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I can now eat a whole pizza without getting full.

Btw, "level up" is one of the most satisfying things in video games.

WASHINGTON – A new species of giant crayfish literally crawled out from under a rock in Tennessee, proving that large new species of animals can be found in highly populated and well-explored places, researchers said on Wednesday.

The new crayfish should not have been easily overlooked, as it is huge -- twice the size of other species, the team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Eastern Kentucky University said.

But the crustacean is also quite rare, they report in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

"This isn't a crayfish that someone would have picked up and just said, 'Oh, it's another crayfish,' and put it back," said University of Illinois aquatic biologist Chris Taylor, one of the researchers.

"You would have recognized it as something really, really different and you would have saved it," Taylor added in a statement.

Taylor and Guenter Schuster of Eastern Kentucky University found their first specimen of the new species under one of the biggest rocks in the deepest part of a commonly explored Tennessee creek.

The new species, called Barbicambarus simmonsi, is about 5 inches (12 cm) long and has antennae covered with a sensitive fringe of tiny, hair-like bristles, called setae.

More than half of the 600 known species of crayfish in the world are found in North America, Taylor said.

"This thing had not been seen by scientific eyes until last year," he said.

We spend millions of dollars every year on federal grants to send biologists to the Amazon, to Southeast Asia -- all over the world looking for and studying the biodiversity of those regions," Schuster said. "But the irony is that there's very little money that is actually spent in our own country to do the same thing. And there are still lots of areas right here in the U.S. that need to be explored."

NEW YORK (Reuters) – People who drink regularly, especially heavy drinkers, may be more likely than teetotalers to suffer atrial fibrillation, a type of abnormal heart rhythm, according to a research review.

In an analysis of 14 studies, a team led by Satoru Kodama at the University of Tsukuba Institute of Clinical Medicine in Japan found that the heaviest drinkers were more likely to be diagnosed with the condition than people who drank little to no alcohol.

Though definitions of "heavy" drinking varied, it meant at least two or more drinks per day for men, and one or more per day for women. In some studies, heavy drinkers downed at least six drinks per day.

While doctors have long known that a drinking binge can trigger an episode of atrial fibrillation (AF), the findings -- reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology -- suggest that usual drinking habits may also matter.

"What we revealed in the current (study) is that not only episodic but habitual heavy drinking is associated with higher risk of AF," said Hirohito Sone, a colleague of Kodama's, told Reuters Health by email.

Atrial fibrillation is the most common abnormal heart rhythm and is not in itself life-threatening, but patients with it are at significantly higher risk of strokes. It may also result in palpitations, fainting, chest pain or congestive heart failure.

When all the study results were combined, heavy drinkers were 51 percent more likely to suffer atrial fibrillation than either non-drinkers or occasional drinkers.

Overall, the risk edged up 8 percent for every increase of 10 grams in participants' daily alcohol intake.

More than 2.6 million U.S. citizens will suffer from atrial fibrillation this year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The condition becomes more common with age and additional risk factors include high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity.

Since coronary heart disease is much more common cause of death than atrial fibrillation, Sone said moderate drinking -- up to one or two drinks per day -- is probably still a heart-healthy habit for most people.

A better way to show a connection is with studies that measure people's drinking habits, then follow them over time to see who develops atrial fibrillation, said Kenneth Mukamal of Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who led two of the studies included in the analysis.

One of Mukamal's studies found a connection only between heavy drinking, with men who had five or more drinks a day having a higher risk of developing the condition over time than occasional drinkers.

Mukamal said that, based on longer-term studies, "there's little risk from chronic drinking in moderation, but heavier drinking -- even rarely -- acutely increases risk."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/guQxql

CHICAGO – As a decorated Chicago police lieutenant, Jon Burge prided himself on sending bad guys to prison by getting them to confess to terrible crimes — and by committing terrible crimes himself in the process, prosecutors say. Now, having been convicted of lying about the violent means he and his men used to get confessions, it is Burge's turn to face prison time.

With the sentencing hearing for Burge scheduled to start Thursday, prosecutors say his perjury and obstruction of justice convictions add up to 30-plus years in federal prison. Defense attorneys are arguing for less than two years for the 63-year-old former commander whose name has become synonymous with police brutality in the nation's third-largest city.

Both sides will call witnesses, and U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow will decide whether to also allow testimony from outside groups with an interest in a case that's been nearly 40 years in the making. The hearing is expected to last two days.

