Owners of a fish farm near the village of Alresford have been raising fish for nearly 30 years. Recently they noticed some of their brown trout appeared to be missing. Then a local wildlife photographer and friend of the fish farmers made an amazing discovery.

Dennis Bright captured images of the trout leaping 3 feet out of the water into the mouth of an 8 inch wide metal feeding pipe. The pipe leads to a tributary of the River Itchen about 30 feet away. To get to the water, the trout had to leap into the tiny metal pipe then swim against the swift current.

Fish farm owner David Riley said: “I have been a farmer here for about 30 years and have never seen a fish make it to the other side but I know Dennis and if he says he has seen it I believe him.”

Icthyologists say this behaviour is instinctive. Now is the season for trout romance, and fish experts say the trout were attempting to swim upstream to spawn. The incredibly intelligent creatures were fooled into thinking the water from the pipe was a waterfall that was coming from upstream. They were programmed by nature to try and get past the waterfall, much like their relatives the Atlantic salmon. Paul Knight of the Salmon and Trout Association said: They will follow instinct. I don’t think they would be looking up at the pipe and thinking, “Come on lads, let’s go for it.”

The trout join a growing list of animals that have escaped their fate as dinner for hungry consumers. There have been several high profile cases of animals escaping just before they are turned into food.

Consider one of the most famous cases in recent history. In 1995, a three year old heifer named Emily was taken to a slaughterhouse in the town of Hopkinton, Massachusetts. She was in the slaughter yard itself when she made a daring escape. Emily leapt a five foot tall fence before escaping slaughterhouse staff members and reaching the nearby woods.

Emily became a folk hero as she spent 40 days evading all forms of capture, including attempts to lure her back with hay bales. Emily was eventually recaptured after reportedly grazing with a herd of deer, but her exploits had earned her a reprieve. The slaughterhouse wanted nothing more to do with the celebrity side of beef and sold her to a local church for $1. The animal spent the rest of her days in a field at the abbey before dying of cancer in 2004.

Emily is one of many cows, pigs, sheep, and research animals to escape their confines. Many of the animals who escape are saved from slaughter by the national or international attention they receive. Britain was previously captivated by a pair of porkers dubbed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Pig, who escaped a slaughterhouse and evaded capture for a week, even receiving a little help from residents. The saga was later made into a movie.

Some animals aren’t even escaping slaughter. Takoma the dolphin, in a seemingly political statement, deserted her US Army post as a mine hunter in the Iraq war. The L.A. zoo had 35 escapes between 1998 and 2003. We shouldn’t be particularly surprised by these types of behaviors. Animals are wild creatures; they want to live the way they were intended to live in nature. Even cows, which are stupid and domesticated animals, can probably figure out they’re about to die when they get to a slaughterhouse. I say more power to them. If an animal is smart and ballsy enough to escape their confinement and evade capture for a significant amount of time, I say they’ve more than earned their freedom. Run free, brothers!”

(Via Environmental Graffiti.)

Beaten so fiercely that most of his tail feathers fell out, the bird was euthanized, said Richard Gentles, a spokesman for the city’s Center for Animal Care and Control.

‘It’s just unbelievable that someone would do something to a poor, defenseless animal and do it in such a cruel fashion,’ he said.

The peacock, a male several years old, wandered into a Burger King parking lot in the New York borough of Staten Island and perched on a car hood Thursday morning. Charmed employees were feeding him bread when the man appeared.

He seized the iridescent bird by the neck, hurled it to the ground and started kicking and stomping the creature, said worker Felicia Finnegan, 19.

‘He was going crazy,’ she said.

Asked what he was doing, she said, the attacker explained, ‘’I'm killing a vampire!'’

Employees called police, but the man ran when he saw them. Authorities were looking for the attacker, described as in his teens or early 20s.

It was not clear how the bird made his way to the Burger King, but a Staten Island resident who raises peacocks said he had given some to a person who lives near the restaurant.”

(Via SF Gate.)

‘Science is rather a state of mind,’ Angier argues and, as such, it should inform everything. ‘It is a way of viewing the world, of facing reality square on but taking nothing for granted.’ It would be hard to argue that this state of mind was advancing across the globe. We no longer make and mend, so we no longer know how anything works….’

Though Brockman borrowed Snow’s phrase (’the third culture’), he did not employ it in the same way: Snow had hoped for a kind of detente between the rival mindsets; Brockman perceived a third way. ‘Literary intellectuals are not communicating with scientists,’ he suggested. ‘Scientists are communicating directly with the general public. Traditional intellectual media played a vertical game; journalists wrote up and professors wrote down. Today, Third Culture thinkers tend to avoid the middleman and endeavour to express their deepest thoughts in a manner accessible to the intelligent reading public.”

(Via Boing Boing.)

Michael Moylan was admitted to hospital in Florida on Wednesday complaining of severe head pain. His wife April fled when a bullet was discovered.

She was subsequently arrested for illegal possession of a firearm.

