- Thursday was not a good day for the Ultimate Fighting
Championships. Dana White’s organization is the undisputed king of
mixed-martial arts and rapidly gaining ground on boxing in terms of popularity
with combat sports fans, largely because every month UFC delivers a great
pay-per-view event full of fights fans want to see. That changed for the first
time on Thursday, as White was forced to call off UFC 151 after an injury forced light heavyweight Dan
Henderson off the card and his opponent, champion Jon Jones, turned down a
replacement fight against Chael Sonnen. White blasted Jones for rejecting the
fight even though the man nicknamed “Bones Jones” is the fastest-rising star in
UFC and a huge draw. Taking a fight on eight days’ notice may have been too much
for Jones to accept, but it was obviously not too much for UFC
middleweight champion Anderson Silva to accept. Silva, whose last fight was a
thorough beatdown of Sonnen, offered to accept a light heavyweight fight on
eight days' notice if it would salvage UFC 151. Ed Soares, Silva's manager,
confirmed that his fighter asked him to inform UFC he was willing to headline
the card as a light heavyweight even though he has not been training or
preparing the way he would if he were getting ready for a fight. White
ultimately turned the offer down, saying it was too late to save the card. "Anderson called me, said he heard
about the event getting canceled," Soares said. "He goes, 'Well dude, tell Dana I haven't been training and I'm not
in the best shape. I wouldn't be able to make 185 pounds, but if he could find another 205-pound
fighter willing to take the fight on eight days' notice, I'd be willing to take
the fight to save the event.” Jones said he didn’t want the other fighters on
the card to suffer or for the fans to miss out. He had planned to take the rest
of 2012 off after a win over Sonnen at UFC 148 in July, but showed himself to
be a fighting champion nonetheless……….
- Don’t f*ck with Nepalese villager Mohamed Salmo Miya. Miya, who lives in a
village some 125 miles southeast of the Nepali capital of Kathmandu, doesn’t
take kindly to being hassled by anyone, especially not some slimy snake
slithering through his rice paddy. He was out in his paddy, working hard and
doing what Nepalese villagers who farm rice paddies do, when a snake snuck up
and bit him. The snake, called "goman" in Nepal, is also known as the
Common Cobra, is not deadly to bite victims but this particular bite victim was
deadly for the snake. After it bit Miya, he didn’t panic, run for home or sit
down and have a good cry. Instead, an enraged Miya pursued the snake and when
he tracked it down, he exacted revenge in emphatic fashion. Deciding the best
way to convey his anger was to make the snake feel his pain, Miya bit the snake
back and continued biting it until he killed it. Biting a snake seems a tad
dangerous and more than a little insane, but Miya didn’t flinch even though he
could have picked up a garden tool or stick and gotten the job done just as
well. "I could have killed it with a stick but bit it with my teeth
instead because I was angry," Miya said. Police official Niraj Shahi
confirmed that Miya would not be charged with killing the snake because the
reptile was not among snake species listed as endangered in Nepal. He was treated
at a village health post and released back into the wild to terrorize the
snakes of his remote village………..
- If there isn't enough hydrogen in the world, maybe it’s
time to manufacture some. With several major
automakers hard at work developing hydrogen fuel cell projects, pilot projects
underway and mountains of money to be made for those who win the race,
competition is fierce. There are also significant cost and sustainability
considerations to resolve. At the same time, scientists in Cambridge are
working on their own solution to the challenge and this week, they were able to
achieve significant progress toward figuring out at least one part of the
dilemma: the need for a sustainable and cost-effective source for hydrogen. The
Cambridge team used a cobalt catalyst instead of expensive platinum and
conducted their tests in the "industrially relevant" conditions in
which air was present, and at room temperature. “Until now, no inexpensive
molecular catalyst was known to evolve H2 efficiently in water and under
aerobic conditions. However, such conditions are essential for use in
developing green hydrogen as a future energy source under industrially relevant
conditions,” said researcher Dr. Erwin Reisner, an EPSRC research fellow and
head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. “Our
research has shown that inexpensive
materials such as cobalt are suitable to fulfill this challenging requirement.
