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Tails are useful in many ways, but — unlike these vervet monkeys pictured in Lake Mburo National Park in Uganda — humans' closest primate relatives lost the appendages about 25 million years ago. (Photo credit: imageBROKER/Shutterstock via CNN Newsource) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Humans have many wonderful qualities, but we lack something that’s a common feature among most animals with backbones: a tail. Exactly why that is has been something of a mystery. Tails are useful for balance, propulsion, communication and defense against biting insects. However, humans and our closest primate relatives — the great apes — said farewell to tails about 25...

A girl in Mexico has been born with a tail, doctors have revealed. The extremely rare phenomenon has been recorded fewer than 200 times. The infant, who wasn't identified, was born by a C-section at a hospital in Nuevo Leon. Her parents were healthy and in their late twenties. Doctors quickly spotted a 5.7cm-long (2.2 inch) tail that was 'soft', 'covered in skin and fine hair' and had a 'pointy' tip. Detailing the incident in Journal of Paediatric Surgery Case Reports, doctors, led by Dr Josue Rueda, believe the case is the first ever recorded in Mexico. The medics said...

Discovered by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) spacecraft, the unusual phenomenon is thought to have been caused by the effects of the solar winds and could help to shine more light on how the Martian atmosphere escaped in to space. "We found that Mars' magnetic tail, or magnetotail, is unique in the Solar System," said NASA scientist Gina DiBraccio. "It's not like the magnetotail found at Venus, a planet with no magnetic field of its own, nor is it like Earth's, which is surrounded by its own internally generated magnetic field." "Instead, it is a hybrid between...

Left: what the tunnel would look like; right: what the sky does look like. (Image Credit Below) Mysterious structures in the sky that have puzzled astronomers for decades might finally have an explanation – and it's quite something. The North Polar Spur and the Fan Region, on opposite sides of the sky, may be connected by a vast system of magnetized filaments. These form a structure resembling a tunnel that circles the Solar System, and many nearby stars besides. "If we were to look up in the sky," said astronomer Jennifer West of the University of Toronto in Canada, "we...

In 2014, Joe Morrissey, then a 57-year-old Delegate to the Virginia General Assembly, plead guilty to a misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was sentenced to 12 months in jail (with six months suspended) because of a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old office assistant at his law firm. On Tuesday, he won his election to Virginia Senate. I'll give you one guess what his political affiliation is. That's right, he's a Democrat. And he won his election with more than 60 percent of the vote.

Flight logs for Epstein were posted on Gawker. The article: https://gawker.com/flight-logs-put-clinton-dershowitz-on-pedophile-billio-1681039971 The flight manifests: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1507315-epstein-flight-manifests.html If you search at the FAA site, you can find information based on a plane's tail number ID. https://registry.faa.gov/aircraftinquiry/ An August 6, 2002 flight lists a plane with the ID: N474AW. Serial Number 155488 Certificate Issue Date 10/21/1997 Manufacturer Name ROCKWELL Mode S Code (base 8 / oct) 51350013 Model OV-10D Mode S Code (base 16 / hex) A5D00B Year Manufacturer None Cancel Date 05/14/2010 Reason for Cancellation Cancelled Export To None Type Registration Government Aircraft Registration prior to Deregistration Name UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF...

Strange Space Object Stumps Astronomers; Appears to be Asteroid but Has Six Comet-Like Tails Posted by Russell Westerholm Astronomers have spotted a curious comet-like spatial object with the Hubble Telescope that has six trails, causing it to look like a badminton shuttlecock, BBC News reported. The observers were lead to believe the object is an asteroid because it was spotted in an asteroid belt, but its tails are more characteristic of a comet. Asteroids also typically only appear as tiny dots of light. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," Dave Jewitt, a professor from the University of California...

This is an image of Mercury's tail obtained from combining a full day of data from a camera aboard the STEREO-A spacecraft. The reflected sunlight off the planet's surface results in a type of over-exposure that causes Mercury to appear much larger than its actual size. The tail-like structure extending anti-sunward from the planet is visible over several days and spans an angular size exceeding that of a full Moon in the night sky.

ROME and BOSTON - Scientists from Boston University's Center for Space Physics reported today that NASA satellites designed to view the escaping atmosphere of the Sun have also recorded evidence of gas escaping from the planet Mercury. The scientists reported these findings at the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) meeting in Rome, Italy this week. The STEREO mission has two satellites placed in the same orbit around the Sun that the Earth has, but at locations ahead and behind it (STEREO, or Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory, is the third mission in NASA's Solar Terrestrial Probes program). This configuration offers multi-directional...

