"Smarter than your average bear"

Not exactly Yogi, but is seems there was one smart bear who wanted to go joy riding.

A bear climbed into an empty car in the US state of Colorado, sounded the horn and sent the vehicle rolling down hill with the terrified animal still inside.

The car's owner, 17-year-old Ben Story, took a snap of the panic-stricken bear as it demolished the inside of his vehicle in its bid to escape.

Police in Larkspur, near Denver, eventually freed the animal by opening the door from a distance using a rope.

It is believed the bear was attracted by a sandwich left on the back seat.

Mr Story and his family were asleep when the bear opened the unlocked door of his 2008 Toyota Corolla in the early hours of the morning and climbed inside.

'Flashers on'

Mr Story's father, Ralph, said the bear must have hit the car's automatic transmission into neutral sending it rolling backwards 125ft (38m), off the driveway, down an embankment and into a thicket of trees.

"The four-way flashers were on. It's like he knew what was going on, and kept hitting the horn," he told Denver's 7News.

Once the car door closed behind the bear, it was trapped inside.

Ben Story said his car was wrecked.

"It [the bear] was a pretty good size, actually it was pretty big. If you look at the inside of the car, there's nothing left at all. You could see it moving around, it like took up the entire inside of the car."

The bear was last seen running into the woods.

Colorado wildlife expert Tyler Baskfield said bears often entered cars and houses in search of food.

"It happens all the time," he said. "They're very smart."



Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Balloon Goes Up in South Korea

Balloons released by schoolchildren sparked a major security alert in South Korea, reports say, amid heightened tensions with North Korea.

A resident of Ansan, near Seoul, reported seeing 40-50 objects resembling parachutes falling on a mountainside.

The military and police mobilised a special joint task force.

Upon investigation, the objects turned out to be helium balloons released by a local school.

Tensions between North and South Korea have been running high since the sinking of a South Korean warship earlier this year. Seoul said the ship was torpedoed by Northern forces.

In another incident earlier this month, an alert was raised after an explosion was heard on Yeonpyeong island, near the sea border with North Korea, and a diving suit was found on a shoreline, the JoongAng newspaper reported.

A joint military and police investigation found that the diving suit was abandoned by a fisherman and that the explosion had been caused by a South Korean mine, the paper said


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Shoe Shops of the Ancient World

The oldest example of a leather shoe has been discovered by archaeologists in a cave in Armenia.

At 5,500 years old, the well preserved cow-hide shoe pre-dates Stonehenge by 400 years and the Pyramids of Giza by 1,000 years.

It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot, the researchers say.

They have published details of the discovery from south-east Armenia in the journal Plos One.

The shoe contained grass, although the archaeologists are uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the footwear.

The authors are unsure whether it was worn by a man or a woman. The shoe is relatively small, corresponding to a UK women's size 5 (European size 38; US size 7 women), but it could have been worn by a man of that period.

It was discovered at the Areni-1 cave in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, which borders on Turkey and Iran.

The archaeologists put the shoe's remarkable preservation down to the stable, cool and dry conditions in the cave and the fact that the floor of the cave was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung.

This layer of excrement acted as a solid seal, preserving it over the millennia.

"We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600-700 years old because they were in such good condition," said co-author Dr Ron Pinhasi from University College Cork in Ireland.

"It was only when the material was dated by the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford and in California that we realised that the shoe was older by a few hundred years than the shoes worn by Oetzi the Iceman."

Other well preserved objects were also found in the cave, including large containers, many of which held wheat and barley, apricots and other edible plants.

Sandals made from plant fibres found at the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri, US, pre-date the shoes from Areni by some 2,000-2,500 years.




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A Change in the Letter of the Law

In 1938, American-born architect Alfred Butts invented the game Scrabble, selling the rights and trademark in 1948 the game has more than stood the test of time.

Now for the first time in the history of Scrabble the rules are going to be changed to allow the use of proper nouns, games company Mattel has said.

Place names, people's names and company names or brands will now count.

Mattel, which brings out a new version of the game containing amended rules in July, hopes the change will encourage younger people to play.

Until now a few proper nouns had been allowed which were determined by a word list based on the Collins dictionary.

In Scrabble, players try to gain the highest points by making words with individual letter tiles on a grid board.

Each letter tile has a points value between one and 10, based on the letter's frequency in standard English.

Various coloured squares on the board can double or triple a player's points.

Mattel said there would be no hard and fast rule over whether a proper noun was correct or not.

A spokeswoman for the company said the use of proper nouns would "add a new dimension" to Scrabble and "introduce an element of popular culture into the game".

She said: "This is one of a number of twists and challenges included that we believe existing fans will enjoy and will also enable younger fans and families to get involved."

However, Mattel said it would not be doing away with the old rules altogether.

It will continue to sell a board with the original rules.

I can just see all those Scrabble-hollicks working their way through maps of Europe tring to find those wonderful Polish or Slavakian names which use 4 "J's", 3 "Z's" and a couple of "X's"


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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US girl sues for $1m over arrest for desk scribble

I often say that as the west was being developed, the lasso was one of the cowboys major tools. It seems over the years in modern USA the "lass" part has been dropped and today's American just main tool seems to be "Sui".

