strawberriblow please add yourself to my...'s blog: "wendy's believe it or not?"

ok, so imagine you live in portugal and your moving house. you find a lovely farm house set in a decent plot of land. the place has been empty for 15 years! whilst exploring your new property you find a large barn in the trees. the door is padlocked shut and its all rusted solid. so you grind the padlock open......... and this is what you find....... http://mma.tv/tuf/index.cfm?ac=ListMessages&PID=1&TID=991002&FID=2&pc=27 go check it out

CALI, Colombia - Through the bars of his cage, an African lion named Jupiter stretches his giant paws around the neck of Ana Julia Torres and plants a kiss on her puckered lips. It could be a kiss of gratitude: Since Jupiter was rescued six years ago from a life of abuse and malnutrition in a traveling circus, Torres has fed and nursed him back to health at her Villa Lorena shelter for injured and mistreated animals. "Here we have animals that are lame, missing limbs, blind, cross-eyed, disabled," said Torres, 47, who relies on donations and her own modest teacher's salary to run the shelter in a poor neighborhood in the southern city of Cali. "They come to us malnourished, wounded, burned, stabbed, with gunshots." Torres said her work rehabilitating animals began more than a decade ago when a friend gave her an owl that had been kept as a pet. Later, when she asked her students to bring their pets to school, she realized many families illegally kept wild fauna from Colombia's biologically diverse jungles in their homes. The number of animals under her care grew, and today Jupiter is among 800 recovering creatures at Villa Lorena — from burned peacocks and limbless flamencos to blind monkeys and mutilated elephants. Most of the animals are caged, though some, like iguanas, roam freely around the impeccably clean grounds enclosed by a 13-foot wall. Inside is a monument that the state governor dedicated in recognition of Torres' work. Torres said many of the animals were rejected as infants by their parents in the wild or found abandoned on the streets of Cali, a city of 2 million. Others were rescued from cruel treatment by owners. One mountain lion kept illegally as a pet had its two front legs cut off by its owner after it clawed a family member's face. Torres said that of all the animals she has cared for, she is proudest of having rescued Yeyo, a now-deceased spider monkey who had suffered violent, drunken beatings at the hands of an alcoholic owner. "The monkey would scream every time it was beaten, until one day the police came and found the wall covered in blood," she said. Two veterinarians saved Yeyo from death, though it lost an eye and its teeth from the abuse. Yeyo remained terrified of people, cowering in the corner of the cage at the sound of footsteps, she said. Torres said she opposes exhibiting animals in circuses and has therefore kept her shelter closed to the public. "We want the animals to live in peace," Torres said. "All their life they were shown at circuses and shows — this is a paradise where they can finally rest."

Lakes of methane have been spotted on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boosting the theory that this strange, distant world bears beguiling similarities to Earth, according to a new study. Titan has long intrigued space scientists, as it is the only moon in the Solar System to have a dense atmosphere -- and its atmosphere, like Earth's, mainly comprises nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is also rich in methane, although the source for this vast store of hydrocarbons is unclear. Methane, on the geological scale, has a relatively limited life. A molecule of the compound lasts several tens of millions of years before it is broken up by sunlight. Given that Titan is billions of years old, the question is how this atmospheric methane gets to be renewed. Without replenishment, it should have disappeared long ago. A popular hypothesis is that it comes from a vast ocean of hydrocarbons. But when the US spacecraft Cassini sent down a European lander, Huygens, to Titan in 2005, the images sent back were of a rugged landscape veiled in an orange haze. There were indeed signs of methane flows and methane precipitation, but nothing at all that pointed to any sea of the stuff. But a flyby by Cassini on July 22 last year has revealed, thanks to a radar scan, 75 large, smooth, dark patches between three and 70 kilometers across (two and 42 miles) across that appear to be lakes of liquid methane, scientists report on Thursday. They believe the lakes prove that Titan has a "methane cycle" -- a system that is like the water cycle on Earth, in which the liquid evaporates, cools and condenses and then falls as rain, replenishing the surface liquid. As on Earth, Titan's surface methane may well be supplemented by a "table" of liquid methane that seeps through the rock, the paper suggests. Some of the methane lakes seem only partly filled, and other depressions are dry, which suggests that, given the high northerly latitudes where they were spotted, the methane cycle follows Titan's seasons. In winter, the lakes expand, while in summer, they shrink or dry up completely -- again, another parallel with Earth's hydrological cycle. The study, which appears on Thursday in the British weekly journal Nature, is headed by Ellen Stofan of Proxemy Research in Virginia and University College London. Titan and Earth are of course very different, especially in their potential for nurturing life. Titan is frigid, dark and, as far as is known, waterless, where as Earth is warm, light and has lots of liquid water. But French astrophysicist Christophe Sotin says both our planet and Titan have been sculpted by processes that, fundamentally, are quite similar. The findings "add to the weight of evidence that Titan is a complex world in which the interaction between the inner and outer layers is controlled by processes similar to those that must have dominated the evolution of any Earth-like planet," Sotin said in a commentary. "Indeed, as far as we know," Sotin added, "there is only one planetary body that displays more dynamism than Titan. Its name is Earth." from paris free press

One-Eyed Kitten Sold To Museum Little Creature To Join Debate On Science, Religion (AP) GRANBY, N.Y. The one-eyed, noseless kitten that inspired an international debate last year over whether it was a hoax is coming to a new museum of oddities in central New York. The museum founder, who believes in creationism, said the kitten is meant to launch another debate about how science and religion intersect. The Oregon woman who owned the kitten said she turned down Ripley's Believe it or Not! and sold the remains to John Adolfi of Granby because she liked his religious reasons for wanting them. "We didn't want Cy becoming a joke or part of a personal collection," Traci Allen said. "But John was so heartfelt, you could tell he was genuine and sincere." Adolfi would not say how much he paid for the kitten, named Cy, for Cyclops. He said he plans to have it embalmed Wednesday at a local funeral home. The kitten died in December, a day after being born. Veterinarians in Oregon said it suffered from a rare disorder called holoprosencephaly. Cy will be displayed in a glass jar in the Lost World Museum, which Adolfi hopes to open in nearby Phoenix this fall. Other exhibits will include giant plants and eggs, deformed animal remains and archaeological finds, Adolfi said.