Moylan, a convicted felon, later told police she had accidentally shot her husband as he slept when she drew a gun kept under her pillow.

She fired the weapon by mistake after being woken up by a burglar alarm in the early hours of Wednesday morning, reports quoted Moylan as saying.

Her previous conviction for cocaine dealing disqualifies her from owning a firearm in the United States.

Mr Moylan, meanwhile, remains in hospital in a stable condition.

A spokesman for the local sheriff told the BBC a decision had yet to be made on whether to charge Mr Moylan, who is also a convicted felon.

The sheriff’s spokesman said it was ‘logistically not a useful thing’ to arrest Mr Moylan at this stage.

If arrested, he said, Mr Moylan would have to appear in court within 21 days and the sheriff’s office would have to pay any of his outstanding medical bills.

‘There is no reason for the public to have to pay for this crime,’ he said.

Conflicting accounts

Mr Moylan arrived at a Florida hospital on Wednesday, saying he was woken up with a headache so severe he thought he had suffered an aneurysm.

He also reportedly told doctors he thought his wife had elbowed him in the head during the night.

A local newspaper, The Fort Pierce Tribune, quoted the sheriff as saying: ‘The nurse looked at him and said: ‘It appears that you’ve been shot.’ And he said: ‘No way.'’

A police search of the couple’s house uncovered a gun and blood-stained rags.

When initially questioned by police, husband and wife reportedly gave conflicting accounts of what had happened. “

(Via BBC News.)

He wakes up, heads to the curb of his home in the Villages of Wesley Chapel, rolls his empty trash cans to the back porch and stores them for the next garbage collection.

But when he reached the back porch about 7 a.m. May 30, he found a grumbling 25-pound bobcat on his doorstep.

‘I’ve seen bobcats before, but this one growled this deep, loud growl,’ Rippy said. ‘I set my cart down with the cans because I knew he was going to jump and bite me.’

Rippy is 62. He is a Vietnam veteran. Growing up on a farm in Indiana, he was used to animals. He’d even seen bobcats before.

But this one was different. So Rippy braced himself, preparing for the worst.

The bobcat lunged toward him, biting Rippy in the abdomen. Then the animal wrapped its body around Rippy’s, sliding its sharp nails across Rippy’s arms and legs, leaving bloody scratches.

He knew he had to do something, anything, to stop the attack.

So Rippy grabbed the animal by the neck.

‘I was waiting for him to get in a good position so I could hold him,’ he said.

The bobcat struggled to free itself, but Rippy was determined not to let go. He choked the bobcat for about a minute until it died.

‘He went limp, and I’m standing there holding him by his neck,’ he said. ‘I was bleeding everyplace.’

Rippy’s wife and son were off to work. So Rippy, injured but calm, put the bobcat down and headed toward his neighbor’s house.

Barbara Ahlers called authorities. Her husband, George, took pictures of their bloodied neighbor. And Rippy took pictures of the bobcat.

An Animal Control official arrived and took the bobcat away. Because of its unusual behavior, the animal was tested for rabies.

The test came back positive two days later. Rippy was placed on medication and given a series of shots.

Still, a rabies alert was never issued because of a Pasco County Health Department rule: There must be three animals that test positive for rabies in one ZIP code in order for the public to be alerted.

Florida bobcats usually weigh 15 to 35 pounds. They typically prey on small animals, such as rabbits, rodents and birds, although occasionally they go for larger game like deer.

After the attack, county officials praised Rippy for his quick thinking.

‘We give this guy a lot of credit for what he did,’ said Denise Hilton, animal services manager for Pasco County Animal Control. ‘The man was definitely using his head when he did that. If he let the cat go, we could have had more victims.’

Rippy, recuperating at home from his puncture wounds, was glad he acted on his instincts.

‘If that cat had attacked a child, it would’ve been really bad,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have quit.’”

(Via St. Petersberg Times.)

A 2 year-old was accidentally served a margarita in his drink instead of the apple juice his mother ordered. The kid kept pushing the drink away after taking a sip and his mom didn’t understand why. She opened the sippy cup and found the alcohol. She wasn’t going to make a fuss, but later at home the child got sick and vomited. The chain says the incident was an isolated mistake. The child is fine now.

The reason this happened? Not only was the apple juice and the Triple sec/tequila mixture kept on the same shelf, they were kept in identical plastic bottles. Yikes.”

(Via Slashfood.)

“Russian computers controlling the International Space Station’s (ISS) orientation and supply of oxygen and water have failed, Nasa officials say.

The station’s three crew and seven visiting shuttle astronauts are not at any immediate risk; the ISS has not lost all vital systems.

But it could force Nasa to extend the current shuttle mission by one day.

Engineers are unsure why the computers stopped working as a failure of this type has not occurred before.

The US space shuttle Atlantis docked with the orbiting outpost at the weekend to begin its latest mission.

Nasa’s space station chief said he expected the problem to be fixed within the next few days.

