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clipped from www.weirdasianews.com

When Umbrellas and Raincoats Mate

They say “Technology comes from Humanity”, and this is exactly what happened when a South Korean company incorporated a UFO outline into its design–the UFO cap.

(Source)

clipped from news.yahoo.com

By Jon Herskovitz

Thu Jul 17, 4:01 AM ET

SEOUL (Reuters) - Two South Korean labs are offering pet owners the chance to clone dogs, but for those looking to bring back a beloved beagle, be ready to wait in line and have plenty of cash on hand.

The Seoul-based labs -- one affiliated to RNL Bio Co and the other to Sooam Biotech Research Foundation -- are separated by about 30 km (20 miles) and bill themselves as the only places in the world where you can clone a cocker spaniel or retrieve a retriever, with costs running at about $50,000 (25,000 pounds) to $100,000.

Customers such as South Korea's customs service have cloned a champion sniffer dog, seeing the option as a cost-effective way to produce candidates for expensive training programs.

The customs service estimates the cost at 60 million won (30,128 pounds) per clone. It costs about twice that to breed and train a normal sniffer dog, but only about 30 percent are good enough to make the grade, it said.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

GORHAM, Maine - A woman got the shock of her life when she found an 8-foot snake mixed in with clothes in her washing machine. The snake, identified as a reticulated python, somehow got into the water pipes of Mara Ranger's 1800s-era farmhouse and slithered into the machine.

"I jumped back and all of sudden its head starts coming out of the washing machine and it looked huge," Ranger told WMTW-TV.

When Richard Burton, who operates Maine Animal Damage Control in Lewiston, arrived at Ranger's house, he could barely believe his eyes.

Burton reached into the machine wearing a pair of welding gloves, expecting to come out with a 4-foot snake. But when he pulled the animal out, it kept coming and coming — all 8 feet of it.

In the meantime, Ranger said she's a little paranoid.

"Now that it's gone, I'm going to be checking crevasses and corners," Ranger said. "I'm going to be looking in the tub first — before and after, maybe even during, the rinse cycle."

clipped from enews.earthlink.net

From Associated Press

July 15, 2008 5:42 PM EDT

HOBART, Ind. - An officer's squad car was nearly totaled in a crash less than a half hour into his first day on the city police force. Officer Tim Pochron was inside his house early Monday when someone smashed into his new squad car parked outside.

"Pochron was 29 minutes into the first day of his new job when his parked squad car was struck," Hobart police Lt. Steve Houck said.

A man drove his car into a tree and Pochron's car, police said. The man tested positive for drugs, was arrested and taken to a hospital.

The force of the collision bent the rear axle of the squad car.

Pochron, 26, was sworn in last week. He was to start his first day Monday on the morning shift. He previously worked as a police officer in the neighboring Lake County city of Lake Station.

Pochron spent most of the morning filling out paperwork at the station. Deputy Chief Jeff White said Pochron's squad car can be repaired, but he's not sure how much it will cost.

clipped from www.medterms.com

French disease: Syphilis. Depending upon someone's thoughts as to where the disease came from, syphilis was also known as the Italian, Spanish, German and Polish disease. The name "syphilis" was coined by Hieronymus Fracastorius (Girolamo Fracastoro). Fracastorius was a true Renaissance man; he wrote on the temperature of wines, the rise of the Nile, poetry, the mind, and the soul; he was an astronomer, geographer, botanist, mathematician, philosopher and, last but not least in the present context, a physician. In 1530 he published the poem "Syphilis sive morbus gallicus" (Syphilis or the French Disease) in which the name of the disease first appeared. Perhaps more importantly, Fracastorius went on in 1546 to write "On Contagion" ("De contagione et contagiosis morbis et curatione"), the first known discussion of the phenomenon of contagious infection: a landmark in the history of infectious disease.