Rat empathy, bulletproof boats and achy NBA knees

- Life is dangerous for Texas Department of Public Safety workers. Any time your state has to combat drug dealers and human smugglers, that tends to be the case. Gunfire is a staple of the department’s day-to-day existence, so officers need more weapons and tools if they’re going to win the fight. The newest of those tools is…….bulletproof boats. A new fleet of the special crafts will soon begin patrolling along the Rio Grande and international lakes and DPS officials seem very fired up about it. "This is what you call the bad boat. And indeed it is," said Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. McCraw and six of his fellow bureaucratic stooges held a launch event for the boats on Thursday at Decker Lake in east Travis County, showing off the first of the boats they have received. Each vessel costs approximately $580,000 fully equipped and the fleet will be paid for by state funding and federal grants. Measuring 34 feet long, the boats are equipped with feature armored glass and armored hulls, 900-horsepower engines, powerful night vision cameras and…….freaking four machine gun turrets. Hell yes, you read that correctly. Four machine gun turrets on the boat. Aside from surface-to-air missiles and a battering ram, these vessels seem to have everything they need to wage an all-out war on smugglers, human traffickers……or small, Third World countries. The “shallow water interceptors” will be used to expand the department’s fight against illegal people and items moving across the border in places were traditional patrols aren’t possible. "It is fully capable of taking whatever threats they'll encounter. And there will be a full spectrum of threats, because we will be using this as an interdiction tool. The cartels continue to exploit, move ton quantities of drugs or humans across that river and those waterways. We need to be able to interdict those," McCraw said. Each of the six boats will be named in honor of a state trooper who died in the line of duty and when fully staffed, the newly formed Highway Patrol Tactical Marine Unit will number 40 DPS officers. The six boats will be deployed along the border in early 2012………………


- In one of life’s great ironies, Angelina Jolie apparently has a tough time asking other people to take their clothes off in front of a camera. A woman whose primary go-to skill as an actress is sexing it up and who has disrobed on camera in nearly every one of her roles conceded in a recent interview that she felt uncomfortable asking her actors to bare all and shoot love scenes while directing her latest movie The Land Of Blood and Honey. The film is Jolie’s directorial debut and she explained that stars Zana Marjanovic and Goran Kostic, helped her with the sex scene, because they were willing to go further for the sake of the film. "I believe it was Zana's first love scene and Goran is a family man with a wife and kids. You kind of suddenly feel this strange thing of asking people to participate in anything like that because they're not a real couple," Jolie said. You find out how strange this is to ask anybody to get naked together and put a camera on them. "They actually made me more comfortable. I was being a lot more prudish. I would have allowed them to be more prudish and they told me it was all right and important for the story. They wanted to do what they wanted to do and they were comfortable.” Jolie did draw from her own experience filming such scenes in the past and made sure they were shot carefully and respectfully because she herself has "felt misrepresented" in previous movies where she took her clothes off. "You feel, 'Why did they hold on to that and why did they feel they needed to do that?'" she said. Something else Jolie took from those sex scenes and her first outing as a director was a profound admiration for the physique of her leading lady. "She has a very beautiful body that is very organic in that European sense. She is a real woman and a beautiful woman," she said of Marjanovic. Now that sounds more like the Angie we all know and love……………


- Never underestimate the kindness of lab rats. They have kindness, compassion and empathy and a new study proves it. A team of University of Chicago neuroscientists gave their lab rats a choice between snacking on a piece of yummy chocolate or helping a fellow rat escape from a restraint and most of the rats bypassed the food in order to assist their fellow rodent. "This is the first evidence of helping behavior triggered by empathy in rats," said researcher Jean Decety, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago. "There are a lot of ideas in the literature showing that empathy is not unique to humans, and it has been well demonstrated in apes, but in rodents it was not very clear." Decety and her team began by building a rapport between the rats by pairing up 30 of them and having each duo share the same cage for two weeks. At the end of those two weeks, they moved the rats to a new cage where one of the rats was held in a restraining device while the other could roam free. The free rat could see and hear his or her trapped cagemate and all of the free rats showed more and more irritation with the situation as time passed. To free the trapped rat, the free rat had to figure out how to open a door to an enclosure. It took most of the rats three to seven days to figure out the mechanism, but once they knew how, most went straight to the door to open it every time they were put in the cage. When researchers substituted plastic toy rats for live ones in the enclosure, the free rats did not attempt to free them. "We are not training these rats in any way," said study author Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal. "These rats are learning because they are motivated by something internal. We're not showing them how to open the door, they don't get any previous exposure on opening the door, and it's hard to open the door. But they keep trying and trying, and it eventually works." Even when the trapped rat was freed and released into another cage away from its companion, the free rats still opened the door, indicating they were not motivated by companionship. "There was no other reason to take this action, except to terminate the distress of the trapped rats," Bartal said. "In the rat model world, seeing the same behavior repeated over and over basically means that this action is rewarding to the rat." The last variation on the experiment was placing a pile of chocolate chips in the cage in an attempt to draw the free rat away from helping its friend. Previous experiments showed the rats’ affinity for chocolate, but the rats typically went to free their friend first and even if they ate a few chips first, they would then free their pal and allow him to eat the remaining chips. When the roles were reversed, four-fifths of the rats made the same choice to free their mate. Study co-author Peggy Mason drew an interesting parallel from the findings and applied it to humans. "When we act without empathy we are acting against our biological inheritance," she said. "If humans would listen and act on their biological inheritance more often, we'd be better off." It’s time to learn from the rats…………


