Nuclear Plant Scare: Explosives Found in Sweden

ABC News - Nuclear Plant Scare: Explosives Found in Sweden (ABC News) 

Nuclear Plant Scare : Explosives Found in Sweden - Swedish officials have raised security levels at the country's nuclear power plants after a small amount of explosives, without its detonator, was discovered at one of the plants during a routine security check, local authorities said. 

The explosive material, believed to be civilian-type explosives used in demolition or excavation, was about the size of a tennis ball and was found in a truck at Sweden's Ringhals nuclear power plant. The truck had been on its way from an industrial park into a secure area, but had never made it inside the facility, according to the Ringhals spokesman Gosta Larsen. Since the explosives lacked the detonator, there was no imminent danger, authorities said. 

A sample has been sent to a Swedish lab for analysis. Police are investigating whether it could be a case of sabotage but so far have no suspects, said police spokesman Tommy Nyman. 

"An outsider has obviously placed them on the truck," Nyman said. "We're talking to the truck driver and are trying to map out her movements within the [Ringhals] premises throughout the day." 

Sweden has three power nuclear power stations, all of which have raised their alert level in response to the discovery. The Ringhals plant is just 45 miles from Sweden's second-largest city, Goteburg. ( ABC News / The Associated Press )

READ MORE - Nuclear Plant Scare: Explosives Found in Sweden

Design, not just threads, toughens spider web

Design, not just threads, toughens spider web - Scientists said they had unraveled the mystery of how spider webs can withstand multiple tears and even hurricane-force winds without collapsing.

SCIENTISTS said they had unraveled the mystery of how spider webs can withstand multiple tears and even hurricane-force winds without collapsing.

The findings should be of keen interest to engineers searching for shock-resistant structural designs, they said.

The silk-like threads with which arachnids spin their traps are famously stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar, but this alone does not explain how webs withstand, say, a gash from a fallen branch.

Once ripped, what keeps the whole web from falling apart?

A spider in its web. Picture: AP Source: AP

Researchers led by Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) probed the question using lab experiments, observation and computer modelling.

They began by delving deeper into the molecular structure of the silk threads.

A strand comprises a unique combination of shapeless protein and ordered, nanoscale crystals, they found.

When stress increases -- the falling branch, for example -- the filament elongates in four phases: a linear tugging, a drawn-out stretching as the protein unfolds, a stiffening phase that absorbs force, and finally the breaking point triggered by friction.

Spider threads fall into into two categories, and what makes webs so resilient is how they interact, the researchers said.

So-called viscid silk -- stretchy, wet and sticky -- winds out in ever-widening spirals from the centre of the web, and serves to capture unsuspecting prey.

But the straight threads that radiate outwards like spokes on a wheel, called dragline silk, are dry and stiff and provide structural support.

The radial and spiral filaments each play a different role in absorbing motion, and the way they are intertwined limits puncture damage to the spot where it occurs, the researchers found.

As a result, the web is organised to "sacrifice" local areas so that failure will not prevent the remainder from functioning, even if this is in a diminished capacity.

Dennis Carter, an expert on biomechanics at the US National Science Foundation, which partly funded the research, paid tribute to a "clever strategy" by spiders, which expend precious energy to build their webs.

"It is a distinct departure from the structural principles that seem to be in play for many biological materials," he said in a press release.

There are lessons to be learned from these insights, the researchers said.

"Engineering structures are typically designed to withstand large loads with limited damage, but extreme loads are more difficult to account for," said lead-author Steven Canford of MIT.

"The spider has uniquely solved this problem by allowing a sacrificial member to fail under a high load." ( dailytelegraph.com.au )

READ MORE - Design, not just threads, toughens spider web

Mystery of Pompeii's Trashy Tombs Explained

Mystery of Pompeii's Trashy Tombs Explained - The tombs of Pompeii, the Roman city buried by a volcanic eruption in A.D. 79, had a litter problem. Animal bones, charcoal, broken pottery and architectural material, such as bricks, were found piled inside and outside the tombs where the city's dead were laid to rest.

