Fungi Need Some Love, Too

As neither animal nor plant, the fungus is often the odd organism out—and conservation is no exception, scientists said Saturday at the World Conservation Congress.

Of the 19,817 species in the 2012 Red List of Threatened Species, only three fungi species—one mushroom and two lichens—are listed.
This doesn’t mean fungi have somehow avoided the fate of many other declining species, but rather, there aren’t a lot of people studying them, Gregory Mueller, a fungi expert at the Chicago Botanic Garden, told me.
So, as a fan of the underappreciated, I was happy to hear Mueller announce a new 18-month initiative to collect more data on fungi and figure out which ones may need protection by IUCN.

A Cantharellus mushroom, a type of chanterelle, is listed as threatened by several European countries. Photograph courtesy Gregory Mueller

The initiative is a joint venture of five IUCN Species Survival Commission fungal specialist groups, whose names alone are enough to make you a fungi lover.
There’s the Cup Fungus, Truffle and Allies; Lichen; Mushroom, Bracket, and Puffball (chaired by Mueller); Rusts and Smuts (my personal favorite); and last but not least, the Chytrid, Zygomycete, Downy Mildew, and Slime Moulds—yes, even slime can get a fair shake in the world of fungi.
Why save fungi? For one, they’re nature’s recyclers, processing a lot of dead organic material. They’re also “intimately linked with human well-being,” for instance as food and a source of drugs such as antibiotics, according to IUCN.

Diplomat Killed in Libya Told Fellow Gamers: Hope I ‘Don’t Die Tonight’

On Tuesday, Sean Smith, a Foreign Service Information Management Officer assigned to the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, typed a message to the director of his online gaming guild: ”Assuming we don’t die tonight. We saw one of our ‘police’ that guard the compound taking pictures.” The consulate was under siege, and within hours, a mob would attack, killing Smith along with three others, including the U.S. ambassador.

In his professional and personal life, Smith was a husband and father of two, an Air Force veteran, and a 10-year veteran of the Foreign Service who had served in Baghdad, Pretoria, Montreal and The Hague. But when gaming with EVE Online guild Goonswarm, he was a popular figure known as “Vile Rat,” and alternately as “Vilerat” while volunteering as a moderator at the internet community Something Awful. Smith’s death was confirmed on Wednesday morning by the State Department and reported widely in the news media. But the first people to report Smith’s death were his friends. Their reaction was shock and mourning.
“My people, I have greivous [sic] news. Vile Rat has been confirmed to be KIA in Benghazi; his family has been informed and the news is likely to break out on the wire services soon,” wrote Goonswarm director Alex Gianturco in a message mirrored to Something Awful at 11:21 EST. “Needless to say, we are in shock, have no words, and have nothing but sympathy for his family and children. I have known Vile Rat since 2006, he was one of the oldest of old-guard goons and one of the best and most effective diplomats this game has ever seen.”

‘Muslims’ Movie Producer Was Arrested for PCP, Snitched for Feds

Before he was involved in the making of a noxious video that provided an excuse for anti-American riots in the Middle East, and before he was convicted of federal bank fraud, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula was arrested on charges relating to the making of angel dust.

Court records reviewed by Danger Room show that Nakoula and a co-defendant were brought before the Los Angeles County Superior Courthouse in Downey, California on April 15, 1997. They were charged with possessing the narcotic’s chemical precursors with “the intent to manufacture phencyclidine,” otherwise known as angel dust or PCP.

In the latest in a series of odd revelations about the man thought to be at center of a viral video, “The Innocence of Muslims,” which has been publicly seized upon by people in Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia as a reason to attack U.S. embassies. At least four American government employees have been killed during the confrontations. And that’s brought enormous scrutiny to Nakoula, an Egyptian immigrant and gas station owner, who has alternatively confirmed and denied a role in the making of “Innocence.”

In recent days, we’ve learned that Nakoula used 14 different aliases — including “P.J. Tobacco” and “Kritbag Difrat” — in a complex check kiting scheme. We’ve learned that Nakoula was sentenced to 21 months in federal custody for the affair. According to The Smoking Gun, Nakoula was released from the the United States Penitentiary in Lompoc, California in September, 2010. He spent the following nine months in and out of a halfway house in Long Beach. Unnamed officials tell ABC News he wrote the script for the film, which depicts the prophet Muhammad as a thug and a child molester, while in prison.

The punishment was relatively gentle, even though it wasn’t Nakoula’s first encounter with the law. That’s because Nakoula had decided to become a federal informant.
“I am sorry for what happened. Now I know it was wrong. I decide to cooperate with the government to retrieve some of those mistakes,” Nakoula told Judge Christina Snyder in June of 2010, according to a sentencing transcript obtained by The Smoking Gun.

The man Nakoula agreed to help the feds catch was Eiad Salameh, the ringleader of the check kiting scheme and “a notorious fraudster who has been tracked for more than a decade by state and federal investigators,” the Smoking Gun says. “In his debriefings, Nakoula said he was recruited as a ‘runner’ by Salameh, who pocketed the majority of money generated by the bank swindles.”

