■UNITED KINGDOM
Snappy crackers guaranteed
Researchers have devised what they say is a guaranteed method of pulling crackers to avoid disappointment, reports said yesterday. The experts say the method for always winning the long end of the cracker, and therefore the prize inside, is in the angle that you grip it — and they have released a mathematical formula to follow. You are guaranteed success if you follow the formula O=11xC/L+5xQ, which is based on the angle, grip and quality of the cracker. You must first multiply the circumference of the cracker in inches (C) by 11 before dividing that number by the length (L) of the barrel. Take that total and add it to the figure you get when you multiply the quality (Q) — either 1, 2 or 3 depending on whether the cracker is cheap, standard or premium — by five, the Daily Mail said. The formula ought to produce a figure between 20 and 55 degrees, which is the optimum pulling angle (O). The cracker should also be pulled 2.54cm from the end of the tail. A quality control team at Debenhams department store pulled hundreds of crackers in the run-up to Christmas before discovering the winning formula.
■GERMANY
Helpful boy pulled over
A seven-year-old boy was stopped by police in the northern town of Reinfeld while trying to plow snow with a front loader he borrowed from his parents’ business. Officers found the boy atop the 3.5m-tall excavator after he had cleared a street and was driving back to the parking lot. “He opened the door, got out and admitted immediately that he did not have a driving license,” the police report said. When asked why he had begun plowing, he said his father had complained about the state of the roads. He saw the key in the ignition of the vehicle and took off.
■UNITED STATES
New roach discovered
A Rockefeller University study appears to have uncovered a new species of cockroach in New York City. “The cockroach is genetically modified. Species don’t differ more than 1 percent, this cockroach is 4 percent different, which suggests it is a new species of cockroach,” said Mark Stoeckle, an expert on genomics and DNA barcoding at the university. The previously unidentified creepy-crawly was uncovered as part of a project undertaken by two high-school students, Brenda Tan, 17, and Matt Cost, 18, under Stoeckle’s supervision. The pair trawled New York apartments, stores and street, collecting 217 specimens between November last year and March. They took samples from supermarket food, the remains of an insect found in a box of fruit, a feather from a duster, dried dung and a cockroach and matched DNA sequences using the Barcode of Life Database and GenBank. The American Museum of Natural History laboratory identified 170 genetic codes, leading the researchers to identify 95 different animal species, including some that were unexpected. “A feather from a duster yielded ostrich DNA. A delicacy labeled ‘sturgeon caviar’ instead turned out to be from the paddlefish. A popular Asian snack was revealed as giant flying squid. Bison DNA was found in a dog biscuit,” the pair wrote on the university Web site.
■UNITED STATES
Hallyday home for Xmas
French rocker and entertainment icon Johnny Hallyday has left Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after about two weeks of hospitalization for back surgery. Hallyday’s press agency says the 66-year-old star joined his wife and two daughters at their Los Angeles home.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
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