- Wanna vote in French elections? Soon, you may need only to move there in order to do so. Not move there and become a citizen, but just move there. The French Senate spent much of the day Thursday debating a bill proposing to extend the right to vote in local elections to foreigners living legally in the country. The Senate's new leftist majority brought the bill to the floor even though it has no chance of passing in the National Assembly, the lower house of Parliament which is still under conservative control. That didn’t stop angry mobs for and against the measure from demonstrating outside the building, nor did it stop politicians from screaming each other down and ranting on the good (or harm) the bill would do. Those in favor of the bill argued that because they pay taxes, foreigners living legally in France should also have the right to vote for their local representatives. In fact, citizens of EU countries residing here have long been allowed to vote in local races. While the bill would have no affect on Americans living in France (who obviously don’t vote in any elections in any country), supporters contended that it was a necessary measure. "We cannot continue to deny the right to vote to those thousands of foreign residents who participate ... in the life of our cities," Communist senator Eliane Assassi said. On the other side of the debate was Prime Minister Francois Fillon, who made a rare appearance at the Senate to denounce the bill because that "the right to vote cannot be bought” and should be exclusive to citizens. "A town, it's not like a business that has its shareholders," said Fillon, of President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative UMP party. Outside the building, two presidential candidates looked to gravy train the attention focused on the debate for their own purposes by taking part in Thursday's two opposing demonstrations. Eva Joly of the EE-LV ecologist party rallied in support of the measure while was Marine Le Pen of the extreme-right National Front party who denounced the measure as a bid by the left to increase its pool of potential voters. Even with a narrow approval in the Senate based on the liberal majority, there is virtually no chance it will pass in the National Assembly and become law. Even so, France is still a great place to live……………



- The Portland Trail Blazers assumed that star guard Brandon Roy would be ready for training camp as NBA teams held their first official practices Friday after the five-month lockout. Roy, a former All-Star who has struggled with health issues for most of his career, apparently has other plans. Sources close to Roy say he is planning to announce his retirement due to degenerative knees, perhaps in the next 24 hours. Under the amnesty clause in the league’s new labor agreement, each team can buy out one player’s contract and release that player without having that salary count against their salary cap number. Roy has admitted to those close to him that his chronic knee problems would have led to a smaller role with the Blazers and could even result in him being released under the amnesty clause. He is extremely active in the Portland community and does not want to risk being picked up by another team and having to leave town. If he does retire, the Blazers will eventually see salary cap benefits from the move - just not for a while. League rules stipulate a one-year waiting period year from the date of the player's injury or illness and since Roy played all the way into the playoffs last season, that date will likely be April 28, 2012. A league doctor will need to confirm that Roy is unfit to play for the Blazers to get the salary-cap relief and once that happens, the Blazers can wipe his contract off the books. Blazers officials have been adamant that they would not use the amnesty clause on Roy despite speculation to the contrary. "Our plan right now is not to use the amnesty," Blazers president Larry Miller said. "We expect Brandon to be a part of this team when the season starts." That statement came after Before the announcement, Miller held a 90-minute meeting at his home with Roy, agent Greg Lawrence, coach Nate McMillan and Blazers interim general manager Chad Buchanan and McMillan emerged from the meeting saying he was going into the season with Roy as his starting shooting guard. Obviously, that changed quickly and for the worse……………