Because of the promised help, because of his many ailments (including Hepatitis C and diabetes) and maybe because of a friendly letter from a friend calling Nakoula “a God-fearing man whose first priority is his family,” Bakoula was sentenced to just 21 months in prison.

That’s in spie of his previous arrests. In August of 1991, he was convicted on two counts of selling watered-down gasoline. And then came the arrest for PCP manufacturing in 1997. A local judge found there was probable cause for the case to continue against Nakoula and a co-defendant, Khaled Yameen Abraham, on August 6th of that year. Nakoula and Abraham were also briefly charged with conspiracy.
Three months later, Abraham was convicted on the PCP charge. Nakoula, on the other hand, was not. Nearly five years later, the case against him was dismissed, for reasons unknown.

According to The Daily Beast, Nakoula and Abraham weren’t just attempting to make PCP. The news site claims that the pair were arrested for trying to mass-produce methamphetamine. Nakoula was arrested on March 27, 1997, according to the Beast, with $45,000 in hundreds and twenties in a paper lunch bag on the seat beside him. Abraham’s house in Lake Elsinore contained 30 boxes of pseudoephedrine, meth’s central ingredient. Another 99 cases were allegedly found at the storage facility. Danger Room hasn’t been able to confirm this account. But it’s entirely possible that Abraham and Nakoula were simultaneously busted for being both PCP and meth makers.

Jupiter Explosion Spotted by Amateur Astronomers

Early Monday morning U.S. amateur astronomers spotted a bright light squiggling across the upper cloud deck of Jupiter. Both assumed they'd witnessed a large meteor or comet impact, and so far, professional astronomers seem to agree.
NASA's Amy Simon Miller, though, cautioned that, "at this point, we can only confirm based on the fact that there were two independent reports." Official observations will have to wait.
Such a strike would be the fourth impact seen on Jupiter in just the last three years. And the fact that the explosion was visible via backyard telescopes more than 454 million miles (730 million kilometers) away—indicates it was probably a significant event.
"Although we don't yet know the size or exact nature of the impactor, based on the flash brightness we expect it is slightly bigger and energetic than the one seen in 2010, which was estimated to be on the order of 10 meters [33 feet] in size," said Miller, chief of the planetary systems laboratory at Goddard Spaceflight Center in Maryland. "By contrast, the impactor in 2009 was likely 200 to 500 meters [660 to 1,600 feet]."
(See "Bright Fireball Slams Into Jupiter" [June 2010] and "Jupiter Impact Creates Huge New Spot" [July 2009].)

New War Robots Inspired by Animals

Apart from being four-legged animals, what do a cheetah and a pack mule have in common? They’ve both inspired what may be the next generation of war machines.

DARPA, a military research group based in Arlington, Virginia, showed off two new robots this month, one inspired by the world’s fastest land mammal and the other based on the body plan of a familiar sturdy beast of burden.

DARPA “is attempting to understand and engineer into robots certain core capabilities that living organisms have refined over millennia of evolution: efficient locomotion, manipulation of objects and adaptability to environments,” says Program Manager Gill Pratt on the DARPA website.

first aid for wet cell phone

Everyday hundreds of phone drop into the toilet. It can happen to anyone. You place your Android phone on the shelf and next thing you know, your toothbrush is upset and decides to hit your Android phone and make it land in the toilet or bathtub.

So how can you fix a waterlogged Android phone?
Step 1. Take off the cover of your Android phone

Step 2. Take out the battery

Step 3. Dry off everything with a towel.

Step 4. Get a rubbermaid container, just large enough to fit your phone inside of it.

Step 5. Find some rice. Any type of rice. Brown rice, white rice, Uncle Ben’s Rice, Generic rice and put some in the rubbermaid container.

(How much rice? Cover the bottom of the container)
Step 6. Place the android phone inside the container and close the lid.

Step 7. Wait for 24 – 48 hours and your Android phone should be dried out, inside out.

Why does this work? Because Rice absorbs water. Any water or vapors that seeped into the phone will seep out into the rice.

Other sources said that alcohol does this too. The other problem arise when it's not just usual water. Salt water does more damages! So be careful to bring out your phones to the beach or the hotspring. Last words: DO WITH YOUR OWN RISKS!

source: http://www.androidupdate.co/my-phone-fell-in-the-toilet-help/

Know more about iOS 6

Turn-by-Turn Navigation

The top feature for most people is Maps, because it now offers turn-by-turn navigation guided by Siri. As you'd expect from Apple, the maps are attractive and pretty easy to read. Directions are really large so you can see them well if you need to quickly glance in the car. The downside is that Maps only offers driving directions, so public transit and walking directions no longer exist. You also need an iPhone 4S, 3rd generation iPad, or newer device to use it. Older models use the new app but offer no voice-guided directions. One more thing to say about Maps is Flyover, which lets you explore a map in 3D. It's pretty cool.

Passbook

Passbook is a new app that keeps track of all your passes and tickets, such as movie tickets and flights. It can even store digital gift and discount cards. As with any new release, partners are limited but it seems Apple has started out with a quite a few major ones. Starbucks, Fandango, and several major airlines support the service.