Of course, many hurdles such as the rather poor stability of the catalyst
remain to be addressed, but our finding provides a first step to produce ‘green
hydrogen’ under relevant conditions.” While this approach is still early in the
developmental process and not ready to be used to produce affordable cars,
these findings are noteworthy because cobalt, which is available in large
supplies, worked after previously being shown to be ineffective. “A H2
evolution catalyst which is active under elevated O2 levels is crucial if we
are to develop an industrial water splitting process – a chemical reaction that
separates the two elements which make up water,” Reisner explained. The next
steps in the process are addressing the poor stability of the catalyst and
developing a solar water-splitting device in which the hydrogen and oxygen are
simultaneously produced. The Cambridge team hopes to develop a sunlight-driven
water splitting system soon and team leaders Fezile Lakadamyali and Masaru Kato
believe a sunlit-driven method could yield “green and sustainable H2 instead of
not-green and not-sustainable processes presently used to produce H2 from
fossil fuels.” More on their work can be found in the latest edition of the
must-have journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition…………
- Damn. There isn't any other way to respond to the news
that Johnny Depp will reportedly make in the neighborhood of $90 million to reprise
his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fifth installment of the “Pirates of the
Caribbean” franchise. Depp, the only one of the series’ stars who has appeared
in a central role in all four of its previous four movies, made just north of
$50 million for his role in the most recent movie in the franchise, 2011's “Pirates
of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.” While some might argue that the franchise
has run out of stories totell and should simply end rather than make a blatant
cash grab with a fifth film, there is no disputing that such a film will make
hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide based largely on brand recognition.
As the central cog in that machine, Depp can command virtually any amount of
money he wants and the push for nine figures is apparently part of his new
long-term career plan. According to sources, Depp has studiously watched the
terrible career arcs of actors like John Travolta or Nicolas Cage and has seen
them become overexposed by doing too many films and having audiences grow tired
of them. By accepting a massive contract for a new “Pirates” film, he can be
much more selective about future roles. Of course, this ignores the fact that
he just made $50 million for stranger tides and has made tens of millions more
for the other roles he’s played throughout his career, but greed is greed and
the Hollywood lifestyle doesn’t come cheap. Playing Captain Jack Sparrow over
the past decade has substantially boosted his profile, allowed him to work with
the man he based the character off, Rolling Stones frontman Keith Richards, and
kept him relevant with younger fans as his career has progressed. Oh, and
considering he recently split with the love of his life, Vanessa Paradis, after
14 years together and the couple have two children together, 12-year-old Lily
Rose and 10-year-old Jack, $90 million should help Depp properly support his
children………
- Even mountain lions like to gamble every now and then. Sometimes,
they like to gamble by attempting to sneak into a casino in downtown Reno, Nev., ahead of
the breakfast rush and snag some free waffles, pancakes, eggs and bacon. Friday
morning was not so different from any other morning in the world’s “Biggest
Little City,” except that a 100-pound cat attempted to walk through the front
door at Harrah’s. A predator that could have mauled and killed most anything in
sight could have conquered the casino’s breakfast buffet – if only it could
have figured out the building’s revolving door. Guests spotted the young male
cat trying to walk into the casino, but when the animal couldn’t negotiate the
revolving door, it hid under an outdoor stage in a nearby plaza. Nevada
Department of Wildlife officers were called to the scene and were able to
capture the cat without any further incident. NDW spokesman Chris Healy didn’t cut
the animal much slack, suggesting its behavior was “almost the equivalent of
being a stupid teenager.” According to Healy, young mountain lions are often
displaced after being chased out of a territory by adults. After officers tranquilized
the roughly 2-year-old cat, they planned to tag it and release it into the wild
for participation in a University of Nevada, Reno study. Like many runs to Las
Vegas or Reno for a little gambling, the mountain lion’s trip went horribly
sideways and ended with him unconscious, being hauled off by law enforcement
and dumped somewhere they don’t know. The only difference here is that the
mountain lion didn’t end up on the roof of an unfamiliar building or with a
fuzzy memory of an encounter with Mike Tyson or a small, angry Asian man………..
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