Crowds roll up for a Banksy

Good old Banksy, he's released 1,000 prints for sale at £100 raising money for cataract operations for children in Bangladesh.

According to Sightsavers it costs on average £17 to perform cataract surgery on an adult and £27 on a child. It will give extra resonance to looking at the print in future

Keep your evil monopolistic nose out

I hate Microsoft. I hate the way they squeeze their sticky little tendrils into any market they so that they can increase their monopoly

Now they're doing it to the one laptop per child project

This was meant to be an open source project that would avoid anybody's licenses and would stymie Microsoft getting a toehold in emerging markets so they can squeeze them dry in the future

Thankfully the Green party has brought this matter to the public eye

The UK's Green Party has accused Microsoft of "unacceptable bribery" in trying to run Windows on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.

"Open source tools are a way to let the global south develop their own knowledge economies," Siân Berry, principal speaker for the Green Party, told vnunet.com in an email.

"Microsoft wants to restrict the greatest profits in the knowledge economy to already established software corporations like itself.

"By installing its programs on these laptops Microsoft hopes to create market domination and vendor lock in. That is unacceptable bribery.

What a lovely family

A 19 year old has been arrested for raping his mother to get back at his brother over a row - hmmmm how classy

what we understand the rape stemmed from an argument between him and his brother. And apparently they were arguing over a girlfriend. And the rape was some sort of retaliation towards his brother,' said Sgt. Jamie Smith of the Albertville Police Department.
It was unusual retaliation on an unsuspecting victim.
Authorities say Helms' mother was apparently passed out drunk on the couch when the rape started.
'During the attack she did come to and recognize her attacker. (Reporter: As her son?) As her son,' said Smith.

Wow

It looks like there may be another undiscovered tomb in the Valley of the Kings and speculation is mounting that it might contain one of the missing royal mummies from the Amarna Perios - Akhenaten or Nefertiti - how amazing woulod that be??

From its location this tomb could prove to be a find of the greatest possible significance. By inference from the neighbouring tombs KV62 (Tutankhamun) and KV63 I believe it is likely to represent yet another burial of immediate post-Amarna date - not impossibly home to one or more of the missing Amarna dead about whom I first speculated in 1997 and to whose actual existence KV63 now points. Situated in a part of the Valley which was out of bounds to earlier excavators, moreover, the new find is almost certain to be undisturbed.

What is America Like

Watch a video as a crazy American in a concrete armoured bulldozer destroys half a town before killing himself

How's this for a good idea

It's good to see that people are really starting to think laterally about maintaining our levels of power usage but with renewable sources

British engineers are converting street vibrations into electricity and predict a working prototype by Christmas capable of powering facility lights in the busiest areas of a city.
'We can harvest between 5 to 7 watts of energy per footstep that is currently being wasted into the ground,' says Claire Price, director of The Facility Architects, the British firm heading up the Pacesetters Project. 'And a passing train can generate very useful energy to run signaling or to power lights.

You know you're reading something bad ...

When it contains quotes like:

More than 60% of all processed food in Britain today contains soya in some form, according to food industry estimates. It is in breakfast cereals, cereal bars and biscuits, cheeses, cakes, dairy desserts, gravies, noodles, pastries, soups, sausage casings, sauces and sandwich spreads. Soya, crushed, separated and refined into its different parts, can appear on food labels as soya flour, hydrolysed vegetable protein, soy protein isolate, protein concentrate, textured vegetable protein, vegetable oil (simple, fully, or partially hydrogenated), plant sterols, or the emulsifier lecithin. Its many guises hint at its value to manufacturers.

The effort that has gone into creating the global soya market has indeed
been enormous. Today it is dominated by a handful of American trading companies. Three of them - Bunge, ADM and Cargill - control 80% of the European soya bean crushing industry. These three, together with allied companies, are also estimated to control up to 80% of European animal feed manufacturing. They dominate the US soya market, and also account for 60% of Brazil's soya exports.

You can just hear the ravening grind of cash machine driven ravening corporations as the dream up more despicable ways to fill our diet with processed food that in the long-term is against our health.

You have to ask yourself why!

Why on earth would you want to have a bicycle that you need to row?? - in the words of Eric Cartman "it just does not make sense!"

Poo Jellyfish, poo

Scientist have noticed that a species of tiny jellyfish no larger than your thumb may be able to save the planet from global warming.

They feast on phytoplankton, which are booming in our oceans due to the increase in the temperature. The phytoplankton use the Co2 to photosynthesise, taking it out of the atmosphere and then, once eaten, the CO2 gets deposited on the ocean floor in the jellyfish's poo.

Woods Hole biologists Laurence Madin and Patricia Kremer of the University of Connecticut and colleagues found that one swarm of these tiny jellyfish covered almost 40,000 square miles of the sea surface and consumed almost 74% percent of
phytoplankton every day, removing it from the ocean and preventing it from evaporating back into the atmosphere. Instead, it was contained in their fecal pellets, which sank down into deep water at the rate of up to 4,000 tons of carbon a day.

Let's just hope those little buggers multiply and scoff to their hearts content

Russian Researchers Develop Tomato Vaccine Against HIV and Hepatitis - NEWS - MOSNEWS.COM

soon people could be gaining the benefits of promising experiments of growing HIV vaccines in tomatoes. This offers the hope of cheap, sustainable vaccines for the poorest of countries

Rurik Salyaev at the Siberian Institute of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry in Irkutsk, Russia, and his colleagues used the soil bacterium
Agrobacterium tumefaciens to shuttle a synthetic combination of HIV and HBV DNA fragments into
tomato plants. These include fragments of genes for various HIV proteins and the gene for an HBV protein called HBV surface antigen.

The tomato plants then manufacture the proteins and, like the oral polio vaccine, when the tomatoes are eaten, these proteins prompt the body to create antibodies against the viruses