Lonely man in latex with donkey in hotel room arrested Check into a hotel wearing latex and handcuffs with a donkey in Ireland, get arrested. A man who was found dressed in latex and handcuffs brought a donkey to his room in a Galway city centre hotel, because he was advised “to get out and meet people,” the local court heard last week. Thomas Aloysius McCarney with an address in south Galway was charged with cruelty to animals, lewd and obscene behaviour, and with being a danger to himself when he appeared before the court on Friday. He was also charged with damage to a mini-bar in the room, but this charge was later dropped when the defendant said that it was the donkey who caused that damage. - http://www.galwayfirst.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=114&Item Homeland Security replaces migrants with prison labor A reader says: "Colorado proposes replacing 'illegal' farm workers with Homeland Security-mandated prison labor." The inmates will be watched by prison guards, who will be paid by the farms. The cost is subject to negotiation, but farmers say they expect to pay more for the inmate labor and its associated costs than for their traditional workers [...] Prisoners who are a low security risk may choose to work in the fields, earning 60 cents a day. They also are eligible for small bonuses [...] "If they can't get slaves from Mexico, they want them from the jails," said Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors restrictions on immigration.' Dear CSPAN: you're not Disney, Congress isn't Mickey Carl sez, "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi posted a minute of video of herself testifying on her blog. C-SPAN sent her a take down notice and she caved in complied. The Speaker should have stuck to her guns and told C-SPAN to fug off that she was asserting her fair use rights to that material. C-SPAN told the New York Times that they were simply protecting their copyright "like CNN." But, C-SPAN is not like CNN or Disney. In this open letter to C-SPAN's CEO, I submit my purchase order for 6,251 congressional hearings and assert my fair use rights. If C-SPAN were Disney, I might understand (though I would not sympathize with) a desire to milk an asset for every penny allowable by law. But, C-SPAN is not Disney and you should not treat the U.S. Congress like Disney would treat Mickey Mouse. C-SPAN is a publicly-supported charity. Your only shareholders are the American public. Your donors received considerable tax relief in making donations to you. You and your staff were well paid for your excellent work. Congressional hearings are of strikingly important public value, and aggressive moves to prevent any fair use of the material is double-dipping on your part. For C-SPAN and for the American public record, the right thing to do is to release all of that material back into the public domain where it belongs. Tadpole limb regeneration, human tissue regeneration? Researchers have identified the electrical switch that turns on a tadpole's regeneration system so it can grow a new tail or leg. Someday, a detailed understanding of this phenomena could possibly lead to a way to stimulate human tissue regeneration. Michael Levin and his colleagues at the Forsyth Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology in Boston report that a molecular pump that moves protons across the cell membrane, generating a current, is the "master control to initiate the regeneration response." From News@Nature: Researchers have known for decades that an electrical current is created at the site of regenerating limbs. Furthermore, applying an external current speeds up the regeneration process, and drugs that block the current prevent regeneration. The electrical signals help to tell cells what type to grow into, how fast to grow, and where to position themselves in the new limb... ...The complex networks needed to construct a complicated organ or appendage are already genetically encoded in all of our (human) cells (too) — we needed them to develop those organs in the first place. "The question is: how do you turn them back on?" Levin says. "When you know the language that these cells use to tell each other what to do, you're a short step away from getting them to do that after an injury."