-- The clip is quite a bit WTF reaction inducing, but awesomeness.. haha...

“It's official: the Subway sandwich chain has surpassed McDonald's Corp. as the world's largest restaurant chain, in terms of units.

At the end of last year, Subway had 33,749 restaurants worldwide, compared to McDonald's 32,737. The burger giant disclosed its year-end store count in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late last month.

The race for global dominance is an important one for an industry that's mostly saturated in the U.S. High unemployment and economic uncertainty have battered the restaurant industry in the U.S., and chains are increasingly looking overseas for growth, particularly in Asia.

Starbucks Corp. recently said it plans to triple its number of outlets in China, for example. Dunkin' Brands Inc., parent of Dunkin' Donuts and Baskin-Robbins, plans to open thousands of new outlets in China in coming years as well as its first stores in Vietnam in the next 18 months. Subway just opened its 1,000th location in Asia, including its first in Vietnam.

Subway, which opened its first international restaurant in 1984, in Bahrain, expects its number of international restaurants to exceed its domestic ones by 2020, says Don Fertman, Subway's Chief Development Officer. The chain currently has just over 24,000 restaurants in the U.S., where it generated $10.5 billion of its $15.2 billion in revenue last year.

The closely held company, owned by Doctor's Associates Inc., does not disclose its profits.

McDonald's is still the leader when it comes to sales. The burger chain reported $24 billion in revenue last year. "We remain focused on listening to and serving our customers, and are committed to being better, not just bigger," a McDonald's spokeswoman says…”

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-- “Just released video from a New York police helicopter reveals the horror of the terror attack on the World Trade Center as it happens. The 17-minute footage shows incredibly close footage of black smoke billowing from the towers in the biggest terror attack ever on US soil. "Holy shit," says one cop as the crew watches later as the first tower crumble to dust from a helicopter landing pad. The video was obtained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology under the Freedom of Information Act and was sent with several photos anonymously to the Cryptome website.”

-- "An African spurred tortoise (Geochelone sulcata) with two heads and five legs is displayed in Zilina, Slovakia. The seven-week-old two-headed tortoise has been given two names: Magda (left head) and Lenka (right head)."

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"Fossilized alien microbes have been discovered in a sample extracted from a meteorite, according to research carried out by a NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center astrobiologist. What's more, he has challenged any scientist to investigate his work.

Published in the online Journal of Cosmology, Richard Hoover's paper claims to have made the discovery after finding "large complex filaments" inside "freshly fractured internal surfaces" of carbonaceous chondrite meteorite samples (including new fragment samples from the famous French Orgueil meteorite).

Some of the "alien" fossils appear to resemble bacteria found on Earth (such as types of cyanobacteria, a microorganism that helped make early-Earth hospitable to life by producing oxygen), whereas others don't look so familiar.

"The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth," Hoover told Fox News in an "exclusive" interview.

"There are some that are just very strange and don't look like anything that I've been able to identify, and I've shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped."

This discovery could have huge implications for the genesis of life on Earth. If there are microbes that originated inside a meteorite that was found on Earth, did life originate from space? If so, did life on Earth get "seeded" by a meteorite? Perhaps Earth-Brand™ Life is actually an evolved form of Cosmic-Brand™ Life?..."

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"Whether Antarctica's ice will survive a warmer world is one of the great puzzles of climate science. Now it seems vast expanses of ice may have hung on for the past 200,000 years, surviving the last interglacial.

The west Antarctic ice sheet's base is below sea level, which should make it unstable. If it were to collapse the torrent of fresh water could raise global sea level by 5 metres. Whether or not this will happen as temperatures climb is a hotly debated topic.

A new study by David Sugden at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and colleagues suggests the ice sheet may be more stable than we thought. They studied the Heritage range of mountains near the central dome of the west Antarctic ice sheet. Specifically, the researchers looked at blue-ice moraines, where winds erode the ice in topological depressions, exposing the rocks beneath.

They analysed the moraine for beryllium isotopes produced by cosmic radiation, which accumulate in the rock when it is exposed. Sugden's team found evidence that the moraines had been forming for at least 200,000 years, suggesting that ice has covered the area for at least that long (Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, DOI: 10.1016/j.palaeo.2011.01.027), and therefore survived the last interglacial 125,000 years ago.

Don't expect this to be the final word on the matter. A recent study by Robert Kopp at Princeton University (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08686) suggests sea levels were 8 to 9 metres higher than now during the last interglacial, in part due to the west Antarctic ice sheet melting. If Sugden's team is correct, that amount of sea level rise would be unlikely.

Working out who is right is a "frustrating and intriguing scientific riddle that we'd love to unravel", says Richard Alley of Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Even if the central parts of the ice sheet can survive a warming climate, melting is likely at the extremities, says Sugden. Tim Naish of Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, agrees. With melting at the edges and in Greenland, "we're looking at a rise of one metre plus or minus 0.5 metres" by 2100, he says - double the maximum predicted in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."

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-- They see me rollin', they hatin'...

"A rocket carrying the Glory Earth-observing satellite launched yesterday but failed to place the satellite into orbit, sending both plummeting into the Pacific.

Nasa said a protective covering on the Taurus XL rocket did not separate as planned three minutes after launch at 2.09am local time (10.09 GMT).

With the covering intact, the rocket was too heavy to get the satellite into orbit.Nasa launch commentator George Dillar announced the failure 15 minutes after lift-off from Vandenberg Air Force base in California.

Launch director Omar Baez said: 'We failed to make orbit and all indications are that the satellite and rocket are in the South Pacific Ocean somewhere.'

The satellite and rocket were built by Virginia-based Orbital Sciences, which suffered a similar failure with a Taurus XL rocket in 2009 on another Nasa launch.

After that failure, Orbital Sciences redesigned the system for shedding the protective covering.

Ron Grabe of Orbital Sciences said the company considered the problem to be fixed and had carried out three successful launches with the new system before yesterday's failure.

Orbital Sciences has been expected to be among the private companies that will be used to get cargo to the International Space Station once Nasa retires its shuttle fleet..."

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“Members of renegade Russian art group Voina showered Russian policewomen with passionate kisses in their latest stunt shown in a video released on Tuesday as a new police law came into effect. The short video shows a string of clips of young women approaching female police officers on duty and kissing them on the mouth.

The footage is shown to a fast-paced Yiddish song "Down With the Police" that dates from early 20th century. "Voina, in the face of activists of its militant-feminist wing, has initiated the rite of kissing cops and their cop abuse. They chose the grey women as the objects of carrying out the rite," a Voina statement said, as written on the blog wisegizmo.livejournal.com.

Russian police, including women officers, wear ill-fitting grey uniforms during winter months accompanied with grey traditional 'ushanka' hats. Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev initiated a new police law in an attempt to reform the force known for rampant corruption. Since the Bolshevik revolution, it has been called "militsia", but the reform rebrands it back to "politsia".

The Voina activists are shown in clips filmed mostly in the Moscow metro, where they approach officers with a question that is quickly followed by an aggressive kiss on the mouth. In one of the clips they nearly fall off the station platform as the officer tries to break free of the embrace. On its Twitter blog the group claimed to have kissed "several hundred" policewomen.”

-- Out of the many nutty activities that the creative offspring of great Mother Russia dream up, this is the one I could actually get into…

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