To explain the presence of so much garbage alongside the dead, archaeologists have theorized that 15 years before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, an earthquake left Pompeii in disrepair.

However, this theory is unlikely, according to an archaeologist who says the citizens of Pompeii may have just been messy, at least by modern, Western standards.

"We tend to assume things like that are universal, but attitudes toward sanitation are very culturally defined, and it looks like in Pompeii attitudes were very different than ours," said Allison Emmerson, a graduate student studying Roman archaeology in the classics department of the University of Cincinnati.

Archaeological evidence from the last 15 years indicates that the city likely did not fall into ruin after the earthquake in A.D. 62; rather than flee, citizens appear to have rebuilt, reconstructing public spaces and elite houses. When the eruption buried the city, new tombs were still being built and the city appeared prosperous, according to Emmerson.

"It just didn’t make sense that trash would mean the tombs weren't being used," she said.

In fact, the tombs weren't unique; excavators have found the same sort of household garbage in the city streets, along the walls of the city, even on the floors of homes. When Emmerson excavated a room in a house that appears to have also served as a restaurant, she found a cistern for storing water between two garbage pits packed with broken pottery and food waste, such as animal bones, grape seeds and olive pits.

No evidence has been found for a system for handling garbage or for dedicated dumps.

"The closest thing that has been found is a giant heap of garbage outside the city walls," she said.

The residents of Pompeii also appear not to have shared our conventions on burial. As Romans, they were primarily concerned with being remembered after death, so they sought tombs in high-traffic areas. Since Roman law and custom forbid cemeteries inside the city, the tombs ringed the city walls, and clustered at its gates.

The walls of the tombs also served as the billboards of the day, bearing official graffiti announcing gladiator fights, and political advertisements for candidates for office in red paint. Other graffiti was of the "bathroom" variety, Emmerson said. These included more obscene versions of "I had a girl here," and messages back and forth scratched into the plaster of the tombs.

Emmerson is scheduled to present her work, which examines how Pompeii's tombs reflect the culture at the time, on Saturday (Jan. 7) at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Philadelphia. ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - Mystery of Pompeii's Trashy Tombs Explained

Finger Length Linked to Penis Size

Finger Length Linked to Penis Size - Hold up your right hand. Are your index and ring fingers close to the same size? Congratulations, you're more likely than men with mismatched digits to have a long penis.

A smaller ratio between the second and fourth fingers is linked to a longer stretched penis size, researchers report today (July 4) in the Asian Journal of Andrology. The findings go beyond providing a new finger ratio-based pick-up line for men in bars, however; researchers say that a quick look at a man's fingers could reveal his exposure to male hormones in the womb, providing a hint about his risk for hormone-driven diseases like prostate cancer.

The idea that men's finger ratio and hormone exposure are linked is not a new one. Studies have found that the ratio between the second and fourth finger is related to sperm count, likelihood of heart attack, hand preference, facial masculinity and more. One small 2002 study published in the journal Urology found a correlation between the length of the index finger and genital size in healthy men under 40, suggesting that testosterone exposure in the womb affects the growth of both.

Stretched penis length

In the new study, researchers at Gachon University Gil Hospital in South Korea recruited 144 volunteers 20 years of age and older who were going to undergo urological surgery. While the men were under anesthesia, the researchers measured their finger lengths and both their flaccid and stretched penis lengths. Stretched penis length is statistically correlated to the size of the penis when fully erect.

The average flaccid penis length, the researchers found, was 3.0 inches (7.7 centimeters), with a range of 1.6 to 4.7 in. (4 to 12 cm). Stretched lengths ranged from nearly 3.0 to 6.7 in. (7.5 to 17 cm), with an average of 4.6 in. (11.7 cm).

The average ratio between the two fingers was 0.38 in. (0.97 cm), with a range of 0.35 to 0.44 in. (0.88 to 1.12 cm), making the differences hard to make out with the unaided eye. But the lower the digit ratio, the study found, the longer the penis was likely to be.

