancient belief that ingesting the hair of a dog that literally bit you could guard against infection.

12  A 2006 study showed that household dogs with minimal training can smell early- and late-stage lung and breast cancers. Swedish oncologists also found that dogs can distinguish among types of ovarian cancer.

13  A dog's nose has roughly 220 million olfactory receptors, 40 times as many as humans have.

14  Penn State engineers are trying to design an artificial sniffer based on the fluid mechanics and odorant transport of the canine nose.

15  Dogs can hear frequencies up to 45,000 Hz, about twice as high as humans can. But they're not the champs: Porpoises go to 150,000 Hz.

16  A team led by UCLA biologists concluded that small dogs descended from Middle Eastern gray wolves more than 12,000 years ago. The connection was traced through a growth-factor gene mutation not seen in larger dogs.

17  Much older canid remains have been found in Germany, Russia, and Belgium, dating as far back as 31,000 years.

18  The reference genome for doggie DNA studies is the boxer, a breed that has an unusually high degree of genetic uniformity.

19  So that's why schnauzers look like Groucho. According to scientists at the National Human Genome Research Institute, an alteration in one gene, RSPO2, gives dogs wiry eyebrows and mustaches.

20  A variant of another gene, FGF5, produces long, silky coats, and curly hair comes from a mutation in KRT71. All three variants produce a coat like that of the Portuguese water dog adopted by the First Family.

[Warph]

     

...that the 700th issue of Superman went on sale June 23, 2010. The Man of Steel has incredible superpowers, of course.

Meanwhile, stories of a mother picking up a car to free her trapped child seem to be more urban legend than reality. But the human body is capable of some mind-blowing feats that could cause even Superman to do a double take.

But rather than some strange powers gleaned from Earth's sun, some scientists argue that bursts of adrenaline during stressful situations give people somewhat paranormal, superhuman abilities, also referred to as hysterical strength. Others suspect humans are always capable of these great feats - it just takes a crisis for them to actually perform them.


Some Mind-Blowing Super-Human Feats:

Surviving Freezing Temperatures - Nicknamed the "Iceman," Wim Hof is a Dutch adventurer and daredevil who ran an Arctic marathon at minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 29 degrees Celsius) – while shirtless. He also holds the world record for being immersed in ice for an hour and 44 minutes.

In 2007, he was able to survive for 72 minutes outdoors at the North Pole while wearing nothing but shorts. Hof says that he is able to control his body temperature by using the Tantric practice of Tummo, which is practiced by Yogi monks in Tibet, and involves the practice of focusing on the body's energies turning them into heat.


Balancing a Car - Think lifting an SUV is impressive? John Evans can actually balance a car on his head! The 6-foot-6-inch (2-meter) tall, 343-pound (155-kilogram) British man managed to balance a 352-pound (159-kg) mini car on top of his head for 33 seconds – without using his hands.

Calling himself a professional "head balancer," Evans has already broken 25 records in 11 Guinness World Records categories. He'd previously balanced motorcycles, boats, washing machines, people and beers kegs, but the car is by far his heaviest – and most dangerous – record-breaking attempt to date. Evans credits his neck, which has an astonishing width of 24 inches (60 cm), with allowing him to achieve his balancing acts.


Lifting a Car - A standard example of superhuman strength, the "lifting a car to free someone" story seems rooted in myth. In fact, comic book artist Jack Kirby once said in an interview that he got the idea for the Incredible Hulk after seeing a mother lift a car off her child, although the legitimacy of his story has been disputed. But there have been reported cases of this phenomenon.

In 2008, Chris Hickman, a Florida firefighter, came to the scene of a car crash in which an older model Chevrolet Blazer had flipped and landed on its side, pinning the driver's arm between the vehicle and the pavement. Hickman then lifted the SUV about 12 inches (30 cm) off the ground, giving the other firefighters the opportunity to rescue trapped driver, officials said in news reports of the incident.


