"Members of Orlando Food Not Bombs were arrested Wednesday when police said they violated a city ordinance by feeding the homeless in Lake Eola Park.

Jessica Cross, 24, Benjamin Markeson, 49, and Jonathan "Keith" McHenry, 54, were arrested at 6:10 p.m. on a charge of violating the ordinance restricting group feedings in public parks. McHenry is a co-founder of the international Food Not Bombs movement, which began in the early 1980s.

The group lost a court battle in April, clearing the way for the city to enforce the ordinance. It requires groups to obtain a permit and limits each group to two permits per year for each park within a 2-mile radius of City Hall.

Arrest papers state that Cross, Markeson and McHenry helped feed 40 people Wednesday night. The ordinance applies to feedings of more than 25 people..."

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-- WTF!!!

"Who invited Alfred Hitchcock to the Everett Police Department’s north precinct?

Like a scene out of the famous director’s film “The Birds,” three angry crows have been dive-bombing police officers as they dash across the parking lot to their cars.

“They’re like velociraptors,” Lt. Bob Johns told the Everett Herald.

Crows are paticularly adept at recognizing faces, meaning you don’t want to get on their bad side. University of Washington researchers recently determined crows have an uncanny ability to remember faces — and they act out if they feel threatened.

Now Everett police officers are dealing with a literal game of Angry Birds..."

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"The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.

The effort includes secretive projects to create independent cellphone networks inside foreign countries, as well as one operation out of a spy novel in a fifth-floor shop on L Street in Washington, where a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype “Internet in a suitcase.”

Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet.

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Some projects involve technology that the United States is developing; others pull together tools that have already been created by hackers in a so-called liberation-technology movement sweeping the globe..."

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"British spies hacked into an al-Qaida website to replace instructions on how to build a bomb with recipes for making cupcakes, newspapers reported on Friday.

The cyber offensive took place last year when the English language magazine called Inspire, aimed at Muslims in the West, was launched by supporters of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

British intelligence officers based at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the state eavesdropping service, attacked the 67-page magazine, leaving most of it garbled, British newspapers said.

Instead of being able to read how to "Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom," readers were greeted with computer code which actually contained recipes from The Best Cupcakes in America, published by U.S. chat show host Ellen DeGeneres.

The Washington Post reported that the British action followed a dispute between the CIA and the newly formed U.S. Cyber Command.

The cyber unit had wanted to block the al Qaeda magazine but the CIA, which had countered such an attack would expose sources and intelligence methods, won the debate and declined to allow an attack on Inspire..."

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-- Time to get a true white water kayak and drive to Alaska!!!

"The Voyager missions have yielded many surprising discoveries about our solar system and, despite being 9 billion miles away from Earth, the data continues to pour in. Now, scientists at NASA are saying that they have made sense of some surprising readings from the spacecraft over the past few years. Their data indicates that the edge of the solar system is a frothy stew of magnetic bubbles.

For years it was assumed that the heliosheath, the outer limit of our sun’s magnetic field and the boarder of galactic space, was composed of graceful arcs of magnetic energy that curved back toward the sun. The reality is far less neat and tidy. Instead of arcs, the magnetic field is broken into a membrane of distinct bubbles, each about 100 million miles wide. The whole mix is also apparently writhing around, its movement being compared to bubbles from a jacuzzi jet.

Don’t worry, if none of this makes any sense, there’s a soothing and explanatory video at the end of this post. With pictures!

While it was a surprising discovery, scientists believe they understand how this bubbly barrier came to be. Because the sun’s spin has wobble to it, its magnetic field is twisted into ripples. At the edge of the solar system, those ripples bunch together and eventually split into massive magnetic bubbles.

With a working hypothesis about the nature of the bubbles, the next question is how this discovery changes our understanding of the solar system’s interaction with the rest of the galaxy. For instance, our solar system is constantly bombarded with high-energy cosmic rays spewed out from other celestial bodies. The sun’s magnetic field helps to deflect most of these away from us, but how the rays interact with the bubbles is still unknown..."

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""This nebula had such a resemblance to a comet in its form and brightness that I endeavored to find others, so that astronomers would not confuse these same nebulae with comets just beginning to shine." -Charles Messier

Astronomers have been scouring the skies for new discoveries since long before the invention of the telescope. Why, just with the naked eye and some dark skies, anyone can discover about 6,000 stars, five major planets, the Milky Way, and the occasional very faint nebula.

And of course, if you're very fortunate and very diligent, you could have been among the first to discover whenever a new comet brightened and suddenly appeared! By time comets get relatively close to the Sun, their tails become bright and extended, and often easily visible to the naked eye.

But the telescope changed everything. Because now, for the first time, you could discover a comet when it was still very faint. When it was, in fact, still invisible to the naked eye, but where a careful observer would notice an object where there previously was none. Something, perhaps, like 2004's Comet Machholz..."

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-- "Some 60 million light-years away in the southerly constellation Corvus, two large galaxies collided. But the stars in the two galaxies, cataloged as NGC 4038 and NGC 4039, don't collide in the course of the ponderous event, lasting hundreds of millions of years. Instead, their large clouds of molecular gas and dust do, triggering furious episodes of star formation near the center of the cosmic wreckage. Spanning about 500 thousand light-years, this stunning view also reveals new star clusters and matter flung far from the scene of the accident by gravitational tidal forces. Of course, the suggestive visual appearance of the extended arcing structures gives the galaxy pair its popular name - The Antennae. "

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"In the ponds of northern Europe lives a tiny brown spider with a bubble on its back. The 10-millimeter-long Argyroneta aquatica is the only spider in the world that spends its entire life underwater. But just like land spiders, it needs oxygen to breathe. So every so often, it leaves its underwater web home to visit the surface and brings back a bubble of air that sticks to its hairy abdomen. It deposits the bubble into a little silk air tank spun for the purpose. This "diving bell," researchers have now found, is not just a repository. It's actually a gill that sucks oxygen from the water, allowing the spider to stay under for up to 24 hours.

Fascinated by the water spider ever since he read about it as a boy, physiologist Roger Seymour of the University of Adelaide in Australia decided to study it "out of sheer curiosity more than anything else." So he traveled to Berlin to meet with physiologist Stefan Hetz of Humboldt University in Germany. The pair spent a summer collecting spiders, putting them in tanks, and watching them spin their silvery nets and fill them with air bubbles.

The researchers decided to try out a new technology: a tiny fiber-optic oxygen sensor called an optode. Only 15 micrometers in diameter, the optode was small enough not to rupture the diving bell when the researchers poked it through the webby membrane and measured how gases move across the bell's surface. The bell, they found, functions like a gill: As the spider removes oxygen from the bell by breathing it in, more oxygen flows in to take its place. This gives the spider a constant oxygen supply without requiring it to venture to the surface often. But after about 24 hours, water pressure on the silk begins to collapse the bell, so the spider makes a break for the surface to grab another bubble. The optode also showed that the spider consumes surprisingly little oxygen over the course of its trips back to the bell to grab a breath of air..."

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