No Woman, No Drive video mocking Saudi Arabia's ban on women drivers goes viral

A music video criticising Saudi Arabia's ban on women drivers has gone viral - with nearly EIGHT million views in less than a week.
No Woman, No Drive, set to the tune of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry, was filmed by Saudi comedians and activists.
They sing lyrics such as: "In this bright future you can't forget your past, so put your car keys away."
Hisham Fageeh, an Arab-American comedian living in Saudi Arabia, introduces the video and sings in the film.
In an apparent dig at the country's authorities, he sings a capella - using whistling, finger clicks and beard scratches to make music - as musical instruments are frowned upon by some conservatives.
He also mocks recent comments from a Saudi cleric who claimed driving could damage a woman's ovaries and her chances of having children.
The lyrics say: "I remember when you used to sit in the family car but back seat, ova-ovaries all safe and well so you can make lots and lots of babies."
Currently, Saudi women cannot receive driving licences, although the law does not explicitly say they cannot drive.
The song was released on the same day that women in the country got behind the wheel in protest at the ban.
Campaigners had hoped it would be the biggest day of action so far, but threats of arrest and legal action stopped many from participating.

Read More : http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/no-woman-no-drive-video-2659219

Love Gone Wrong: Five Weird Sex-Related Injuries

An Australian court ruled Wednesday that a woman who was hit by a falling piece of glass while having sex on company time won’t get any workers’ compensation. Presumably a sense of humor is the only thing that could compensate her — and the parties involved in these other five sex-related injuries:
1. The Hospitalization Hickey
The point of giving someone a hickey is to playfully annoy that person and to leave a mark that says “I was here” — not to cause a stroke. A Kiwi husband seems to have missed that memo. When smooching his wife in January 2011, he caused a blood clot to form and travel to her heart. As her left arm became paralyzed, the amorous session came to an end, and the woman was rushed to hospital and put on anticoagulants.
2. The Kiss of Deaf
When two young Chinese shared a kiss in December 2008, the man, perhaps overly eager, kissed the woman in such a way that pressure was reduced in her mouth, rupturing her eardrum. “While kissing is normally very safe, doctors advise people to proceed with caution,” wrote China Daily at the time. The woman was expected to regain full hearing in her left ear after two months.
3. Concrete Proposal
Dr. Peter J. Stephens and Dr. Mark L. Taff wrote an article for an academic journal about one of their patients — a sober and healthy 20-year-old found with a foreign object in his rectum. The patient had been “fooling around” with his boyfriend when the two of them came up with the idea to stir a batch of concrete mix and get a funnel. The rest is medical history. “Examination of the specimen revealed a perfect concrete cast of the rectum, measuring 12 x 7 x 5 cm and weighing 275 g,” the doctors wrote in their article.
4. Kama Sutr-Ow!
A Russian couple in their 50s decided to spice things up at home and borrowed a book of Kama Sutra positions from a friend. One of the positions they tried out was indrani, or the “deck-chair position,” in which the woman draws up her knees so her legs are jammed under her partner’s armpits, or else draped over his shoulders. Problem was, once in that position, the woman had a muscular spasm, and locked the two of them together. Struggling for an hour to break free, they finally had to call paramedics for help. They were successfully separated.
5. A Pleasant Buzz
According to the racy U.K. tabloid Daily Star, 24-year-old Amanda Flowers began suffering from a condition known as “persistent genital arousal disorder” after falling off from a Wii Fit board and twisting a nerve. Now she claims to find mere vibrations of her food processor and mobile phone stimulating. “With no cure I just have to try to control my passion by breathing deeply,” she says. “Hopefully one day I’ll find a superstud who can satisfy me.”

SOURCE  :  http://world.time.com/2013/10/31/love-gone-wrong-five-weird-sex-related-injuries

Suicide bomber hits Tunisian resort, no victims

Tunisia had largely avoided violence, but since the country kicked off the Arab Spring by overthrowing its long-ruling secular dictatorship, it has been battered by a rising Islamist insurgency in remote parts of the country. The violence is the first in a tourist area and raises fears for the country's already troubled tourism industry.
Witnesses told Tunisian media that the man appeared to be about to enter the Riadh Palm hotel in Sousse, about 90 miles (150 kilometers) south of the capital, Tunis, when he exploded. The Interior Ministry said that no one else was injured and no property was damaged. It said the bomber was a Tunisian man wearing an explosive belt.

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Police also arrested a man carrying explosives near the mausoleum of Habib Bourguiba, the country's first post-independence president, in the nearby city of Monastir, ministry spokesman Mohammed Ali Aroui told a local radio station. Both men appeared to belong to an extremist group, he said.
Sousse has long been a major destination for European tourism, a sector that was just now recovering from a catastrophic drop following the country's 2011 revolution when tourists stayed away amid the unrest. A security vacuum opened up and many long-repressed hardline Islamic groups appeared, some of whom armed themselves with weapons from civil war-wracked Libya to the east.
After tolerating hardline groups like Ansar al-Shariah, the moderate Islamist government banned them in September and began arresting members.