A scorched alien planet is flying so close to its parent star that its atmosphere is being swept off it in a glowing tail like some sort of giant comet, NASA announced Thursday. The existence of the planet and its strange tail, which was suggested in previous studies, was confirmed recently by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. These new observations of the gas giant planet, called HD 209458b, suggest strong winds from its nearby star are blowing the atmosphere off the scorched world and shaping it into a comet-like tail. "Since 2003 scientists have theorized the lost mass is being pushed...

Huntsville AL (SPX) Apr 18, 2008 Behold the full Moon. Ancient craters and frozen lava seas lie motionless under an airless sky of profound quiet. It's a slow-motion world where even a human footprint may last millions of years. Nothing ever seems to happen there. Right? Wrong. NASA-supported scientists have realized that something does happen every month when the Moon gets a lashing from Earth's magnetic tail. "Earth's magnetotail extends well beyond the orbit of the Moon and, once a month, the Moon orbits through it," says Tim Stubbs, a University of Maryland scientist working at the Goddard Space Flight...

The ion tail of Venus. Credit: Jeff Hecht, New Scientist Magazine May 31, 1997.   Feb 20, 2008Venus' Tail of the UnexpectedAncient peoples report that the planet Venus once had visible "ropes" stretching out to the Earth. Could a plasma glow discharge have been the cause?The "induced magnetotail" that points away from Venus in the direction of the earth is a teardrop-shaped plasma structure filled with “a lot of little stringy things” that was first detected by NASA’s Pioneer Venus Orbiter in the late 1970s. In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some...

NASA's Pluto-bound spacecraft, New Horizons, recently surfed a long tail of charged particles trailing behind Jupiter. Observations from that wild ride revealed enormous bobbing bubbles of charged particles, or "plasma," and showed that the structure of the planet's tadpole-shaped "magnetotail" is surprisingly varied. The findings, detailed in two reports in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Science, could help scientists understand the protective magnetic environment surrounding Earth and other planets. "If we understand our Jupiter better, we will be able to further understand the extrasolar 'hot Jupiters' of other stars," Norbert Krupp, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute...

Astronomers have for the first time found a gargantuan, comet-like tail created by a slowly dying star, a discovery that gives new insights into how old stars seed the galaxies with material that ultimately becomes new stars and solar systems. Astronomers have long known that dying stars provide the building blocks for future ones, but never before have they seen the process so vividly in action. Save & Share Article What's This? DiggGoogle del.icio.usYahoo! RedditFacebook The 13-light-year-long tail is made up of molecules of oxygen, carbon and nitrogen shed by the slowly dying but very fast-moving star as it speeds...

An Indian teenager is worshipped as a god because he has a 7ins ‘tail’. Arshid Ali Khan, 13, has become a divine symbol in the state of Punjab. Locals have hailed him a reincarnation of the Hindu monkey god Hanuman - and refer to him as Balaji. However, Arshid has to use a wheelchair and he is considering having the ‘tail’ removed. He said: ‘This tail has been given to me by God. I am worshipped because I pray to god and the wishes of people come true.....

Explanation: Once the famous sunset comet, PanSTARRS (C/2011 L4) is now visible all night from much of the northern hemisphere, bound for the outer solar system as it climbs high above the ecliptic plane. Dimmer and fading, the comet's broad dust tail is still growing, though. This widefield telescopic image was taken against the starry background of the constellation Cepheus on May 15. It shows the comet has developed an extensive anti-tail, dust trailing along the comet's orbit (to the left of the coma), stretching more than 3 degrees across the frame. Since the comet is just over 1.6 astronomical...

It turns out we seriously underestimated the central nervous system. It's hard to say what's crazier: the fact that Tufts University researchers spent a year cutting out the tiny eyeballs of tadpole embryos and sticking them back on to the tadpoles' tails, or: the fact that, when they hatched, a few of the tadpoles COULD ACTUALLY SEE OUT OF THE EYES ON THEIR TAILS. As you know, this is not the way vision is supposed to work--your eyeballs are supposed to be connected to a big fat nerve that carries incoming signals back to your brain, which combines the information...

People should post their favorite joke on a thread.

Replay of first hour of the Chris Baker show this morning. Local FM talker. I think he also does an afternoon show broadcast in Texas.. Funny stuff. Song starts @ 30:17 into the clip......Enjoy!

WASHINGTON, May 22 -- Stem cells derived from a patient's own fat can cure a perianal fistula, a Spanish researcher said here. Explain to interested patients that perianal fistulas are difficult-to-treat complications seen in Crohn's and other bowel diseases. Note that this study suggests a stem cell approach to healing fistulas that appears to be highly effective. This study was published as an abstract and presented orally at a conference. These data and conclusions should be considered to be preliminary as they have not yet been reviewed and published in a peer-reviewed publication. In a phase II clinical trial, patients...