February 28, 2005

It Had To Happen

Pupna the Puppy Search engine searches exactly what you're looking for and nothing else -- nothing else.

February 10, 2005

Smallest Surviving Baby Born in Illinois

Maywood, Il (AP) - A baby born weighing less than nine ounces and believed to be the smallest ever to survive went home Tuesday after nearly six months in the hospital.
Rumaisa Rahman's prognosis "is very good," and she is expected to have normal physical and mental development, said Dr. Jonathan Muraskas, who provided care for the tiny girl and her larger twin sister, Hiba, after their births Sept. 19 at Loyola University Medical Center outside Chicago.


Mohammed Abdul Rahman holds
his daughter, Rumaisa, believed to
be smallest baby ever to survive as
they prepare to leave the Loyola
University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., on Tuesday.
{AP/Loyola University Health System, Oscar H. Izquierdo}


Rumaisa weighed 8.6 ounces at birth and measured just 9.5 inches long. She is now five pounds, eight ounces, and almost 17 inches long.
Read the rest here
Update here
Name Voyager

Christine, at Mirabilis.ca, has found a really cool site at A Whole Lotta Nothing. It's called the The Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager. Type in your first name, and you'll see how popular your name has been from the 1900s through to 2003. See if the peak of your name's popularity is about when you were born, or if your parents gave you an out-of-fashion name, or if your name has been popular forever. Fascinating, and lots of fun. Requires Java.

The Royal Navy's hydrographic survey ship HMS Scott is mapping the ocean floor, along the tectonic boundary in the Indian Ocean where a magnitude 9 earthquake on 26 December triggered huge tsunami waves.
The BBC has some amazing pictures here.

February 09, 2005

Update:Black History Month Resources

{via http://www.glavac.com}

From Jeffery Bradley, owner of Positive African American Plays For Children, comes these excellent sites for Black History Month:

Library of Congress Black History Month Manuscripts

Black History Hotlist

February 05, 2005

In Honor of Black History Month

Thomson Gale has assembled a collection of activities and information to complement classroom topics, including: Bbiographies of significant African-American individuals; a Black History Month quiz; a timeline of events that helped shape African-American heritage; activities taken from the Black History Month Resource Book; and African-American literature.

The Department of Education has, of course, a vast collection of materials on Afro - American history, as well as biographies, "interesting facts," and access to documents.

The Librarians' Index to the Internet has (by way of InfoPlease) more - much more


The Library of Congress has an exhaustive catalog

Then there's the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

And last, but certainly not least, is a site that most people don't think of when researching Black History: the National Archives, containing thousands of documents important to the study of Black History.

February 03, 2005

From Popular Science

Life Built to Order

Michael Stroh
Feb 2005

One morning last fall, a dozen or so government scientists shuffle into a small conference room on the sprawling grounds of Los Alamos National Laboratory to kick off an unusual research project. The room, tucked away in the basement of an old physics building known as SM-40, has paint-flaked cinderblock walls and a tangle of exposed plumbing overhead. The only decorative touch, a cheap potted floor plant, is slumped half-dead in the corner. Eventually a tall man with a sculpted Scandinavian jawline hurries in. Steen Rasmussen apologizes for running late. He shakes a few hands and then cues the team?s lead chemist, Liaohai Chen, to begin. Someone flips off the lights, and a PowerPoint slide flashes onto a projector screen.

The slide reads: "We are not crazy."

For an instant the scientists seem unsure how to react. Some laugh, others look uneasy. And who could blame them? Los Alamos, famed birthplace of the atomic bomb, has just awarded Rasmussen nearly $5 million to attempt an experiment as bold as the one that drew scientists to this pine-dotted New Mexico mesa back in the 1940s: He intends to create a brand-new life-form.


If any scientific enterprise demands a sanity
check at the outset, surely this is it
Posted by Hello


I know you'll want to read the rest of the story here.