Read More : http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2013-10-30/suicide-bomber-hits-tunisian-resort-town

Sebelius to face grilling at hearing on glitch-ridden ObamaCare website rollout

The top health official in charge of ObamaCare implementation will face a chorus of critics Wednesday as she prepares to testify on Capitol Hill – amid complaints not only about the main federal website, but also a wave of cancellation notices.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, her first appearance before Congress since the troubled launch of state-based health exchanges on Oct. 1.
Sebelius is likely to face tough questions about problems with the HealthCare.gov website, which was plagued by technical glitches again Tuesday night after the website's data hub experienced an outage that left consumers in Connecticut unable to apply for coverage.
On Sunday, a similar outage at a Verizon Terremark data center brought the website down, even as White House officials claimed the website was up and running.
In written testimony released ahead of Wednesday's hearing, Sebelius vowed to improve the website and said the consumer experience to date is "not acceptable." But she defended the law itself and said extensive work and testing is being done.
"We are working to ensure consumers' interaction with HealthCare.gov is a positive one, and that the Affordable Care Act  fully delivers on its promise," she said in the prepared remarks.
Sebelius blamed the website contractors and the "initial wave of interest" for the glitches, but expressed confidence in the experts and specialists working to solve "complex technical issues."
"By enlisting additional technical help, aggressively monitoring errors, testing to prevent new issues from cropping up, and regularly deploying fixes to the site, we are working to ensure consumers’ interaction with HealthCare.gov is a positive one, and that the Affordable Care Act fully delivers on its promise," she said.
Among other issues, the initial wave of interest stressed the account 3 service, resulting in many consumers experiencing difficulty signing up, while those who were able to sign up sometimes had problems logging in.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., speaking on the Senate floor, called Tuesday for Sebelius' resignation. Alexander is the top Republican on the Senate health panel.
"Mr. President, at some point there has to be accountability. Expecting this secretary to be able to fix what she hasn't been able to fix during the last three-and-a-half years is unrealistic," he said. "It's throwing good money after bad. It's time for her to resign -- someone else to take charge."
Republicans were also voicing concern Tuesday about Americans being kicked off their current health plans, and newly uncovered documents that show the administration anticipated millions might lose their current coverage and be sent into different plans -- despite pledges to the contrary from the White House.
Sebelius is also expected to testify before the Senate Finance Committee on the rollout of ObamaCare, committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said in a statement. The hearing is scheduled for Nov. 6.
Her appearance Wednesday comes a day after Marilyn Tavenner, head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services,  repeatedly refused to disclose how many people have enrolled in ObamaCare -- during a hearing where she did not deny that officials have that information.
At the top of Tuesday's House Ways and Means Committee hearing, Tavenner apologized for the failures of the main ObamaCare website and vowed to fix them.
But, raising more questions about the administration's transparency on the project, she declined to cite enrollment numbers. She did not claim, as Sebelius recently did, that officials simply do not have those numbers -- rather, she said a "decision" was made to release them in mid-November.
"We made the decision that we were not releasing the numbers until mid-November," she said.
Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., asked again whether she had any idea what the numbers are.
Her answer was the same.
"I'll take that as you don't want to answer the question," Nunes said.

SOURCE : http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/10/30/sebelius-to-face-grilling-at-hearing-on-glitch-ridden-obamacare-website-rollout/

CSU researchers capture unique photo of asteroid

It just was a small white streak — a small cloud speckled with dark spots — hurtling toward rural Russia.
But to Colorado State University scientist Steve Miller, who had combed many satellite images searching for it, that white streak was unique, a one-of-a-kind image of a rare and largely unpredictable event: A meteor crashing to Earth’s surface, like it did on Feb. 15 in Chelyabinsk, Russia.
The photo of the meteor trail, captured from a satellite orbiting 500 miles away from Earth, is the subject of a new CSU study and has the potential to help foster a new field of research, Miller said. Until now, scientists have not been able to track relatively small asteroids, like the Chelyabinsk meteor, and divert them from Earth. Miller hopes that photos taken from space and Earth, along with closer study, will change that.
The Chelyabinsk meteor was a complete surprise — its trail through the atmosphere was stunning.
In the lens of countless cameras — on car dashboards, on top of buildings, on cellphones — the fireball cast a blinding white light before it crashed to the ground. It was about 55 feet wide and weighed more than the Eiffel Tower. Its sonic boom burst windows miles away.
It was also the sonic boom that convinced Miller, deputy director at the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, that this meteor was the real thing.
“I watched it over and over again on the TiVo,” he said.
Thanks to a 33-year partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, Miller and his team of researchers were able to capture a shot of the meteor as it trailed to Earth. One of 21 partnerships around the country, the CIRA researchers can access images from 10 geostationary satellites orbiting Earth, monitoring weather.
One satellite, what Miller calls a “low Earth orbiter,” was moving over the northern hemisphere when it caught the image of the meteor on one of its daily passes over the northern hemisphere at seven kilometers per second. From Earth, it looked like a shooting star.

