Midnight Moon

DENVER - Students hopped on chairs and screams erupted when a nonpoisonous bull snake wandered into a classroom at Colorado State University Wednesday and bit a student in the hand.

Instructor Stu Field was minutes into his lecture when students noticed the snake slithering near the west doors of the classroom. He said the student who was bitten, who name wasn't released, was attempting to remove the snake from the classroom.

"Class had just started and then one girl stood on her chair and started screaming. Then every girl around it started screaming and all the girls stood on their chairs," Brittanny Bellefeuille, a freshman chemical engineering major, said.

Another student placed the snake in his backpack and took it outside. School officials believe the snake was likely brought into the building by another student.

BRISBANE, Australia (AP) - An Australian woman was killed by a pet camel given to her as a 60th birthday present after the animal apparently tried to have sex, police said Sunday.

A mail that i got from my friend. I really like her. She always sends these interesting and meaningful emails to me. Je t'adore. <3 

Don't worry abt the last part abt sending this message and stuff [its an email]

Nail in the Fence
>>
>>            Make sure you read all the way down
>>                      to the last sentence.

>>           (Most importantly the last sentence)
>>           There once was a little boy who had a bad
>>           temper . His Father gave him a bag of nails
>>           and told him that every time he lost his
>>           temper , he must hammer a nail into the back
>>           of the fence. The first day the boy had
>>           driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next
>>           few weeks, as he learned to control his
>>           anger , the number of nails hammered daily
>>           gradually dwindled down. He discovered
>>           it was easier to hold his temper than to
>>           drive those nails into the fence.
>>           Finally the day came when the boy didn't
>>           lose his temper at all. He told his father
>>           about it and the father suggested that the
>>           boy now pull out one nail for each day that
>>           he was able to hold his temper.
>>           The days passed and the young boy was finally
>>           able to tell his father that all the nails
>>           were gone. The father took his son by the
>>           hand and led him to the fence. He said, 'You
>>           have done well, my son, but look at the
>>           holes in the fence. The fence will never be
>>           the same. When you say things in anger,
>>           they leave a scar just like this one. You
>>           can put a knife in a man and draw it out.
>>           It won't matter how many times you say I'm
>>           sorry , the wound is still there. ' A verbal
>>           wound is as bad as a physical one.
>>           Friends are very rare jewels, indeed. They
>>           make you smile and encourage you to succeed.
>>           They lend an ear, they share words of praise
>>           and they always want to open their hearts to us.'
>>           It's National Friendship Week. Show your
>>           friends how much you care. Send this to
>>           everyone you consider a FRIEND, even if
>>           it means sending it back to the person who
>>           sent it to you. If it comes back to you,
>>           then you'll know you have a circle of friends.
>>           YOU ARE MY FRIEND AND I AM HONOURED!
>>           Now send this to every friend you have!! And to
>>           your family.
>>           Please forgive me if I have ever left a hole.

Katie Kirkpatrick, 21, held off cancer to celebrate the happiest day of her life. Katie had chased cancer, once only to have it return-to clog her lungs and grab hold of her heart. Breathing was difficult now, she had to use oxygen. The pain in her back was so intense it broke through the morphine that was supposed to act as a shield. Her organs were shutting down but it would not stop her from marrying Nick Godwin, 23, who was in love with Katie since 11th grade.

Five days later, Katie has died.

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Huge and distant cousins of today’s ice-loving penguins might have
basked in a warm climate along the Peruvian coast more than 30 million
years ago, fossils of two extinct penguin species suggest.

One
of the ancient birds sported a seven-inch beak and stood at five feet
tall, which would have dwarfed even the heavyweights of today, the
Emperor penguins. Currently, 17 penguin species inhabit the globe,
ranging in size from the two-pound, 16-inch little blue penguin to the
84-pound, 4.3-foot Emperor penguin.

The skeletal bones and two complete skulls suggest the warm-weather penguins were deep divers and could “fly” through the water with the grace of their modern kin, scooping up fish along the way.

The findings, detailed online this week in the journal Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, call into question the established
idea that penguins
evolved in high latitudes and didn’t waddle close to the equator until
about 10 million years ago—long after Earth cooled significantly.

“We tend to think of penguins as being cold-adapted species,” said
lead study author Julia Clarke, a paleontologist at North Carolina
State University and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
“But the new fossils date back to one of the warmest periods in the
last 65 million years of Earth’s history. The evidence indicates that
penguins reached low-latitude regions more than 30 million years prior
to our previous estimates.”

“We had known from isolated bones and limited material an array of
giant penguin species from high-latitude regions,” Clarke told
LiveScience, “but none from low latitudes.”

Penguin evolution

Clarke and her colleagues studied remains from two new, extinct
penguin species that had been discovered in 2005 along the southern
coast of Peru. The giant penguin, Icadyptes salasi lived about 36
million years ago. The second species, Perudyptes devriesi, was 2.5 to
3 feet tall and represents one of the oldest known penguin species,
living about 42 million years ago.

Unlike living penguin species,
the ancient, oversized birds had long, narrow beaks, with Perudyptes
having an exceptionally long and spear-like beak, which Clarke said
likely helped the animal gulp down large prey and attain its towering
stature.

Perudyptes had features indicating a transition from wing to paddle.
For instance, the giant penguin’s wing muscles were reduced compared
with flight-able birds, “which basically are part of the changes to get
to a paddle-like structure--you reduce these intrinsic wing muscles,”
Clarke said.

To find out how the penguins landed in low-latitude regions, the
scientists examined the geographic distribution and evolutionary
relationships of other extinct penguins.

The results suggest the two Peruvian species result from separate dispersals, with the ancestors of Perudyptes dwelling in Antarctica before their equator-bound trek and Icadyptes originating near New Zealand.

Warming up

A picture of Peruvian penguins
hanging out on the beach make some people wonder if today’s
cold-adapted penguins would bask in the effects of global warming. Not
so, Clarke warns.

“We are not by these findings implying that extant penguins will not
be affected by current global warming. These Peruvian species are early
branches off the penguin family tree, that are comparatively distant
cousins of living penguins,” Clarke said. “In addition, current global
warming is occurring on a significantly shorter timescale. The data
from these new fossil species cannot be used to argue that warming
wouldn’t negatively impact living penguins.”

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation Office of International Science and Engineering and the National Geographic Society.

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