‘We have plenty of resources, so we have plenty of time to sort this out,’ said Mike Suffredini, ISS programme manager for the US space agency.

Without the Russian oxygen machine running, the space station has a 56-day supply of oxygen left. ‘If we are in that position, we have an option to depart,’ Mr Suffredini said.

Different scenarios

The station’s Russian segment has a network of six computers, but on Wednesday, only two were functioning.

The computers have experienced problems before, but a system-wide re-boot usually solved the problem.

This time, the system has been unable to re-boot.

Astronauts have finished the shuttle mission’s second spacewalk
Under a worst-case scenario, where the computer problem persists beyond the shuttle’s stay, and attempts to resolve it come to no avail, the station’s three crew members could be forced to return to Earth early, the website Space.com reported.

The ISS is currently relying on its four gyroscopes to maintain its orientation in space, then shifting to using thrusters aboard the shuttle Atlantis when the gyroscopes are overwhelmed.

This dependency on the shuttle has caused Nasa managers to consider an extension of one day to Atlantis’ 13-day mission.

If this goes ahead, the crew will have to conserve supplies - the shuttle mission has already been extended by two days in order to carry out repairs on a torn thermal blanket.

The crew of space shuttle Atlantis were originally due to spend 11 days at the ISS.

The mission was extended to 13 days in order to carry out repairs on a 10cm (4in) section of thermal blanket which peeled back as the shuttle blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Friday.

The blanket protects the shuttle from the intense heat of re-entering the atmosphere.

The repairs could be made during a planned third spacewalk or a fourth, extra one, Nasa managers have said.

Engineers think the blanket was loosened by aerodynamic forces during lift-off, and was not hit by debris.

Damage to the shuttle Columbia in 2003 during its launch led to the vehicle’s disintegration as it returned to Earth, killing all seven crew.

This was supposed to be the second shuttle mission of 2007, but a freak storm over the Florida launch site in late February caused hail damage to the shuttle and delayed the mid-March flight.

Despite the delays, managers are confident they will be able to complete the ISS before the shuttles’ 2010 retirement date.

Nasa plans to fly 15 more missions to the station to deliver large components, spare parts and other supplies. In addition, one final servicing call to the Hubble Space Telescope is planned for September 2008.”

(Via BBC News.)

A drought in Lynchburg, Tenn., is putting the production of legendary Jack Daniel’s whiskey at risk. The spring used to craft Jack Daniel’s may dry up, and although the Tennessee whiskey maker is conserving the water, distillers are wondering what may happen if the spring goes dry.

This video has more about how the drought is affecting Jack Daniel’s production, and why they may need to stop producing the whiskey until water levels increase.

The latest Drought Monitor shows that most of southern Tennessee is in a severe drought. Nearby Nashville has only received 13.95 inches of precipitation this year, more than 9 inches below average.

According to the Jack Daniel’s website, the water at the spring “flows year-round at 800 gallons per minute at a constant temperature of 56°and is virtually iron free. It’s the reason why the distillery was located in this spot originally –- and why it’s remained there ever since. Just outside the cave you’ll find a statue of Jack Daniel. The man himself, standing guard over this prized spring.”

(Via USA Today - The Weather Guys.)

‘He really taught kids how to use the thinking skills of a scientist,’ said former colleague Steve Jacobs. He worked with Herbert on a 1980s show that echoed the original 1950s ‘Watch Mr. Wizard’ series, which became a fond baby boomer memory.

In ‘Watch Mr. Wizard,’ which was produced from 1951 to 1964 and received a Peabody Award in 1954, Herbert turned TV into an entertaining classroom. On a simple, workshop-like set, he demonstrated experiments using household items.

‘He modeled how to predict and measure and analyze. … The show today might seem slow but it was in-depth and forced you to think along,’ Jacobs said. ‘You were learning about the forces of nature.’

Herbert encouraged children to duplicate experiments at home, said Jacobs, who recounted serving as a behind-the-scenes ’science sidekick’ to Herbert on the ’80s ‘Mr. Wizard’s World’ that aired on the Nickelodeon channel.

When Jacobs would reach for beakers and flasks, Herbert would remind him that science didn’t require special tools.

‘’You could use a mayonnaise jar for that,'’ Jacobs recalled being chided by Herbert. ‘He tried to bust the image of scientists and that science wasn’t just for special people and places.’

Herbert’s place in TV history was acknowledged by later stars. When ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ debuted in 1982, Herbert was among the first-night guests.

Born in Waconia, Minn., Herbert was a 1940 graduate of LaCrosse State Teachers College and served as a U.S. Army Air Corps pilot during World War II. He worked as an actor, model and radio writer before starting ‘Watch Mr. Wizard’ in Chicago on NBC.

The show moved to New York after several years.

He is survived by six children and stepchildren and by his second wife, Norma, his son-in-law said. A private funeral service was planned.”

(Via Seattle PI.)

(Via Tech Dirt.)