Yesterday the stupidity that goes with some of these legal cases again showed it's ugly face, when it was announced that 12-year-old US schoolgirl is suing the New York City authorities for $1m in damages after she was arrested for writing on her desk.

Alexa Gonzalez was led out of her school in handcuffs by police after she was caught scribbling a message to her friends with an erasable, green marker.




Miss Gonzalez and her mother are suing the police and education departments in New York City.

They are claiming for excessive use of force and violation of her rights.

Miss Gonzalez was caught scribbling "I love my friends Abby and Faith" on her desk during a Spanish class in February.

The 12-year-old said her Spanish teacher then "dragged" her to the dean's office where police were called.

'Better judgement'

Miss Gonzalez told the New York Daily News she broke down as she was led out of Junior High School 190 in Queens in handcuffs.

"I started crying, like, a lot," she said. "I made two little doodles... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary."

She said she was then held at a local school precinct for hours in what she calls a traumatizing and excessive ordeal.

New York City officials have acknowledged the arrest was a mistake, saying better judgement should have been used by the arresting officers.

Miss Gonzalez was suspended from school and tried in a family court, where she was given eight hours of community service and ordered to write an essay about lessons to be learned from the incident.

Her family's lawyer said the school had overreacted by calling the police.

Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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Follow That Toad

If you see the toads leaving, run for the hills.

The Common toads appear to be able to sense an impending earthquake and will flee their colony days before the seismic activity strikes.The evidence comes from a population of toads which left their breeding colony three days before an earthquake that struck L'Aquila in Italy in 2009.

How toads sensed the quake is unclear, but most breeding pairs and males fled.

They reacted despite the colony being 74km from the quake's epicenter, say biologists in the Journal of Zoology.

It is hard to objectively and quantifiably study how animals respond to seismic activity, in part because earthquakes are rare and unpredictable.

Some studies have been done on how domestic animals respond, but measuring the response of wild animals is more difficult.

Even those that have been shown to react, such as fish, rodents and snakes tend to do so shortly before an earthquakes strikes, rather than days ahead of the event.

However, biologist Dr Rachel Grant of the Open University, in Milton Keynes, UK, was routinely studying the behavior of various colonies of common toads on a daily basis in Italy around the time a massive earthquake struck.

Her studies included a 29-day period gathering data before, during and after the earthquake that hit Italy on 6 April 2009.

The quake, a 6.3-magnitude event, struck close to L'Aquila city, about 95km (60 miles) north-east of Rome.

Dr Grant was studying toads 74km away in San Ruffino Lake in central Italy, when she recorded the toads behaving oddly.

Five days before the earthquake, the number of male common toads in the breeding colony fell by 96%.

AMPHIBIAN PHENOMENA
Common frogs (Rana temporaria) mating
Dr Grant has also shown that many amphibians around the world synchronize their mating activity by the full Moon, a phenomenon not reported before
The world's first truly monogamous amphibian was described earlier this year
Listen to a common toad croaking

That is highly unusual for male toads: once they have bred, they normally remain active in large numbers at breeding sites until spawning has finished.

Yet spawning had barely begun at the San Ruffino Lake site before the earthquake struck.

Also, no weather event could be linked to the toads' disappearance.

Three days before the earthquake, the number of breeding pairs also suddenly dropped to zero.

While spawn was found at the site up to six days before the earthquake, and again six days after it, no spawn was laid during the so-called earthquake period - the time from the first main shock to the last aftershock.

"Our study is one of the first to document animal behavior before, during and after an earthquake," says Dr Grant.

She believes the toads fled to higher ground, possibly where they would be at less risk from rock falls, landslides and flooding.

Exactly how the toads sense impending seismic activity is unclear.

The shift in the toads' behaviour coincided with disruptions in the ionosphere, the uppermost electromagnetic layer of the earth's atmosphere, which researchers detected around the time of the L'Aquila quake using a technique known as very low frequency (VLF) radio sounding.

ITALIAN EARTHQUAKE

Use this map to explore coverage of the Italian earthquake in video, audio, pictures and text
After the quake, L'Aquila was described as a 'broken city'
Read 'A history of deadly earthquakes'

Such changes to the atmosphere have in turn been linked by some scientists to the release of radon gas, or gravity waves, prior to an earthquake.

In the case of the L'Aquila quake, Dr Grant could not determine what caused the disruptions in the ionosphere.

However, her findings do suggest that the toads can detect something.

"Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system," she says.

Ants ignore quakes

One other study has quantified an animal's response to a major earthquake.

Researchers had the serendipitous opportunity to measure how the behavior of the desert harvester ant (Messor pergandei) changed as the ground began to tremble in the Mojave Desert, California, on 28 June 1992.

The largest quake to hit the US in four decades struck during the middle of an ongoing study, which measured how many ants walked the trails to and from the colony, the distributions of worker ants and even how much carbon dioxide the ants produced.

However, in response to that 7.4 magnitude quake, the ants did not appear to alter their behavior at all.


Barry Eva (Storyheart)

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