Octuplets’ mother already has twins, four other children
Octuplets’ mother already has twins, four other children
The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week already has six young children and never expected that the fertility treatment she received would result in eight more babies, her mother said Thursday.
The woman, who has not been publicly identified, had embryos implanted last year, and “they all happened to take,” Angela Suleman said, leading to the eight births Monday. “I looked at those babies. They are so tiny and so beautiful.”
She acknowledged that raising 14 children is a daunting prospect.
Flip-Flop: Did the Moon Do a Turnabout?
Flip-Flop: Did the Moon Do a Turnabout?
For thousands of years only one side of the moon was visible to humankind as a result of synchronous rotation, a sort of orbital lockstep that keeps the moon rotating once for every lap it takes around Earth. Astronomers had to settle for this near-side view until 1959, when a Soviet craft took the first photographs of the moon’s far side. But could the view from Earth have been different early in lunar geologic history?
In a paper in press for the journal Icarus, geophysicists Mark Wieczorek and Mathieu Le Feuvre of France’s National Center for Scientific Research’s Institute of Earth Physics in Paris postulate that our natural satellite was once rotated 180 degrees, with the current far side of the moon facing Earth. A large impact roughly four billion years ago could have temporarily disrupted the moon’s rotation, the researchers say, allowing it to eventually settle back into so-called spin-orbit synchrony either in its original orientation or rotated 180 degrees. (Wieczorek says that the tidal bulges on the lunar surface induced by Earth’s gravity, which deform the moon into an elongated shape that helps stabilize its position, would prevent the moon from easing into synchrony at any intermediate orientation.)
Wieczorek and Le Feuvre first examined the size and velocity necessary for a sufficiently spin-disrupting asteroidal or cometary strike, turning up a few possible candidates based on cratering records on the lunar surface.
Profiles in Panic
With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs and assets, even many of the wealthiest players are retrenching. Others, like the Lehman Brothers bankers who borrowed against their millions in stock, have lost everything. Hedge-fund managers try to sell their luxury homes, while trophy wives are hocking their jewelry. The pain is being felt on St. Barth’s and at Sotheby’s, on benefit-gala committees and at the East Hampton Airport, as the world of the Big Rich collapses, its culture in shock and its values in question.
A snapshot: East Hampton, late summer, a lawn party at a house on the ocean overlooking the dunes. The host is a prince of private equity known for dressing well. One of his guests is Steven Cohen, the publicity-shy billionaire whose SAC Capital, with $16 billion under management, is perhaps the most revered of the 10,000 or so hedge funds spawned by this giddily rich time. Nearby is Daniel Loeb, of Third Point, one of the better-known “activist” hedge funds, who hopes to move soon into a 10,700-square-foot, $45 million penthouse at 15 Central Park West, a Manhattan monument to the new gilded age. Gliding easily between them is art dealer Larry Gagosian, so successful at selling Bacons and Serras to Wall Street’s new titans—including to Cohen—that he now travels in his own private jet and has his own helicopter to take him to it.
How your friends’ friends can affect your mood
How your friends’ friends can affect your mood
If you live in the northern hemisphere, this is probably not your favourite month. January tends to dispirit people more than any other. We all know why: foul weather, post-Christmas debt, the long wait before your next holiday, quarterly bills, dark evenings and dark mornings. At least, that is the way it seems. For while all these things might contribute to the way you feel, there is one crucial factor you probably have not accounted for: the state of mind of your friends and relatives. Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends - people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks “like pebbles thrown into a pond”, says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.
At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.
The Big Mac index
The dollar’s recent revival has made fewer currencies look dear against the Big Mac index, our lighthearted guide to exchange rates. The index is based on the idea of purchasing-power parity, which says currencies should trade at the rate that makes the price of goods the same in each country. So if the price of a Big Mac translated into dollars is above $3.54, its cost in America, the currency is dear; if it is below that benchmark, it is cheap. There are three noteworthy shifts since the summer. The yen, which had looked very cheap, is now close to fair value. So is the pound, which had looked dear the last time we compared burger prices in July. The euro is still overvalued on the burger gauge, but far less so than last summer.
Film, Porn Shoots Sought by Los Angeles Homeowners Hit by Slump
Film, Porn Shoots Sought by Los Angeles Homeowners Hit by Slump
Jayshree Gupta reclined on an English-style sofa in her Beverly Hills penthouse as crews buzzed around taping protective paper over the hardwood floors and wheeling in crates of camera gear.
She was hosting a television-commercial shoot. It meant allowing dozens of strangers and 400-pound klieg lights into her home for a full day, and it was worth every minute, Gupta said.
“I am doing it because I need money to maintain my lifestyle,” she said, perched near a portrait of herself painted by her friend Barbara Carrera, the Bond girl in 1983’s “Never Say Never Again.” “A lot of my money is either gone or tied up. Right now I am hurting.”
New Version of Invisibility Moves Closer to Visual Cloaking
New Version of Invisibility Moves Closer to Visual Cloaking
Researchers who created the first so-called invisibility cloak in 2006, have made significant advances that could lead to an invisibility cloak for visible light in as little as six months. “A large number of folks are looking at it, and I think it’s a matter of coupling the right material to the right device,” [Discovery News] said researcher David Smith. His team has developed an algorithm that speeds up the design of materials that can bend light around an object. Using the new algorithm, they were able to create an invisibility cloak that can bend much wider spectrum of microwaves than previous versions.
Invisibility cloaks rely on metamaterials, ones with unique properties that derive from [their] physical structure, not [their] chemical make up [Discovery News]. Smith compares the effect of metamaterials on light to mirages that appear over a road on sweltering days. “You see what looks like water hovering over the road, but it is in reality a reflection from the sky,” Smith said. “In that example, the mirage you see is cloaking the road below. In effect, we are creating an engineered mirage with this latest cloak design” [AFP].
Ten Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade
Ten Best Green Jobs for the Next Decade
Massive investments in clean energy promise to keep farmers, urban planners, and green-tech entrepreneurs in business for the next decade. This guide to sustainability focused career paths will help solar-charge your work life.
“It’s time to bail out the people and the planet,” says Van Jones, author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems. We agree, and this guide to to sustainability-focused career paths will help retrofit and solar-charge your work life.
America has only two million farmers, and their average age is 55. Since sustainable agriculture requires small-scale, local, organic methods rather than petroleum-based machines and fertilizers, there is a huge need for more farmers — up to tens of millions of them, according to food guru Michael Pollan. Modern farmers are small businesspeople who must be as skilled in heirloom genetics as marketing.
Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime
Honey Laundering: A sticky trail of intrigue and crime
Out popped a dozen people in dark windbreakers identifying them as feds — agents from Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some raced to the loading docks. Others hurried through the front door. All were armed.
“I just sell honey — what the hell is this all about?” he remembered asking, as he was hustled into a tiny room with his office manager and truck driver.
Three days before the April 25 raid, customs had persuaded a federal judge in Seattle to issue the search warrant shoved in Ingalls’ hands. But it wasn’t until Ingalls read “Attachment D” that he understood why investigators were seizing his business records, passport, phone logs, photographs, Rolodexes, mail and computer files — almost anything that could be copied or hauled away.
Frankie the feline exposed as cat burglar
Frankie the feline exposed as the cat burglar stealing toys from his neighbours’ homes
A real-life cat burglar has left his owner feeling less than purr-fect - by swiping dozens of cuddly toys from nearby homes.
Owner Julie Bishop believes the two-year-old feline is sneaking into her neighbours’ homes.
He drags each one of his finds through the catflap before depositing them on the same spot in the living room.