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T.R. Hummer
Woman attacks Mona Lisa - TelegraphScreams erupted from the 40-odd tourists jostling for position around Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic painted lady when the empty terracotta mug flew over their heads and smashed into the portrait.
The Russian woman is thought to have bought it minutes earlier at the museum gift shop.
However, the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile was unaffected by the commotion, as the mug bounced harmlessly off the bullet-proof glass shielding her and shattered on the floor, according to the team of staff paid to guard her.
"There was no damage done to the painting whatsoever," a museum official told Le Parisien.
"Naturally the Mona Lisa is a carefully watched and protected painting. It is kept in a special sealed box to protect it from vibrations, heat and humidity. It is protected by thick glass resistant to bullets and any other object hurled at it," he said.
The woman was seized by two museum security guards and handed over to central Paris police after the incident on August 2.
The remaining tourists were then left in peace to gaze at the work, viewed by 8.5 million people each year.
The Russian is being held in custody and has reportedly undergone a psychological examination.
Doctors were trying to assess whether she was suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, a rare condition in which often perfectly sane individuals momentarily lose all reason and attack a work of art.
In July last year, a 32-year-old woman wearing lipstick kissed a painting by the American artist Cy Twombly on display in Avignon, leaving left a large red smudge. She was sentenced to community work.
At the Orsay Museum in Paris the previous year, a man ripped a hole in a painting by impressionist Claude Monet.
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BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Telescope sees planets collide
A Nasa space telescope has found evidence of a high-speed collision between two burgeoning planets orbiting a young star.
Astronomers say the cosmic smash-up is similar to the one that formed our Moon some four billion years ago, when a Mars-sized object crashed into Earth.
In this case, two rocky bodies are thought to have slammed into one another in the last few thousand years.
Details are to be published in the Astrophysical Journal.
The collision involved one object that was at least as big as our Moon and another that was at least as big as Mercury.
The impact destroyed the smaller body, vaporising huge amounts of rock and flinging plumes of hot lava into space.
Infrared detectors on Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope were able to pick up the signatures of the vaporised rock, along with fragments of hardened lava, known as tektites.
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T.R. Hummer
Asia Times Online :: South Asia news, business and economy from India and PakistanWhile other parts of India focus on building software parks and special tax-free economic zones to attract investment, in Uttar Pradesh (UP) chief minister Mayawati has a different agenda.
Mayawati, who goes by one name, has erected so many statues of herself and her late political mentor Kanshi Ram that it has led to a public outcry and a complaint to India's Supreme Court. Her critics say the statues have also put severe strain on the budget of Uttar Pradesh, which is India's most populous state and one of its least developed.
The statues and parks are being constructed by the local government with a zeal some commentators say would be better channeled towards improving roads, healthcare, education and law and order.
Huge statues of Mayawati and Kanshi Ram have sprung up across the state, as have marble and stone carved elephants, the logo of Mayawati's political outfit, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
According to estimates, the state has already spent over 15 billion rupees (US$313 million) on statues and parks, with the final aim of constructing 10,000 statues across the state. In its supplementary budget for 2009-10, the Uttar Pradesh government has allocated 7 billion rupees for memorials and parks, with 270 million rupees earmarked for new statues.
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AfricaNews - Libya: 220 Nigerians face execution - The AfricaNews articles of KingsleyKoboKingsley Kobo writes:
Nigerians in the diaspora inundated their country's news websites with e-mail petitions against the probable execution of some 220 Nigerian youths in Libya, who have been accused of illegal entry. News reports said Nigerian authorities were not aware of the situation and were shocked at the news.
A Nigerian national daily, Vanguard, reported the urgency of the e-mails alerts, which called on the government to intervene in no time to prevent the killing of these Nigerians.
30 youths, according to the e-mails, were allegedly executed in the early hours of Thursday in a prison yard in Tripoli, the Libyan capital, according to News Agency of Nigeria (NAN).
One of the reports quoted a 37-year-old man from Imo State (eastern Nigeria) who said he was arrested alongside other Nigerians for entering the North African country without valid documents, and was awaiting execution.
According to quotes from other victims, the Libyan forces arrested them in the desert while trying to cross to Europe. But they said they were never involved in any criminal activities.
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Scientists Pinpoint Source of Earth’s "Hum"It's not just whales that sing, the Earth does too. A pair of physicists at the University of California figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by ocean waves colliding with the seafloor.
About ten years ago researchers discovered infrasonic background noise of 3-7 mHz believed to originate from the solid Earth itself. claim to have the most convincing physical evidence yet. Using data from a wide-spread array of seismic recorders, Peter Bromirski and Peter Gerstoft, have pinpointed the Pacific coast of Central America as the dominate source of background noise, with the western coast of Europe acting as the main secondary source.
Hum beam power observations using the USArray EarthScope transportable array, which monitors seismic activity right across the US and its surrounding waters, combined with infragravity wave observations, show that the dominant source area of the Earth’s hum during winter months is the Pacific coast of North America, with the western coast of Europe a secondary source region.
Pbo_obs Within this new view of hum, long-wavelength surface waves - known as ocean swell - act as the mediator between the sky and the sea. As the swell reaches shallower waters, a portion of its energy is then transformed by non-linear processes into infragravity (IG) waves, which have even longer wavelengths than the surface waves. Some of the energy from IG waves affect the Earth, registering as blips at seismic recording stations around the world.
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UK scientists developing intelligent harvesting robot to save farms up to £100,000 a yearResearchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington have developed imaging technology to be used in an intelligent harvesting machine that could minimise wastage and solve an impending labour shortage for UK farmers.
Annual waste for certain crops can be up to 60% - which can mean up to £100,000 of lost revenue for an average farm every year, according to farmers who were consulted during research. Falling number of migrant labourers means that healthy crops cannot be gathered and so farms are losing crops due to harvesting at the wrong time.
NPL 's scientists are working with KMS projects and Vegetable Harvesting Systems (VHS) to turn the technology into an intelligent harvesting machine, which can look beneath the leafy layers of a crop, identify the differing materials, and enable precise size identification. This can be used to develop a fully automated harvesting robot, which would be able to fill the gap left by the labour shortage.
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Chevrolet Volt's official fuel economy: 230 mpg - Aug. 11, 2009The Chevrolet Volt, GM's electric car that's expected to go on sale in late 2010, is projected to get an estimated 230 miles per gallon, the automaker announced Tuesday.
That exceptionally high government mileage rating could give the Volt a major boost. For the first time, car buyers will easily be able to compare electric cars with ordinary gas-powered cars.
"Having a car that gets triple-digit fuel economy can and will be a game changer for us," said GM CEO Fritz Henderson.
Determining fuel economy for an electric car is a tricky matter, and General Motors (GM, Fortune 500) has been working with the Environmental Protection Agency for years on the issue.
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