- Squashing spiders is still a whole lot of fun and the task of cleaning off their webs from doorways and in corners where they take up residence is still a nuisance, but maybe it’s time to give arachnids credit for something other than turning Peter Parker into New York’s web-slinging crime stopper of a hero. It turns out that spiders might be able to manufacture a sort of natural Kevlar, otherwise known as the material used in bulletproof vests and clothing. A new project from, oddly enough, Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi, along with Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands, created a swatch of nearly bulletproof skin made from spider silk and human skin cells. The project is called 2.6g 329m/s, deriving its name from the maximum weight and velocity a Type 1 bulletproof vest can withstand from a .22 calibre Long Rifle bullet. Essaidi and the FGCN team were able to graft spider silk between the epidermis and dermis and create skin capable of stopping a bullet that was fired at a reduced speed. Unfortunately, the synthetic skin failed to repel a bullet that was fired at normal speed from a .22 caliber rifle. Essaidi, showing her artist side more than her scientific mindset, was perfectly okay with failing to create a fully bulletproof skin hybrid. "With this work I want to show that safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof," Essaidi said. "The work did stop some partially slowed bullets but not the one at full speed." Umm…….thanks for nothing? There are plenty of materials out there that cannot stop bullets, so you adding one to the list to underscore how there truly is no “safety” when it comes to guns and bullets seems a fruitless exercise. But Essaidi believes her project will generate plenty of beneficial discussion. "But even with the skin pierced by the bullet the experiment is still a success. It leads to the conversation about how which form of safety would benefit society," she explained. Anyone who wants to see the project in person need not scour some obscure scientific journal; it is part of an exhibition called Designers & Artists 4 Genomics at the Naturalis biodiversity museum in Leiden, Netherlands, which runs until Jan. 8……………
- After battling the his own team all training camp long over his contract and demands for a renegotiated deal, New York Giants defensive end Osi Umenyiora finally decided to drop his demands and report to camp to play the year out under his current contract. Umenyiora, a two-time Pro Bowl defensive end who had 11.5 sacks and 10 forced fumbles last season, was part of a 10-player lawsuit against during the league’s four-month lockout, a lawsuit Umenyiora joined because he claimed the Giants promised back in 2008 to either rework his current deal or trade him to a team willing to do so if he was still playing at a high level at this point. His stats from last season confirm that level of play, but the team offered him only performance incentives to be added to his contract, an offer he rejected. The Giants also gave Umenyiora and his agent permission to seek a trade, although they made any trade an impossibility by slapping a demand of a first-round pick on Umenyiora. After second-year defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul played very well in the Giants’ first exhibition game, Umenyiora decided to end his holdout. However, when he showed up in training camp he did little more than ride a stationary bike on the sidelines, complaining of an injured knee. The conspiracy theorist would argue that he was playing up his injury – if it existed at all – and that conspiracy theory just got juicier after Umenyiora had arthroscopic surgery to clean out his trouble right knee on Friday and will now miss three to six weeks, if not longer. Teammate Justin Tuck is not among those who doubt the legitimacy of Umenyiora’s injury and said as much Saturday. "We had already talked about it and what his plans were going to be," Tuck said. "He came out in practice with every intention of letting his knee be dealt with in the offseason. After a couple practices it swelled up on him, and him and the Giants made a conscious decision to take care of it now. It wasn't like he planned on it. He planned on playing the season with it, but seeing how it was the first week of practice, he felt like the best idea was to take care of it now." Umenyiora himself issued a statement Friday through the team, which read in part, "It was going to have to be done; the only question was when. If I'm going to miss a little while, I would prefer it be now than at the crucial part of our season. It's the best decision for the team and myself." At least one part of that statement is true, but the other half…………
- Every new business needs an angle, something to make it unique and help it stand apart from scores of similar competitors. The right gimmick can mean great success while the wrong one can doom a promising start-up to failure. It may be too soon to say for certain which side of the continuum Fort Wayne Dust Bunnies will fall on, but early returns suggest that the presently anonymous owner of this new venture has found something good to capitalize on: the pervy nature of most members of society. See, this unidentified man has created a maid service with a twist, the twist being that he pimps out his maids to clean in the nude. It sounds like a recipe for trouble, but each maid travels with a security guard whose sole job is to make sure no desperate dude (or woman) orders a naked maid and tries to get some, um, more personal services from her. As a quick aside, if your maid rolls with a security guard to ensure she isn't sexually assaulted or propositioned, that’s a good sign your business fall under the heading of shady. Still, business has been good thus far and the owner sat down for an anonymous interview with a local television station to speak about his odd business model. “We're to the point now that we're working almost every day and we’re getting repeat business,” he said. So what does an average cleaning job look like for a Fort Wayne Dust Bunny look like? Maids are limited to light housekeeping duties: washing dishes, vacuuming, and dusting. They earn roughly $30 an hour, according to the owner, who charges customers $60 an hour. There is a two-hour minimum for any job and local government officials have already said there is nothing about the business that violates any local codes or ordinances. However, free maid porn on the Internet is still a more cost-effective option……….