Twisting Metal - Another Guinness World Records holder, Sakinat Khanapiyeva, is the strongest grandma in the world. The 76-year-old from Dagestan, Russia, can lift a 52-pound (24-kg) dumb-bell, break horseshoes and twist 2-inch (5-cm) steel rods. She first discovered her strength when she was 10 years old, after she was able to move a 661-pound (299-kg) container of grain, which is equivalent to the weight of four grown men, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.


50 Marathons in 50 Days - Calling it the 50/50/50, Los Angeles native Dean Karnazes ran 50 marathons in 50 U.S. states in 50 consecutive days, beginning with the Lewis and Clark Marathon in St. Louis on Sept. 17, 2006, and finishing with the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5.

Karnazes also ran 135 miles (217 km) nonstop across Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in temperatures reaching 120 degrees F (48 degrees C), and a marathon to the South Pole at minus 40 degrees F (minus 40 degrees C).

"It hurts so much and your body is saying stop, and you kind of override those mechanisms and force yourself to go on," Karnazes told news sources.


Scaling Buildings - Known as the "the human spider," Alain Robert has climbed most of the tallest skyscrapers in the world without a rope or any climbing equipment. Using only his hands and climbing shoes, Robert scales landmark buildings, including the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Opera House and the Sears Tower. More than once, he was arrested for illegally scaling a building while wearing a Spider-Man costume, causing him to be arrested and expelled from China.

Many of his climbs last for over an hour and provide him no chance to rest until he reaches the top. His training, physical conditioning and technique allow Robert to climb by holding on to the small protrusions of building walls and windows, such as window ledges and frames, he claims.


Surviving a Lightning Strike - Between the ages of 30 and 65, Roy Cleveland Sullivan was struck by lightning seven times - and survived them all. During that time, Sullivan averaged being struck by lightning once every five years, while the average person's odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are one in 750,000. However, Sullivan increased his chances by working as a park ranger at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, which averages 35 to 45 thunderstorm days per year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Nicknamed the "Human Lightning Conductor" and the "Human Lightning Rod," Sullivan has been struck by lightning more than any other human being, according to Guinness World Records. He died in 1983 at the age of 71 – not as a result of a final lightning strike, but from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, reportedly over an unrequited love.

[W. Gray]

A couple out here were walking in a park just this past week.

She is 40 weeks pregnant.

Both were hit by lightning.

They drove themselves to a hospital where both were pronounced in good condition.

Radio Station KOA is sponsoring a best nickname for the newborn whenever it decides to emerge.

One of the suggestions was "Sparky."

[ddurbin]

Hey Waldo,
Sounds like the couple has already set a world's record-----a 40 month pregnancy--WOW!!!!!!

[Warph]

http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/10/astronaut-feels-spaces-toll-on-his-body/

....that Astronauts feel space's toll on their bodies.

CNN -  It's not really why he signed up to be an astronaut, but like it or not, Mike Barratt and his eyes have become a science project.

The eye charts he reads, the red drops that turn his eyes yellow and the ultrasounds being performed on him could determine whether he or any other astronaut ever journeys into deep space or sets foot on other worlds.

NASA's new priority is how to protect astronauts from going blind on the years-long trip to get wherever they are going.

"I absolutely agree that this is our number one priority," Barratt said.

Why?

Because when Barratt blasted off to the international space station, he needed eyeglasses for distance. When he returned to Earth, his distance vision was fine, but he needed reading glasses. That was more than two years ago. And he's not getting better.

"We really need to understand this. This is a critical point for understanding how humans adapt to spaceflight," he said.

In the past few years, about half of the astronauts aboard the international space station have developed an increasing pressure inside their heads, an intracranial pressure that reshapes their optic nerve, causing a significant shift in the eyesight of male astronauts. Doctors call it papilledema.

Female space travelers have not been affected.

Some of the astronauts slowly recover. Others have not.

Space station astronauts typically spend about six months in orbit.

Barratt is one of 10 male astronauts, all older than 45, who have not recovered. Barratt returned from a six-month stint aboard the station in October 2009 and has experienced a profound change in his sight.

He used to be nearsighted. But now, the space veteran says he's eagle-eyed at long distance but needs glasses for reading. There is no treatment and no answers as to why female space flyers are not affected.

