An indestructible ball

Imagine this scene in your neighborhood: A group of kids plays a pickup soccer game. They kick around the ball in the street or maybe in someone's backyard. The ball bounces from child to child, off of feet, knees, heads. Now, imagine that same scene in a war zone. In a landscape peppered with barbed wire, broken glass and thorny brush, that same soccer ball has a lifespan of about one hour. It was this realization that led Tim Jahnigen, a former lyricist and chef, to take action. In 2006 while watching a news story on Darfur, Tim noticed children kicking around a ball of trash with a string and recognized a need for a ball that could withstand harsh conditions during play. Tim mentioned his idea to a well-known friend from his time in the music business, Sting, who urged him to pursue the idea and provided initial funding and support. In 2010, Tim and his wife, Lisa Tarver, launched One World Futbol Project, an organization that hopes to foster the healing power of play by producing nearly indestructible soccer balls for disadvantaged communities. Made from a unique plastic that's lighter and more flexible than rubber — a material similar to Crocs shoes — One World Futbol never needs a pump and does not go flat, even when punctured. And trust me, I tried. As Tim and Lisa shared their story with me, I was particularly struck by One World Futbol's potential for healing. Lisa says research continues to show that play is one of the few forms of activity that actually helps people recover from traumatic situations. "So when children are in refugee camps or recovering from natural disasters, the opportunity for play is vital to that community's recovery," she explains. One World Futbol Project operates on the "buy one, give one" model, similar to other mission-driven companies such as Toms shoes and Warby Parker. Buyers can purchase two balls for $39.95, which covers one for themselves and one to be donated to a community in need. To date, the organization has supplied over 850,000 balls, but distribution doesn't come without challenges. Because the balls cannot be deflated, they are significantly more expensive and difficult to ship than traditional soccer balls. And the question still remains of how something that supposedly lasts forever can be commercially viable. There’s little need to ever buy another! Still, there’s so much hope in something as simple as a ball. Regardless of geography, kids are kids, and the enthusiasm over a soccer game played with friends is something that’s universal, from Detroit to Darfur, Miami to Malawi. yahoo.com

Thief Forgets To Log Off Facebook After Burglarizing Home

A Minnesota man is in jail because he logged on to Facebook. Police say 26-year-old Nicholas Wig checked his profile from a home he broke into, and then he didn’t log off. It happened June 19 in South St. Paul. “World’s dumbest criminal,” the homeowner James Wood said. “I don’t know.” Wood had come home to find his house ransacked. His credit cards, cash and watch were all gone. In their place, the thief had left a pair of Nike tennis shoes, jeans and a belt, that were all wet. Wood said it had been raining outside. “I started to panic,” he said. “But then I noticed he had pulled up his Facebook profile.” Wood posted to Facebook using Wig’s profile, saying Wig had burglarized his home. He even shared his phone number to see if someone would call with information. Wig texted him later that day. “I replied you left a few things at my house last night, how can I get them back to you,” Wood said. Wig agreed to meet with Wood later that night. Wood believes Wig was under the impression he would give him back some of his clothes he had left at his home in exchange for a recycled cell phone Wig had stolen. Wood, at his friend’s house, left for home. On his way back to his house he saw and recognized Wig, from his Facebook profile, walking on the street. He immediately called police. “I’ve never seen this before,” Dakota County Attorney James Backstrom said. “It’s a pretty unusual case, might even make the late night television shows in terms of not being too bright.” Wig was wearing Wood’s watch when he found him. Police arrested him at the scene. He could face up to 10 years in prison and $20,000 in fines if convicted

Boy survives five-hour flight in airplane wheel well

A 16-year-old boy was lucky to be alive Monday after surviving a flight from California to Hawaii in the wheel well of an airplane, US media reported. The young stowaway endured freezing temperatures and a lack of oxygen aboard the five-and-a-half hour Hawaiian Airlines flight, which reached an altitude of some 38,000 feet, an FBI official told the Los Angeles Times. “How he survived, I don’t know. It’s a miracle,” FBI spokesman Tom Simon told the daily following the teen’s harrowing journey halfway across the Pacific Ocean.