Testosterone in the womb

The prenatal hormone exposures and genetic processes that link fingers to penises are still unknown, the researchers wrote, though testosterone in the womb seems to play a role. If the findings hold, wrote Skidmore College biologist Denise Brooks McQuade in an editorial accompanying the study, digit ratio could provide an at-a-glance measure for doctors to gauge how much testosterone their patients were exposed to in the womb.

That makes digit-ratio measurement far more than a fancy bar trick, wrote McQuade, who was not involved in the research.

"'Hotness' aside, the value of digit ratio research for the biomedical scientist or clinician may come from the predictive abilities and risk-assessment qualities of the measurement for clinical conditions," she wrote. ( LiveScience.com )

READ MORE - Finger Length Linked to Penis Size

The Story of John Hancock's Signature

The Story of John Hancock's Signature - There are a lot of stories surrounding the Declaration of Independence. One of the most famous concerns John Hancock and his comically large signature. According to legend, the founding father signed his name bigger than everyone else's because he wanted to make sure "fat old King George" could read it without his spectacles.

It's a neat story about American brashness, but it isn't very accurate. The truth is a tad less dramatic. Snopes.com explains that Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, gave a super-sized signature not because he was itching for a fight with the king, but because, among other things, he happened to be the first person to sign the document.

Because Hancock was the first to sign, he did the sensible thing and put his name front and center. He was the leader of the Congress, after all. He didn't know his fellow patriots would sign their names on a smaller scale.

The story behind John Hancock's signature on the Declaration of Independence. (Thinkstock)

So, why are some of the other signatures high and to the left while others are down and to the right? The National Archives explains, "In accordance with prevailing custom, the other delegates began to sign at the right below the text, their signatures arranged according to the geographic location of the states they represented. New Hampshire, the northernmost state, began the list, and Georgia, the southernmost, ended it."

And it's worth remembering that signing one's name to the Declaration of Independence was no small thing. Those who signed the document were sure to be hanged for treason should they be caught.

Another popular story says that the members of Congress were inspired to lend their own names to the document after seeing Hancock's epic autograph and the bravery it signified. Neat, but not true. Not only was Hancock the first to sign the Declaration, he did it weeks before anybody else. The National Archives explains, "One of the most widely held misconceptions about the Declaration is that it was signed on July 4, 1776, by all the delegates in attendance."

In reality, Hancock signed it in the presence of just one man, Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress. National Geographic explains, "no one actually signed the Declaration of Independence at any time during July 1776. Signing began on August 2, with John Hancock's famously bold scribble, and wasn't completed until late November."

That famous painting of all the founding fathers gathered around, signing the document was a case of artistic license. ( yahoo.com )

READ MORE - The Story of John Hancock's Signature

Arrest in 54-year-old murder mystery

Arrest in 54-year-old murder mystery — Charles "Chuck" Ridulph always assumed the person who stole his little sister from the neighborhood corner where she played and dumped her body in a wooded stretch some 100 miles away was a trucker or passing stranger — surely not anyone from the hometown he remembers as one big, friendly playground.

And, after more than a half century passed since her death, he assumed the culprit also had died or was in prison for some other crime.

On Saturday, he said he was stunned by the news that a one-time neighbor had been charged in the kidnapping and killing that captured national attention, including that of the president and FBI chief. Prosecutors in bucolic Sycamore, a city of 15,000 that's home to a yearly pumpkin festival, charged a former police officer Friday in the 1957 abduction of 7-year-old Maria Ridulph after an ex-girlfriend's discovery of an unused train ticket blew a hole in his alibi.

Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, has been held in Seattle on $3 million bail. A judge overseeing a Saturday court appearance for him said he had been taken to a regional trauma center but did not elaborate. She rescheduled his bail hearing for 12:30 p.m. Monday.

