Miss Fidget.com

Wow, like how bad does it have to be to close a hospital?

Spider plague closes Australian hospital
Tuesday, April 22, 2008 | www.sfgate.com

A tiny Australian hospital is closing temporarily because of an infestation of poisonous spiders.

The Baralaba Multi Purpose Health Service will close for 24 hours starting Thursday morning so officials can fumigate the building to get rid of redback spiders that have been found in large numbers in the main part of the hospital.

Three or four patients will need to be moved to another hospital while the building is closed, according to a statement from Queensland state health officials.

Redback spiders, common throughout most of the country, have a painful bite and a toxic venom, although an anti-venom is available.

The statement said warm weather had caused more redback spider eggs to hatch than usual.

“We believe the best way to deal with them, and the safest option for staff and patients, is to have the whole building fumigated so both the spiders and their eggs are killed,” Ellen Palmer, rural director of nursing, said in the statement Wednesday.

Nearly 300 people live in Baralaba, about 320 kilometers (200 miles) northwest of Brisbane.

It’s not an easy or exact science to fly with balloons. American men seem to be the best at it, based on the flights of Kent Couch and lawn chair flight pioneer Larry Walters. Click those links for great posts in balloon chair avionics.

The most recent attempt to fly with balloons seems to be ending badly for the pilot, a priest from Brazil. The latest news says his balloons have been found but he has not.

Brazilian priest on balloon voyage goes missing
Last Updated: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 | 7:16 AM ET | CBC News

A Brazilian priest who rode a bundle of party balloons into the horizon to set a flight record has disappeared.

Rev. Adelir Antonio di Carli took off Sunday from the coastal city of Paranagua in southern Brazil, buoyed by hundreds of helium-filled balloons.

Wearing a helmet, aluminum thermal flight suit, waterproof clothes and a parachute, he was attempting to break the 19-hour record of human flight by party balloons.

Eight hours after takeoff, di Carli was reported missing after he lost contact with authorities.

Rescuers said they have found the balloons floating in the ocean off the coast of southern Brazil but have seen no sign of di Carli, who planned to use money raised from his adventure to finance a “spiritual” rest stop for truckers in Paranagua, which is the country’s primary grain port.

“Given his physical condition and the equipment he was carrying, I would say there is an 80 per cent chance that he is still alive,” fire commander Johnny Coelho told Globo TV.

Coelho said the priest could be floating somewhere in the ocean or may have found refuge at a remote beach or coastal forest. He was carrying enough cereal bars and water to sustain him for five days and had a GPS device, satellite phone and buoyant chair with him, Coelho said.

It was di Carli’s second balloon journey following a successful four-hour voyage from the Brazilian town of Ampere to Argentina in January.

How wonderful it is to be a human today. We can hurtle humans into the black void of space but when things go awry, superstitions abound. Since space travel is relatively new in human endeavors, I think old maritime superstitions are often reached for. How truly awesome that people can return from space in a gizmo not much larger than a commercial refrigerator.

Capsule carrying first SKorean astronaut lands off target
By MIKE ECKEL | April 20, 2008 | AP

MOSCOW (AP) — A Russian capsule carrying South Korea’s first astronaut touched down 260 miles off target in northern Kazakhstan on Saturday after hurtling through the atmosphere in a bone-jarring descent from the international space station.

It was the second time in a row — and the third since 2003 — that the Soyuz landing went awry.

Mission Control spokesman Valery Lyndin said the condition of the crew — South Korean bioengineer Yi So-yeon, American astronaut Peggy Whitson and Russian flight engineer Yuri Malenchenko — was satisfactory, though the three had been subjected to severe gravitational forces during the re-entry.

The Russian TMA-11 craft touched down at 4:51 a.m. EDT about 260 miles off its mark, Lyndin said, a highly unusual distance given how precisely engineers plan for such landings. It was also around 20 minutes later than scheduled. Search helicopters then took 25 minutes to locate the capsule and determine the crew was unharmed.

Officials said the craft followed a so-called “ballistic re-entry” — a very steep trajectory that subjects the crew to extreme physical force. Lyndin said the crew had experienced gravitational forces up to 10 times those on Earth during the 3 1/2 hour descent.

The crew were being examined on site by medical officials, and were later to return to Moscow for further evaluation.

“The most important thing is that the crew is healthy and well,” Federal Space Agency chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters. “The landing occurred normally, but according to a back-up plan — the descent was a ballistic trajectory.”

Perminov said engineers would examine the capsule to determine what caused the glitch, though he blamed the Soyuz crew for not informing Mission Control about the unusual descent.

Later, Perminov referred to a naval superstition that having women aboard a ship was bad luck when asked about the presence of two women on the Soyuz.

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This frozen baby mammoth is the best preserved specimen ever found and docs have been able to view her intact internal organs. How dog gone cool is this story? ((hardy har)) I expect in, oh, about 3 years we’ll see a tv special on public tv about this sweet lil baby mammothsicle.

Can prehistoric mammoths now be cloned?
http://www.russiatoday.ru | April 11, 2008, 15:55

Russian scientists say they’ve managed to develop the most detailed picture ever of the insides of prehistoric animals. They made the discovery after studying a baby mammoth found immaculately preserved in the Yamalo-Nenets region in the Urals last year.

The scientists say it was crucial for the study of prehistoric life to pinpoint the exact location of the animal’s internal organs.

Some experts hope that the perfect condition in which the body of the mammoth was found could allow extricate intact DNA from his cells, and, as a result, clone the animal in future.

The 37,000 year-old baby mammoth was named ‘Lyuba’ after the wife of a nomadic reindeer tribesman who found it.

With its trunk still intact, eyes in place and small tufts of fur still on its skin, Lyuba looks more like a museum fake than an eye-witness to the Ice Age, though its tail is missing.

The creature’s organs were also perfectly preserved, and its heart could be clearly seen with the help of computer scanning techniques.

One hundred and thirty centimetres long, 90 centimetres tall and weighing only 50 kilogrammes, the mammoth is almost exactly as it was when it died.

The animal was immediately buried in a watery area or a bog after its death. There was no decay in lack of oxygen. It was located there in a frozen state for several thousand years until it reappeared to the world after a part of the river’s bank slipped off.

To keep it from deteriorating, Lyuba was being stored at minus 10 degrees Celsius in an industrial freezer in the regional museum.

Mammoths, believed to be close relatives of the modern day elephant, roamed the earth from almost 5 million years B.C. to just a few thousand years B.C., when they disappeared.