Security video from the Mineta International Airport in San Jose showed the youth hopping a fence and making his way to Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45, where he climbed, undetected, into the wheel well of the aircraft. With oxygen scarce and temperatures well below freezing, Simon said the boy appears to have been unconscious “for pretty much the entire” flight.

The aircraft landed Sunday mid-morning at Maui’s Kahului Airport, and the boy, who did not regain consciousness for another hour, woke up, he hopped down onto the tarmac. Hawaiian Airlines personnel at that point noticed the youth on a airport ramp and notified security, the newspaper wrote. Despite the security breach that allowed him to reach the plane, there was no indication that boy posed a threat to the airline, and he has not been charged with a crime, report said. While it is not unheard of, it is extremely rare to survive a flight in the wheel well of an aircraft. Many who try end up freezing to death or succumbing from a lack of oxygen. In one recent such case, the body of a 26-year-old stowaway was found crumpled on a suburban London street in 2012, after he apparently climbed aboard a British Airways plane in Angola and fell from the wheel well as the plane prepared to land at Heathrow Airport.

Car appears suddenly on a Russia road

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UK scientists have challenged the idea that the ‪Titanic ‬was unlucky

UK scientists have challenged the idea that the Titanic was unlucky for sailing in a year when there were an exceptional number of icebergs in the North Atlantic.
The ocean liner sank on its maiden voyage 102 years ago, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
The new analysis found the iceberg risk was high in 1912, but not extreme, as has previously been suggested.
The work by a University of Sheffield team appears in the journal Weather.
The iceberg which sank the Titanic was spotted just before midnight on 14 April 1912, some 500m away. Despite quick action to slow the ship and turn to port, it wasn't enough. About 100m of the hull buckled below the waterline and the liner sank in just two-and-a-half hours.
Reports of unusually bad ice in the North Atlantic started to emerge shortly after the disaster. At the time, US officials told the New York Times that a warm winter had caused "an enormously large crop of icebergs".

In the days leading up to that fateful night, the prevailing winds and temperatures, assisted by ocean currents, had conspired to transport icebergs and sea-ice further south than was normal at that time of year.
This iceberg, with a red streak of paint along its side, may have been the one that sank RMS Titanic
All this has led researchers to seek explanations for a supposedly awesome flotilla of ice in the North Atlantic. One US group has proposed that an unusually close approach to Earth by the Mooncaused abnormally high tides in the winter of 1912, which in turn encouraged a greater than usual amount of ice to break off Greenland's glaciers.
Lightoller's tale
"From the moment we left Belfast we had marvellous weather.

Even when we got out on the western ocean - the Atlantic as you probably know it - it was as smooth as the proverbial millpond. Not a breath of wind and the sea like a sheet of glass.
In any other circumstances those conditions would have been ideal. But anyone with experience of ice at sea knows that those very conditions, and the moonless night, only render the detection of icebergs more difficult and call for the additional alertness of both officers and men."

-Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer, RMS Titanic
I Was There - Charles Lightoller
Survivors of the Titanic - BBC Archive

In the latest study, Grant Bigg and David Wilton from Sheffield University's department of geography studied data collected by the US Coast Guard and extending back to 1900.
Observational techniques have changed over the years, complicating comparisons. But the researchers say that a good measure of the volume of icebergs is given by the number that passed the circle of latitude at 48 degrees North, across an area of ocean stretching from Newfoundland to about 40 degrees West.
They found that the record showed great variation in the volume of ice from year to year. And although the iceberg flux from Greenland in 1912 was indeed high, with 1,038 icebergs observed crossing the 48th parallel, this number was neither unusual nor unprecedented.
In the surrounding decades, from 1901-1920, there were five years with at least 700 icebergs crossing 48 degrees North. And the coast guard record shows there was a larger flux of icebergs in 1909 than in 1912.
Prof Bigg told BBC News the flux was at the "large end" but "not outstandingly large" for the first 60-70 years of the 20th Century.
Using the coast guard record and other data, the researchers also developed a computer simulation to examine the likely trajectories of icebergs in 1912. Using this model, they were able to trace the likely origin of the iceberg that sank the Titanic to southwest Greenland.
They suggest that it broke off a glacier in that area in early autumn 1911 and started off as a floating hunk measuring roughly 500m long and 300m deep.

