Train hits a Couple Having Sex On Tracks
Two lovers whom officials said had “failed to overcome their natural passion” were hit by a train in Ukraine while they had sex on the railroad tracks, Russian news outlet RIA Novosti reported. The unidentified 30-something woman died, and her 41-year-old partner lost both his legs in the incident in the city of Zaporozhye. Reports say the pair were supposedly drunk.
“My girlfriend and I could not overcome our passionate nature and wanted to feel a sense of thrill near a railway track,” the man later confessed to the police. This wasn’t the first time that lovers had tempted fate with a tryst on the tracks. A similar incident had taken place about five years ago. In 2008, both participants were killed by a freight locomotive in South Africa after they ignored train whistles. (Huffington Post)
Chimps Beat Humans In Memory Tests
Unless someone has been monkeying around with the research data, chimps are making chumps out of humans when it comes to memory tests. In an interview published in the Guardian, Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a professor at Kyoto University’s Primate Research Institute in Inuyama, Japan, explains three decades of research have led him to the firm conclusion that chimpanzees have much better short-term memories than people. “We’ve concluded through the cognitive tests that chimps have extraordinary memories,” Matsuzawa said. “They can grasp things at a glance.”
Matsuzawa theorizes that, as humans gained certain cognitive abilities — like language — they lost their ancestors’ superior memory capabilities. “Our ancestors may have also had photographic memories, but we lost that during evolution so that we could acquire new skills,” Matsuzawa said. “To get something, we had to lose something.” (Huffington Post)
Sentenced For Murder, man Weds Fiancee
The bride wore white; the groom wore shackles. The marriage of Danne Desbrow and his fiancee, Destiny, came just minutes after he was sentenced to 53 years-to-life in prison for first-degree murder.
Desbrow was sentenced for the 2003 killing of Kevin Santos after a witness with key information came forward recently. His defence attorney argued Desbrow was defending himself in a fight. During the two-month trial, Desbrow proposed to his girlfriend. The two met in high school but lost contact after she became pregnant at 16. They reunited in January after the mother tracked down Desbrow so their son could meet his father. Desbrow was in jail at the time awaiting trial. After Desbrow proposed, Cookson agreed to marry them. (Huffington Post)
Huge Nuclear Reactor Shut Down by Jellyfish
The Oskarshamn power plant in Sweden has one of the biggest nuclear reactors in the world, but it’s apparently no match for tiny jellyfish. Tonnes of moon jellyfish clogged the reactor’s intake pipes from the ocean over the weekend, forcing the plant to shut down, reports Popular Science. (Not so comforting tidbit: It’s a “boiling-water” type reactor, same as at Fukushima.)
The jellyfish were in a “bloom” cycle, a phenomenon that produces huge numbers at once, and a marine biologist says that “more and more of these extreme cases of blooming jellyfish” are cropping up. Moon jellyfish in particular thrive in areas that have been overfished and consequently overrun by algae blooms. “They don’t care if the oxygen concentration is low,” said the biologist. The fish move out, and the jellyfish move in.
A similar clog happened last year at California’s Diablo Canyon plant, though the culprit then was technically sea salp. (Newser)
Mexico’s Answer to Police CorruptionIJ Hire Women
Authorities in the State of Mexico believe they have a solution to the problem of rampant corruption among traffic police: Replace them all with women. But only tall, thin ones. “We get too many short and fat ones,” says a local police chief, who has taken on 60 women to work as traffic cops. “We need tall women that render respect when out in the streets.” The chief says men listen more calmly and attentively to tall women, and women are generally more trustworthy. “They don’t ask for or take bribes,” he says.
But this new anti-corruption plan isn’t going so smoothly. The state won’t let the new female force actually issue tickets until local police units adopt anti-corruption safeguards. But the old cops don’t really want to adopt anti-corruption safeguards. And tall, thin women may not be so incorruptible after all. One driver says she was stopped by a female officer a few months ago, and was told her car would be impounded if she didn’t pay a bribe. “I had to pay her the 200 pesos,” she says. “But let me tell you, it’s not a pleasant thing to do.” (Newser)