The grave site of Maria Ridulph at Elmwood Cemetery is shown in Sycamore, Ill., on Saturday, July 2, 2011. DeKalb County prosecutors charged Jack Daniel McCullough, 71, on Friday with murdering Ridulph, a 7-year-old Illinois girl who was last seen playing with a friend near her home in Sycamore, about 50 miles west of Chicago in 1957. (AP Photo/ Barbara Rodriguez)

"I just can't believe that after all these years they'd be able to find this guy," Chuck Ridulph told The Associated Press at his duplex in Sycamore, about 50 miles west of Chicago.

A 65-year-old minister who mainly serves his area's senior citizens, Ridulph once shared a bedroom with his sister and already has his headstone placed on a burial plot next to her grave. With McCullough's arrest, he worries about a drawn-out legal process that will dredge up bad memories but also perhaps answer some nagging, stomach-churning questions about what happened to the little girl who loved to play dress up.

"It's in my every thought, even in my dreams," he said of his sister's death. "It was just like it was yesterday. It comes up all the time in conversation."

Sycamore Police Chief Donald Thomas was reluctant to discuss the case when found at home Saturday. But he said, "we believe we know who did it. We believe we have a strong case."

His department's breakthrough was a long time coming.

Maria disappeared Dec. 3, 1957, while doing what kids in Sycamore did then — playing. Maria's friend, Kathy Chapman, who was 8 at the time, recalled that she and Maria were under a corner streetlight when a young man she knew as "Johnny" offered them a piggyback ride. Chapman, now 61 and living in St. Charles, Ill., told the AP she ran home to get mittens and that when she returned, Maria and the man were gone.

"She was my best friend," Chapman told the AP on Saturday. "We played every day. We were always together."

The search for Maria grew to involve more than 1,000 law enforcement officers and numerous other community members, ultimately catching the eye of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who requested daily updates.

"Things never went back to normal," Chapman said. "It was always a struggle. I didn't have a normal childhood after that."

Christmas came and went, with a pogo stick wrapped as a gift for Maria remaining unopened, her brother remembered. Then in April 1958, two people foraging for mushrooms found her remains.

Police suspected McCullough, who lived less than two blocks from the Ridulphs and who fit the description of the man said to have approached the girls, Thomas said Friday. But McCullough seemed to have an alibi, claiming he took the train from Rockford to Chicago the day of the abduction.

His story fell apart last year after investigators reinterviewed a woman who dated him in 1957 and asked her to search through some personal items, the Seattle Times reported, citing court documents. She found an unused train ticket from Rockford to Chicago dated the day the girl went missing.

"Once his alibi crumbled, we found about a dozen other facts that helped us build our case," Thomas said.

The Times reported investigators also determined a collect phone call McCullough purportedly made to his then-girlfriend from Chicago actually came from his Sycamore home the day Maria vanished — and he gave a ride to a relative when he should have been on the train.

Chapman said police never showed her a photo of McCullough in the days and months after Maria was kidnapped. But in September of last year, she said investigators came to her with a photo of a teenage McCullough. She identified him as the "Johnny" who approached her and Maria the night her friend vanished. At the time, McCullough's name was John Tessier.

Chapman was shocked to learn the case was still being investigated. She said she had received information some years before about it being closed.

When she got the news that McCullough was charged, she said she was "just ecstatic, could not be happier."

"We've been waiting a long, long time for this," said Chapman, who has three children and three grandchildren.

By Saturday, word of McCullough's arrest had swept throughout Sycamore, its main street adorned by American flags tethered to parking meters and lined by mom-and-pop shops. The prospect of reliving one of the most upsetting moments in the town's history during a trial was already weighing on Dick Larson, a rural mail carrier who went to school with Chuck Ridulph.

"It breaks my heart to think we have to go through this again. This is 54 years ago. It just brings back a whole river flow of memories," the 65-year-old said before crying.

He doesn't believe a conviction will bring closure or help the town heal.

"That's a standard way of thinking, that there's justice and closure," he said. "The people who go through it, they deal with it forever." ( Associated Press )

READ MORE - Arrest in 54-year-old murder mystery