CNN spent part of a day with Barratt, watching as doctors monitored his progress with high-resolution testing as they try to understand how the weightless environment of space is causing half of all space station astronauts to have this vision change. Today, space station astronauts fly with specially designed variable focus glasses to help combat the vision shift.

"The big benefit of these is that they allow us to adjust for significant prescription changes," said Dr. Robert Gibson, a senior vision consultant, who was brought in to help study the problem.

Doctors have found that Barratt's retinas have microscopic folds or wrinkles on them, and the back of his eye, the optic nerve, is no longer round but has flattened.

"I think this is showing that there are physiologic aspects of adaption to spaceflight we weren't seeing before," said Barratt.

This raises a red flag for all of NASA's plans for long-duration human space flight. The space station is supposed to be the test bed for how humans would learn to live in space, but it opens profound questions on whether humans will ever venture to  Mars or to an asteroid if they are unable to figure out how the outer-space environment is affecting the eyes.

"This has all of our attention," said Terry Taddeo, the acting chief of space medicine at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

"It is a serious problem and one we are going to have to understand more about before we would be able to send somebody into a long-duration mission away from Earth, where they would be away for years," he said.

Right now, the only data that doctors have are from six-month tours of duty on the space station.

NASA has begun doing extensive preflight and postflight eye exams, including high-resolution MRIs of the eyes. There have been anecdotes  from some space shuttle astronauts who also complained about vision change, but it does not appear they had long-lasting effects from the much shorter space flights that typically lasted up to about three weeks.

"What we're seeing appears to occur within the first couple of months of flight and appears to level off, plateau after about four to five months," Gibson said.

"If it's just a matter of giving them a stronger prescription, we can live with that," he said. "But if there is an elevated intracranial pressure as the cause of this, we have to be concerned about other neurologic effects."

That means there could be other effects on the body that haven't become apparent.

This is why a three-year mission to Mars is in question.

It would be humans' next great leap, and NASA is spending almost $18 billion over the next five years to develop a heavy lift rocket that would take astronauts to the Red Planet or even to an asteroid. They would travel in a new spacecraft, Orion.

But right now, a trip to Mars is still more science fiction than fact. No one is calling this vision problem a showstopper, yet the program's price tag begs for a solution to be found fast so NASA won't be building the world's largest, fastest rocket to nowhere.

Dr. Bruce Ehni, a neurosurgeon at the VA Medical Center at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has consulted with NASA and is the only neurosurgeon on their panel.

"If they can't predict who is at risk ... they put his health in jeopardy. They put, possibly, the mission in jeopardy if he can't see or do his job effectively," he said.

But Barratt thinks that any deep space venture to Mars is still 20 years away. He's hoping that spacecraft will be a whole lot faster than anything the space agency can fly now.

"You fly fast, and you don't worry," he said, with a grin.

"I'm still hopeful that in 20 years, we'll have advanced propulsion capabilities that can get us there in a matter of weeks to a few months. Then, a lot of these problems go away," he said.

[Warph]

UFO At 2012 Olympics

About a billion Earthlings watched the Olympics opening ceremony Friday night. Did an out-of-this-world spectator tune in as well? A dimly lit, disk-shape object was spotted hovering above the stadium in NBC footage of the ceremony, and the Web has since come alive with exhaustive analysis of this "Olympic UFO."

Several people who spotted the object hovering in the corner of their TV screen Friday (July 27) recorded it and posted the footage to YouTube. The disk appears to have a dome rising from its center, giving it the look of a classic flying saucer.



"Remember that these photos > 

                                               http://badufos.blogspot.com/2012/07/london-olympic-ufo.html 


< are taken from the website of the Goodyear Blimp. And I think those people know their own Blimp when they see it," Sheaffer wrote. "The resemblance between this object and the unknown object in the video is obvious."

Final confirmation came from Goodyear itself late last night. "Wow we really seem to have caused a #UFO phenomenon!" @goodyear_uk wrote on Twitter. "Sorry to disappoint guys! We still think a blimp is pretty cool though!"

Still, some UFO believers aren't convinced. One Twitter user replied, "not so sure about that!"

Okay.... what about this one:

   

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