Its mass by mid-April 1912 - as predicted by the computer model - agrees very closely with the size of an iceberg bearing a streak of red paint that was photographed by Captain William Squares DeCarteret of the Minia, a ship that joined the search for bodies and wreckage at the site of the disaster.

3D printing

You’ve heard of 3D printing from newscasters and journalists, astonished at what they’ve witnessed. A machine reminiscent of the Star Trek Replicator, something magical that can create objects out of thin air. It can “print” in plastic, metal, nylon, and over a hundred other materials. It can be used for making nonsensical little models like the over-printed Yoda, yet it can also print manufacturing prototypes, end user products, quasi-legal guns, aircraft engine partsand even human organs using a person’s own cells.

Also known as "additive manufacturing" or "stereo lithography," 3D printing is often depicted as a mysterious and seemingly magic process.
3D printing turns computer models into real physical things. It takes different materials, from biodegradeable plastic filament PLA to ABS plastic to Nylon, melts it into thin layers onto a surface, moves up and prints another layer. After layer upon layer, you are left with a physical object.

Why Are Missing Malaysia Airlines Passengers’ Phones Still Ringing?

Family members of passengers aboard missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 say their loved ones’ phones are still ringing, and are begging authorities to use GPS to track them down.
Others say their missing friends and relatives are still signed into texting and chatting apps, but have been totally unresponsive since the plane mysteriously vanished last Friday.
But industry experts say both of these things don’t necessarily mean the missing passengers are alive — or at least not underwater.
“The ringing is not actually ringing at the other phone yet,” tech expert Jeff Kagan said. “It’s just telling you that the network is in the process of finding and connecting to it… In this particular case it’s painful because it gives people false hope.”
Distraught mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children, other family and friends can’t help but call their loved ones repeatedly in hopes of hearing something — anything — on the other end.
But long-distance calls often “ring” many times before the phones actually connect. The sound keeps callers from hanging up because they don’t hear anything; however, if one device can’t be reached, the system eventually drops the call for the other.
Flight 370 was on its way from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing when it disappeared. But not before it went hundreds of miles off course, where military last tracked it above Pulau Perak, a tiny island in the Strait of Malacca.
Officials are still attempting to locate the plane, while conspiracy theorists are calling the whole thing very “Lost”-like.
RYOT

Missing plane: US regulators warned of problems on Boeing

Months before Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 mysteriously vanished, US regulators warned of a “cracking and corrosion” problem on Boeing 777s that could lead to a mid-air breakup and drastic drop in cabin pressure.
The revelation comes amid a desperate search for traces of the plane with 239 people on board, which lost contact with air traffic control at around 1730 GMT Friday, about an hour after take-off from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing.
“We are issuing this AD (Airworthiness Directive) to detect and correct cracking and corrosion in the fuselage skin, which could lead to rapid decompression and loss of structural integrity of the airplane,” the Federal Aviation Administration said.
During a sudden drop in cabin pressure, the crew and passengers can become unconscious, leaving no one at the controls of the affected aircraft.
In 1999, a Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart crashed into a field in the US state of South Dakota after flying uncontrolled for several hours after those on board apparently became unconscious due to a lack of oxygen brought on by a loss of cabin pressure.
Malaysia’s air force chief has raised the possibility that MH370 inexplicably turned back and was quoted as saying the jet had been tracked hundreds of miles from its intended flight path.
The FAA circulated a draft of the directive warning of the cracking and corrosion problem on September 26, 2013.
A final directive was issued March 5, three days before the Malaysia Airlines jet disappeared. The FAA directive is to take effect April 9.
The FAA said it was “prompted by a report of cracking in the fuselage skin underneath the satellite communication (SATCOM) antenna adapter.”
“This AD requires repetitive inspections of the visible fuselage skin and doubler if installed, for cracking, corrosion, and any indication of contact of a certain fastener to a bonding jumper, and repair if necessary,” it added.
The FAA said an estimated 120 US registered aircraft are affected by the directive.
A supporting document accompanying the directive indicates that one unidentified operator reported a “16-inch crack” (40.6- centimeter) of the fuselage skin in an aircraft that was 14 years old.
Boeing performed a “metallurgical fracture analysis” of the affected section of the fuselage skin, according to the document.
As the hunt for the missing plane dragged into its fifth day, Malaysian authorities said they were expanding their search zone off Vietnam’s South China Sea coast to the Andaman Sea north of Indonesia, hundreds of kilometers (miles) away

