I recently stumbled upon a list of fifty things that mankind discovered over the course of 2009. There are a lot of surprising things on this list but what disturbs me the most is number twelve.
I’ll be frank: I have made no attempt whatsoever to verify any of these statements. With that said, here is a partial list. The full list is available at www.att.net
1. Domestic pigs can quickly learn how mirrors work and use them to find food.
2. Grumpy people think more clearly because negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking.
3. High cholesterol levels in midlife are associated with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia later in life.
4. Analysis of Greenland ice samples shows Europe froze solid in less than 12 months 12,800 years ago, partly due to a slowdown of the Gulf Stream. Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years.
5. One mutated gene is the reason humans have language, and chimpanzees, our closest relative, do not.
6. Obesity in teenage girls may increase their risk of later developing multiple sclerosis.
7. A fossil skeleton of an Aardonyx celestae dinosaur discovered in South Africa appears to be the missing link between the earliest dinosaurs that walked on two legs and the large plant-eating sauropods that walked on all four.
8. Women who have undergone successful breast cancer treatment are more likely to experience a recurrence if they have dense breast tissue.
9. Babies pick up their parents’ accents from the womb, and infants are born crying in their native dialect. Researchers found that French newborns cry in a rising French accent, and German babies cry with a characteristic falling inflection.
10. Surfing the Internet may help delay dementia because it creates stimulation that exercises portions of the brain.
11. The oldest known silken spider webs, dating back 140 million years, were discovered in Sussex, England, preserved in amber. The webs were spun by spiders closely related to modern-day orb-web garden spiders.
12. Scientists have discovered how to scan brain activity and convert what people are seeing or remembering into crude video images.
13. Pumpkin skin contains a substance that inhibits growth of microbes that cause yeast infections.
14. Hormones that signal whether whales are pregnant, lactating or in the mood to mate have been extracted from whales’ lung mucus, captured by dangling nylon stockings from a pole over their blowholes as they surface to breathe. (This method could allow scientists to study whales without having to slaughter them.)
15. The higher a patient’s body-mass index, the less respect he or she gets from doctors.
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My laptop still has a problem with overhearing. The little trick of duct taping a battery operated fan over the vent hole worked great … right up until the battery died. Since then I cannot seem to get the stupid thing to STAY in the correct position. I’ve got a small CPU fan that I could super-glue over the vent, but I need to find a 12 volt power supply for 