Read More: http://www.coloradoan.com/article/20131028/NEWS01/310250046

It's a snake! Monkey brains may explain our fear of reptiles

We’re not born with a fear of snakes, but it sure seems to develop early.
Now scientists may be closer to a explaining why ophidiophobia ranks among the top fears of humans, and seems to be shared with other primates.
Researchers inserted probes into the brains of Japanese macaques and found that neurons in a part of their brain that controls visual attention were more strongly and quickly activated in response to images of snakes, versus other objects.

The results, published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, appear to support a theory that early primates developed advanced perception as an evolutionary response to being prey, not as an adaptation that may have made foraging or hunting easier.
Though fear of snakes may not be innate, noticing them more than other phenomena may be hard-wired by evolution, said Lynne Isbell, an evolutionary biologist from UC Davis and one of the authors of the paper. That heightened attention, research has shown, can lead to early and resilient learned behavior, such as fear-mediated avoidance. In other words, getting out of the way of snakes.
“The characteristics we have help us to see them better than other mammals can see them,” Isbell said. “Mammals in general are really good at picking up movement. But snakes lie in wait. They don’t move very much, so it’s crucial to see them before they see us and to avoid them.”
Developing new additions to the brain would have given ancestor primates an advantage. Many scientists assumed the advantage had to do with catching insects for food. But Isbell shook that view of primate evolution in 2006, eventually elaborating on it in a book, “The Fruit, the Tree and the Serpent: Why We see So Well.” An arms race between predator and prey is what selected for bigger-brained primates, Isbell argued.
“They were actually prey,” Isbell said  “And the first of the modern predators of primates, and the most persistent, that continued to this day -- and that look the same as they did 100 million years ago -- are snakes.”
The brain addition that made all the difference for Old World monkeys was the pulvinar nuclei, according to Isbell. Those areas of the thalamus have been found to control such things as eye and head motions toward stimuli -- responses known as selective spatial attention.
Researchers were probing deep into the limbic system, a region of emotional processing and memory that sometimes is called the old mammalian brain. They inserted probes into the pulvinar nuclei. These nuclei receive inputs directly from the retina of the eye and also connect with nearby brain regions associated with threat-relevant behavior and emotional processing.
Electrical pulses from the pulvinar neurons occurred about 60 microseconds after the snake was presented to the monkeys -- suggesting that the signal might be processed unconsciously. Another pulse came at about 250 microseconds, and that could be associated with feedback from the cortex, where higher cognitive functions are controlled. The researchers used two monkeys raised in captivity that had no opportunity to encounter a snake. Probes measured responses to snakes, faces and hands of monkeys, and geometric shapes. More neurons responded to the snakes, and did so with greater strength and speed, the data showed.
In addition to those at UC Davis, the research team included scientists from the University of Toyama in Japan and the Primate Center of the University of Brasilia in Brazil. It was supported by the Asian CORE program, which promotes research cooperation.

Read More : http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-snake-fear-monkeys-20131026,0,3773593.story?track=rss#axzz2j69Z08KH

Heat waves could be predicted weeks in advance, study finds

Scientists have discovered a weather pattern that foreshadows heat waves and could be used to predict them more than two weeks in advance, well beyond the 10-day range of weather forecasts, a new study reports.

Researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research wondered if the prolonged and often deadly heat waves that hit the United States and other Northern Hemisphere countries during the summer could be triggered by large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns.
They started by searching weather records before 20 extreme heat waves since 1948, but there were so few examples it was difficult to find patterns amid the statistical noise.
“These are extreme events. They are very rare by definition,” said Haiyan Teng, a climate scientist with the center and lead author of the study published Sunday in Nature Geoscience.
So researchers used a computer simulation of 12,000 years of atmospheric conditions that included approximately 6,000 heat waves. They found that major heat waves tend to happen after an alternating sequence of five high- and low-pressure systems they dubbed “wavenumber-5.”
The pattern essentially forms a ring of weather systems that move slowly across the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, eventually shutting down rainfall and setting the stage for a heat wave.
The odds of a heat wave in the United States rose 15 to 20 days after that weather pattern formed, scientists found. In some cases, heat waves were more than four times more likely to happen, the computer model showed.
After making that discovery, researchers tested the model with historical measurements and found that some of the heat waves in the record books were indeed preceded by that circulation pattern.
The takeaway, Teng said, is that “some extreme events may be more predictable than day-to-day weather.”
Though the pattern could be useful to tell whether there is a higher or lower chance of a heat wave in the next several weeks, Teng warned, it cannot be used to predict specific temperatures.
As anyone who watches the weather forecast knows, that predictive ability drops off after about 10 days.

The findings could give emergency managers more time to prepare for the type of prolonged heat spell the United States last saw in June and July of 2012. A heat wave that hung over North America in the summer of 2006 killed hundreds of people.

“Because of the damage to society, there is a higher priority to produce a probability forecast,” Teng said. 

SOURCE : http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-heat-wave-predict-weeks-advance-weather-pattern-20131028,0,4053065.story#axzz2j69Z08KH