Man arrested for sending live worms in letters to celebrities

A Taiwanese man has been arrested on suspicion of sending threatening letters containing live mealworms and ceremonial money — traditionally used in rituals for the dead — to local celebrities, police said Wednesday.
The case was first reported last month when a record company received a letter addressed to pop singer Jam Hsiao which contained a bag of crawling worms and similar letters were also mailed to a well-known lawyer, an entertainment industry agent and a chain restaurant.
The suspect, identified only by his family Lai, was apprehended late Tuesday in Kaohsiung City, after police interviewed aquariums and bird shops selling the yellow mealworm used in the threat letters to track him down.
According to the police, Lai admitted that he sent the worms and the ceremonial money to celebrities in a bid to gain attention, because he was upset that his girlfriend was prosecuted for violating trademark law.
In Taiwan, ceremonial paper money is usually burnt in rituals to pay respect to the deceased but it is also used to lay a curse and make death threats.
Picked from Vanguard

Important fact about missing malaysia airline plane

There are some astonishing things you're not being told about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the flight that simplyvanishedover the Gulf of Thailand with 239 people on board.
The mystery of the flight's sudden and complete disappearance has even the world's top air safety authorities baffled. "Air-safety and antiterror authorities on two continents appeared equally stumped about what direction the probe should take," reports the Wall Street Journal.
WSJ goes on to report:
"For now, it seems simply inexplicable," said Paul Hayes, director of safety and insurance at Ascend Worldwide, a British advisory and aviation data firm.
While investigators are baffled, the mainstream media isn't telling you the whole story, either. So I've assembled this collection of facts that should raise serious questions in the minds of anyone following this situation.

• Fact #1: All Boeing 777 commercial jets are equipped with black box recorders that can survive any on-board explosion
  No explosion from the plane itself can destroy the black box recorders. They are bomb-proof structures that hold digital recordings of cockpit conversations as well as detailed flight data and control surface data.
  
• Fact #2: All black box recorders transmit locator signals for at least 30 days after falling into the ocean
  Yet the black box from this particular incident hasn't been detected at all. That's why investigators are having such trouble finding it. Normally, they only need to "home in" on the black box transmitter signal. But in this case, the absence of a signal means the black box itself -- an object designed to survive powerful explosions -- has either vanished, malfunctioned or been obliterated by some powerful force beyond the worst fears of aircraft design engineers.
  
• Fact #3: Many parts of destroyed aircraft are naturally bouyant and will float in water
  In past cases of aircraft destroyed over the ocean or crashing into the ocean, debris has always been spotted floating on the surface of the water. That's because -- as you may recall from the safety briefing you've learned to ignore -- "your seat cushion may be used as a flotation device."
  Yes, seat cushions float. So do many other non-metallic aircraft parts. If Flight 370 was brought down by an explosion of some sort, there would be massive debris floating on the ocean, and that debris would not be difficult to spot. The fact that it has not yet been spotted only adds to the mystery of how Flight 370 appears to have literally vanished from the face of the Earth.
  
• Fact #4: If a missile destroyed Flight 370, the missile would have left a radar signature
  One theory currently circulating on the 'net is that a missile brought down the airliner, somehow blasting the aircraft and all its contents to "smithereens" -- which means very tiny pieces of matter that are undetectable as debris.
  The problem with this theory is that there exists no known ground-to-air or air-to-air missile with such a capability. All known missiles generate tremendous debris when they explode on target. Both the missile and the debris produce very large radar signatures which would be easily visible to both military vessels and air traffic authorities.
  picked from NaturalNews