A headline crawling across the top of my screen on the BBC Ticker caught my eye:
Fossil frogs yield ‘soft tissues’

Normally, when a creature is fossilized, the soft tissues are destroyed and you’re left with the fossilized bones. If you’re lucky, you can see where the soft tissues were and that’s about it. Well, it appears that about 10 million years ago, some frogs and salamanders were preserved in some swamps in northeastern Spain. However, unlike every other fossilized creature that’s been found to-date, some of these have both types of bone marrow preserved.

Needless to say, this opens up new possibilities for research into the ancestors of animals that are still around today.

It’s amazing what you can buy on eBay these days.  I googled the word “fun” this evening and noticed the following in the list of sponsored links on the results page…

Tod Maffin mentioned in his todbits podcast that rx had done an excellent job sampling George W. Bush’s speeches and come up with a rendition of U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.  Check it out on rx’s site, or here with lyrics!

I noticed the following stories on the BBC ticker this morning, listed in chronological order:

• Guantanamo suicides ‘acts of war’
• Guantanamo suicides a ‘PR move’

Has the American government inadvertantly implied that ‘acts of war’ are ‘PR moves’?  This would explain a lot.

It’s a fairly well-established fact that airplanes and idiots don’t mix, much in the same way that monkeys, dynamite and matches are bad idea (but highly amusing to watch from a safe distance). Fortunately, there’s a fairly high bar set to enter the aviation world because it costs so much to learn to fly, particularly if you get a commercial license and start flying for an airline. However, every now and then one manages to get through and sooner or later Something Bad happens.

A friend posted a link to what happens when a passenger jet, an idiot (or two since there’s a pilot and co-pilot) and hail meet up. Click here to see the pictures.

It’s very hard to believe that the pilots didn’t have some sort of warning that there was hail in the area they were about to fly through when they encountered this. According to one of the messages in that forum, the pilot(s?) were sacked by the airline, as they should have been.

Wired is reporting that a hacker has been sentenced to two years in prison followed by three years of electronic monitoring under the U.S. Economic Espionage Act for selling a copy of the source for the Windows operating system.

The guy isn’t exactly new to the wonderful world of illicit computer use. At the time he was arrested, he was “on probation for computer trespass and eavesdropping after breaking into some private computers and installing keystroke-logging software.”

It struck me as rather ironic that the government is going to install monitoring software, which almost certainly would include keystroke-logging software, on the system of a guy already convicted for exactly the same thing.

BBC News has an article about fake digital maps and GPSs being used in Shanghai. Apparently, people are getting lost because the maps are actually quite inaccurate.