Hmmm, wondered about the pwned thing. Chess eh?

Good info Skin.

Ah ha! I have long suspected this to be true


CATS have a power over their owners - and they know it. Scientist have
discovered our feline friends use a special blend of sounds to evoke
deep emotional responses from their human companions.

Cats coax their owners into giving them what they want with a special purr that
blends their comforting soft, low sound with a high-pitched element -
very similar to that found in a human baby's cry - that is hard to
ignore.

Cats incorporate this high-pitch sound into their normal, contended
purr to exploit the nurturing instincts of humans for their own needs -
usually to get fed, according to scientists.

Lead author Dr Karen McComb of Sussex University in southern England
said she initiated the study after being repeatedly woken up in the mornings
by her own cat, Pepo.

"I wondered why this purring sounded so annoying and was so
difficult to ignore. Talking with other cat owners, I found that some
of them - including co-author Anna Taylor - also had cats who showed
similar behaviour," she said.

McComb and her team tested human responses to different purring
types, including "solicitation" purrs - which included the
high-frequency element and were made by hungry cats - against
"non-solicitation" or normal purrs.


"When humans were played purrs recorded while cats were actively
seeking food at equal volume to purrs recorded in non-solicitation
contexts, even those with no experience of cats judged the
solicitation' purrs to be more urgent and less pleasant," she said.


When the team re-synthesised the purrs to remove the embedded cry,
the urgency ratings decreased significantly.


McComb concluded that the cats were using the special purr to make
their views known without risking irritating humans with an overt meow.


However, this solution appears only to work in cats living
one-on-one with their owners -- cats in large households usually have
to meow to be heard.

Drunk badger disrupts traffic


BERLIN (Reuters) –
A badger in Germany got so drunk on over-ripe cherries it staggered into the middle of a road and refused to budge, police said on Wednesday.

A motorist called police near the central town of Goslar to report a dead badger on a road -- only for officers to turn up and discover the animal alive and well, but drunk.

Police discovered the nocturnal beast had eaten cherries from a nearby tree which had turned to alcohol and given the badger diarrhoea.

Having failed to scare the animal away, officers eventually chased it from the road with a broom.

Don't badger me! LOL

Well..L.O.W.
hic..

I remember...
hic...

someone once
said something to me about
alcohol...

now what was it again...

ah'...

yes....

now I remember...

it makes you forget

where you put things....

LOL! Skinman, I always want to hug you because you always make me laugh. :)

MyLF must have been drinking again LOL!!!

MOUNT PLEASANT, Wis. – One southern Wisconsin homeowner is probably not in love with the Oscar Mayer wiener. The famed hot dog's Wienermobile crashed Friday into the deck and garage of a home in Mount Pleasant, about 35 miles south of Milwaukee.

Police
said the driver was trying to turn the Wienermobile around in the
driveway and thought she was moving in reverse. But she instead went
forward and hit the home. It sat in the driveway as if it were stuck in
the garage Friday afternoon.

No one was home and no one was injured. No citations were immediately issued.
Both the home and vehicle suffered moderate damage, which Oscar Mayer spokeswoman Sydney Lindner says insurance will cover.

Police hadn't been able to speak to the homeowner as of early Friday evening.

lies its lies i tell you!
mind it is tricky driving with high heels
ps i dont need to stop for directions i know my way round most women

curves is where im at baby! navigating through that exotic landscape of mystery.......... think i better go lay down now

GREENACRES, Fla. – Authorities caught a Lake Worth
man running down the street with a stolen cash register. Greenacres
police reported that a 32-year-old man entered a restaurant Thursday afternoon
and asked for change for a $10 bill. When the cashier asked to see the
bill, the man reportedly began screaming, "I want change!"

Police said the man then grabbed about $40 from a tip box, picked up
the cash register containing nearly $300 and ran out.

The officers who arrested the suspect after a short chase had just come
from reviewing surveillance footage at a nearby connivence store, where
lottery tickets had been stolen a day earlier. By chance, the officers
identified the man as the thief from the footage.

The man was being held on $21,000 bail for multiple charges.

Mosquitoes deliver malaria 'vaccine' through bites


In a daring experiment in Europe, scientists used mosquitoes as flying needles to deliver a "vaccine" of live malaria parasites through their bites. The results were astounding: Everyone in the vaccine group acquired immunity to malaria; everyone in a non-vaccinated comparison group did not, and developed malaria when exposed to the parasites later.

The study was only a small proof-of-principle test, and its approach is not practical on a large scale. However, it shows that scientists may finally be on the right track to developing an effective vaccine
against one of mankind's top killers. A vaccine that uses modified live parasites just entered human testing.

"Malaria vaccines are moving from the laboratory into the real world," Dr. Carlos Campbell wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine. He works for PATH, the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health, a Seattle-based global health foundation.
The new study "reminds us that the whole malaria parasite is the most potent immunizing" agent, even though it is harder to develop a vaccine this way and other leading candidates take a different approach, he wrote.

Malaria kills nearly a million people each year, mostly children under 5 and especially in Africa. Infected mosquitoes inject immature malaria parasites into the skin when they bite; these travel to the liver where they mature and multiply. From there, they enter the bloodstream and attack red blood cells — the phase that makes people sick.

People can develop immunity to malaria if exposed to it many times. The drug chloroquine can kill parasites in the final bloodstream phase, when they are most dangerous.

Scientists tried to take advantage of these two factors, by using chloroquine to protect people while gradually exposing them to malaria parasites and letting immunity develop.

They assigned 10 volunteers to a "vaccine" group and five others to a comparison group. All were
given chloroquine for three months, and exposed once a month to about a dozen mosquitoes — malaria-infected ones in the vaccine group and non-infected mosquitoes in the comparison group.

That was to allow the "vaccine" effect to develop. Next came a test to see if it was working. All
15 stopped taking chloroquine. Two months later, all were bitten by malaria-infected mosquitoes. None of the 10 in the vaccine group developed parasites in their bloodstreams; all five in the comparison
group did.

The study was done in a lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and was funded by two foundations and a French government grant.

"This is not a vaccine" as in a commercial product, but a way to show how whole parasites can be used like a vaccine to protect against disease, said one of the Dutch researchers, Dr. Robert Sauerwein. "It's
more of an in-depth study of the immune factors that might be able to generate a very protective type of response," said Dr. John Treanor, a vaccine specialist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, N.Y., who had no role in the study.

The concept already is in commercial development. A company in Rockville, Md. — Sanaria Inc. — is testing a vaccine using whole parasites that have been irradiated to weaken them, hopefully keeping them in an immature stage in the liver to generate immunity but not cause illness.

Two other reports in the New England Journal show that resistance is growing to artemisinin, the main drug used against malaria in the many areas where chloroquine is no longer effective. Studies in Thailand and Cambodia found the malaria parasite is less susceptible to artemisinin, underscoring the urgent need to develop a vaccine.