- Of all the animated success stories Pixar has created in the past decade, few have produced as many laughs and quotable lines as “Up,” the tale of an aspiring Cub Scout and a crotchety old man who float off to South America in a house buoyed by hundreds of helium-filled balloons. The success of “Up” has led Disney to hand big opportunities to the film’s two co-directors. As Disney and Pixar revealed at the D23 Expo Saturday, the two projects will be drastically different but both helmed by “Up” co-captains. "From director Pete Docter comes an inventive new film that explores a world that everyone knows, but no one has seen: inside the human mind," Disney and Pixar tweeted. That doesn’t say much about the film’s overall slant and scope, but it gives at least as much information as a tweet about the second film. "What if that life-changing asteroid missed Earth? Director Bob Peterson’s hilarious tale depicts a world where dinosaurs never went extinct," the second message read. Both Docter and Peterson have significant cinematic clout based on the commercial and critical succcess of “Up,” which was nominated for a best picture Oscar, won for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures and Best Animated Feature Film of the Year and grossed more than $730 million worldwide. The D23 Expo is taking place in Anaheim, home of Disney Land, and it offers fans access to all things Disney, including films, television and theme parks. The name is a reference to 1923, when Walt Disney opened his studio. Docter and Peterson hope they will be able to channel ol’ Walt’s magic with their new films……….
- There aren’t many places in the world right now where tensions are higher than the border between Egypt and Israel. The Egyptian military reinforced its security along the border with Israel on Friday to secure the crossing after terrorists from the cell that infiltrated Israel on Thursday and killed eight Israelis tried to return to the Gaza Strip from Sinai. Additionally, several Egyptian security personnel were reportedly killed and wounded after a suicide bomber blew himself up on the Egyptian side of the Philadelphi Corridor, the line that separates Sinai and Gazan sides of the city of Rafah. Israeli officials speculated that the suicide bomber likely belonged to the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), which was behind the intricate, multi-stage attack near Eilat on Thursday that killed six Israeli civilians, an IDF soldier and a border policeman and wounded 33 others. For its side of the story, Egypt is denying that the soldiers were killed by a suicide bomber and said that they were hit in an explosion caused by bombs that were planted along the border, likely by the terror cell. Tensions were amped up further Friday morning when the Egyptian military claimed that three of its men were killed in an Israeli air strike along the border. An army official explained that the men from the paramilitary Central Security Forces were killed as the IDF chased terrorists along the border near Egypt’s Red Sea resort of Taba, just west of Eilat. Just prior to that announcement, Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke with a number of senior Egyptian officials in an effort to coordinate ways to prevent similar attacks in the future. “There seems to be an understanding in Egypt following the attacks that the situation there needs to change,” a senior IDF officer said on Friday. “We hope the attacks will serve as the wake-up call for Egypt, which will need to work hard to regain control of the peninsula.” Egyptian officials met with leaders of the three main Beduin tribes on the Sinai Peninsula Thursday to brainstorm ideas to stop the violence in the peninsula. Turning it into a heavily militarized zone should probably help in that endeavor………
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