Dozens of suspects — almost all of them black men — claimed for decades that Burge and his officers tortured them into confessing to crimes ranging from armed robbery to murder. Prosecutors presented testimony at trial from five men — Anthony Holmes, Melvin Jones, Andrew Wilson, Gregory Banks and Shadeed Mu'min — who claimed Burge or his men put plastic bags over their heads until they passed out, stuck guns in their mouths or shocked them with electric currents.

Burge was charged with lying about the alleged torture in a lawsuit filed by former death row inmate Madison Hobley, who was sentenced to death for a 1987 fire that killed seven people, including his wife and son. Hobley was later pardoned.

Hobley claimed detectives put a plastic typewriter cover over his head to make it impossible for him to breathe. Burge denied knowing anything about the "bagging" or taking part in it. The indictment against Burge never said Hobley was tortured, instead accusing Burge of lying with respect to participating in or knowing of any torture under his watch.

Burge has been free on bond since his five-week trial that ended in June.

The allegations against Burge and his men even helped shape the state's debate over the death penalty. Former Illinois Gov. George Ryan released four condemned men from death row in 2003 after Ryan said Burge extracted confessions from them using torture. The allegations of torture and coerced confessions eventually led to a still-standing moratorium on Illinois' death penalty. This month, legislators voted to abolish capital punishment in Illinois. The bill is awaiting the signature of Gov. Pat Quinn.

Motions filed since Burge's trial offer a glimpse into how both sides will build their case. Prosecutors argue that the nature of the violent acts Burge was convicted of lying about should lengthen his sentence, as should the cost his conduct has had on the city, his fellow officers and his victims.

Defense lawyers countered that the sentence sought by prosecutors is "tantamount to life imprisonment" for Burge, who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and has a host of other maladies, including congestive heart failure and chronic bronchitis. His lawyers also argue that the judge should take into account Burge's military service and decades fighting crime.

More than 30 people, many of them police officers, have sent letters to Lefkow asking for leniency, with one calling Burge a "policeman's policemen." The same man added, "If my soul was on the way to heaven and Satan made one last attempt for my soul, Jon Burge would be the person I would want covering my back."

But for the former defendants who say Burge tortured them into confessions, Burge was no savior.

"He was our al-Qaida, he was our (Osama) bin Laden in our neighborhood," said Ronald Kitchen, who was freed from prison after 21 years after it was proven Burge and his men coerced him into falsely confessing to murder. Kitchen spent 13 years of his sentence on death row.

"I would love for him to do 21 years of hard time and to feel the loss that I felt and other people have felt," said Kitchen, who did not testify at Burge's trial.

Burge was fired in 1993 over the alleged mistreatment of Wilson, but he never was criminally charged in that case or any other, leading to widespread outrage in Chicago's black neighborhoods. The anger intensified when Burge moved to Florida and his alleged victims remained in prison.

If you you aren't already paranoid enough to remove your address and cell phone number from Facebook, today might be the day. Facebook has decided to give its third-party app developers API access to users' address and phone numbers as they collectively get more involved in the mobile space, but privacy experts are already warning that such a move could put Facebook users at risk.

In its Developer Blog post, Facebook noted that developers will only be able to access an individual user's address and phone number—not the info of his or her friends. Additionally, those who want to be able to use that data will have to be individually approved by the users themselves, and those developers must take special care to adhere to Facebook's Platform Policies, which forbid them from misleading or spamming users.

Despite Facebook's reassurance that users will have the final say in who gets the info and who doesn't, it didn't take long for observers to point out that it will be easy for shady developers to get in on the action. Security research firm Sophos wrote on its blog that rogue Facebook app developers already manage to trick users into giving them access to personal data, and this move will only make things more dangerous.

"You can imagine, for instance, that bad guys could set up a rogue app that collects mobile phone numbers and then uses that information for the purposes of SMS spamming or sells on the data to cold-calling companies," Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley wrote. "The ability to access users' home addresses will also open up more opportunities for identity theft, combined with the other data that can already be extracted from Facebook users' profiles."

Cluley has a point. Just because app developers agree to follow Facebook's terms doesn't mean that they actually do, and many aren't caught until it's too late. We learned that much just a few months ago when a number of top Facebook apps were found to be collecting and selling user data against Facebook's rules. Facebook ended up suspending those developers for six months, but by that time, the deed was already done.

Imagine if your home address and phone number, or those of your friends and family, were included in that data—does it really matter if developers who use it inappropriately are suspended after the fact? All I know is that I got rid of my cell number on Facebook after an old high school friend used it as part of some creepy "business opportunity" ploy (see, you can't even trust the people you trust). And after this latest developer policy change, I definitely won't be adding it back.

Scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before.
Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed inside thunderstorms in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs occur daily worldwide, but most go undetected.
"These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," said Michael Briggs, a member of Fermi's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) team at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). He presented the findings Monday, during a news briefing at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

Fermi is designed to monitor gamma rays, the highest energy form of light. When antimatter striking Fermi collides with a particle of normal matter, both particles immediately are annihilated and transformed into gamma rays. The GBM has detected gamma rays with energies of 511,000 electron volts, a signal indicating an electron has met its antimatter counterpart, a positron.
Although Fermi's GBM is designed to observe high-energy events in the universe, it's also providing valuable insights into this strange phenomenon. The GBM constantly monitors the entire celestial sky above and the Earth below. The GBM team has identified 130 TGFs since Fermi's launch in 2008.
"In orbit for less than three years, the Fermi mission has proven to be an amazing tool to probe the universe. Now we learn that it can discover mysteries much, much closer to home," said Ilana Harrus, Fermi program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The spacecraft was located immediately above a thunderstorm for most of the observed TGFs, but in four cases, storms were far from Fermi. In addition, lightning-generated radio signals detected by a global monitoring network indicated the only lightning at the time was hundreds or more miles away. During one TGF, which occurred on Dec. 14, 2009, Fermi was located over Egypt. But the active storm was in Zambia, some 2,800 miles to the south. The distant storm was below Fermi's horizon, so any gamma rays it produced could not have been detected.
"Even though Fermi couldn't see the storm, the spacecraft nevertheless was magnetically connected to it," said Joseph Dwyer at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. "The TGF produced high-speed electrons and positrons, which then rode up Earth's magnetic field to strike the spacecraft."
The beam continued past Fermi, reached a location, known as a mirror point, where its motion was reversed, and then hit the spacecraft a second time just 23 milliseconds later. Each time, positrons in the beam collided with electrons in the spacecraft. The particles annihilated each other, emitting gamma rays detected by Fermi's GBM.
Scientists long have suspected TGFs arise from the strong electric fields near the tops of thunderstorms. Under the right conditions, they say, the field becomes strong enough that it drives an upward avalanche of electrons. Reaching speeds nearly as fast as light, the high-energy electrons give off gamma rays when they're deflected by air molecules. Normally, these gamma rays are detected as a TGF.

But the cascading electrons produce so many gamma rays that they blast electrons and positrons clear out of the atmosphere. This happens when the gamma-ray energy transforms into a pair of particles: an electron and a positron. It's these particles that reach Fermi's orbit.
The detection of positrons shows many high-energy particles are being ejected from the atmosphere. In fact, scientists now think that all TGFs emit electron/positron beams. A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters.
"The Fermi results put us a step closer to understanding how TGFs work," said Steven Cummer at Duke University. "We still have to figure out what is special about these storms and the precise role lightning plays in the process."

[video=youtube;0HAIN4BVwOA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HAIN4BVwOA[/video]

If all the hubbub surrounding Facebook’s (News - Alert) security and recent consequences of posting inappropriate pictures on the Internet hasn’t dissuaded you from harboring nude ones of yourself, this story will.

A 23-year-old guy named George Bronk actively monitored certain women’s Facebook profiles and activity in order to hack into their email accounts and forward nude pictures of them to all of their contacts. He has since admitted to that act in addition to possession of child pornography, computer intrusion, and false impersonation. Bronk is originally from California, but his victims reside all over the United States and the UK.
Bronk’s strategy included monitoring wall posts and notes thereby discovering what the victims’ answers to security questions were. He was able to breach their email accounts, and then proceed to forward nude and seminude pictures of them to all of their contacts. Once he had their email account passwords, he also gained access to their Facebook profiles and posted the pictures there.

Bronk will be defended in court by Monica Lynch, who cites his cooperation with the investigation as reason to be lenient with his sentence. She stated that Bronk was simply immature and is a “23-year-old boy going on 15.†She went on to note that he is now fully aware of his infringement upon the law, “He's accepted full responsibility. It's a tragic situation.â€

But the prosecutors say that Bronk was in full knowledge of his errors and deserves six years in prison for his crimes. His defense has surely been compromised by the seven other felonies he admitted some of which are mentioned above. Bronk even went so far as to threaten one of his victims so she would send him more explicit photos.

One of his victims in Connecticut contacted the police who were able to trace his activity to California. California officers obtained a warrant and searched his computer discovering 172 emails with incriminating images of his victims. This breach of email security once again brings to light the security issues Facebook has been dealing with, and calls for tighter controls.

A former Swiss banker has passed on data containing account details of 2,000 prominent people to Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs emails staff to announce leave of absence 'so I can focus on my health'

from MSNBC via Slyck