Jessica Cox, 25, a girl born without arms, stands inside an aircraft. The girl from Tucson , Arizona got the Sport Pilot certificate lately and became the first pilot licensed to fly using only her feet.
Jessica Cox of Tucson was born without arms, but that has only s to pped her from doing one thing: using the word "can't."
With one foot manning the controls and the other delicately guiding the steering column, Cox, 25, soared to achieve a Sport Pilot certificate. Her certificate qu ali fies her to fly a light-sport aircraft to altitudes of 10,000 feet..
"She's a good pilot. She's rock solid," said Parrish Traweek, 42, the flying instruc to r at San Manuel's Ray Blair Airport .
Parrish Traweek runs PC Aircraft Maintenance and Flight Services and has trained many pilots, some of whom didn't come close to Cox's abilities.
"When she came up here driving a car," Traweek recalled, "I knew she'd have no problem flying a plane."
Doctors never learned why she was born without arms, but she figured out early on that she didn't want to use prosthetic devices, and depends on GOD's hands instead.
The Helix Nebula, also known as The Helix or NGC 7293, is a large planetary nebula (PN) located in the constellation of Aquarius. Discovered by Karl Ludwig Harding, probably before 1824, this object is one of the closest to the Earth of all the bright planetary nebulae. The estimated distance is about 215 parsecs or 700 light-years. It is similar in appearance to the Ring Nebula, whose size, age, and physical characteristics are similar to the Dumbbell Nebula, varying only in its relative proximity and the appearance from the equatorial viewing angle. The Helix has often been referred to as the 'Eye of God' on the Internet, since about 2003. In the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, there is a likely reference to the Helix Nebula, as 'The Eye of Jupiter'.
The Helix Nebula is an example of a planetary nebula, or 'planetary' formed at the end of a star's evolution. Gases from the star in the surrounding space appear, from our vantage point, as if we are looking down a helix structure. The remnant central stellar core, known as a planetary nebula nucleus or PNN, is destined to become a white dwarf star. The observed glow of the central star is so energetic that it causes the previously expelled gases to brightly fluoresce. The Helix Nebula in the constellation of Aquarius lies about 700 light-years away, spanning about 0.8 parsec or 2.5 light-years. Recent images by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Helix Nebula are a composite of newly released images from the ACS instrument and the wide-angle images from the Mosaic Camera on the WIYN 0.9-metre telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.
Infrared image of the Helix Nebula, taken by the Spitzer space telescope, 2007
A 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person to be officially recognised as a survivor of both atomic bombs dropped on Japan by the United States at the end of the Second World War.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified hibakusha, or radiation survivor, of the Aug 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki. But officials have now confirmed that he also survived the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier.
Mr Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug 6, 1945, when a US B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He then returned to his home in Nagasaki just in time for the second attack, officials said.
"As far as we know, he is the first one to be officially recognised as a survivor of atomic bombings in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki," said Toshiro Miyamoto, a Nagasaki city official. "It's such an unfortunate case, but it is possible that there are more people like him."
Certification qualifies survivors for government compensation - including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs - but Mr Yamaguchi's compensation will not increase, Mr Miyamoto said.
Mr Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks, which killed 140,000 in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Survivors of the bombs have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.
Details of Mr Yamaguchi's health problems were not released.
Thousands of survivors continue to seek official recognition after the government rejected their eligibility for compensation.
The government last year eased the requirements for being certified as a survivor, following criticism the rules were too strict and neglected many who had developed illnesses that doctors have linked to radiation.
A Kazakh lady, Sakhan Dosova, will mark her 130th birthday on March 27. Dosova lives in a small town of Prishakhtinsk, in central Kazakhstan, has 11 children and 37 grandchildren and great grandchildren. According to Nuken Alkeshova, her granddaughter who takes care of her, the last national census several years ago revealed that her grandmother was the oldest citizen in the country -- and if true, the oldest citizen in the world by 16 years. Alkeshova put her longevity down to eating cottage cheese and not eating sweets, and in an interview with RFE/RL's Kazakh Service certainly doesn't put it down to the $110 a month state pension she receives. It's incredibly difficult to deny or support her claim. Dosova has both a Soviet-era passport and Kazakh identification card. In the Russian and Soviet empires, the combination of non-Russian speaking locals and non-Kazakh speaking provincial officials meant bureaucratic errors were common. Because of the distances involved in getting from remote parts of the steppe to regional capitals, documents like birth certificates were often processed every few years in mass batches thus widening the margins of bureaucratic error. That's not to take anything away from Mrs Dosova though, who is clearly a remarkable lady. In an interview with RFE/RL, Dosova said she hoped our correspondents wouldn't see what she saw in her long life and wanted the Kazakh authorities to realize how pitiful her pension was
Part male lion and female tiger, biggest feline in the world up to 1000 pounds. They are not in zoos because they are a hybrid and not worthy.
Additional info (add @December 17th, 2010): -- Know what's a Liger? It's a cross breed of a Lion male and Tiger female...
He looks like something from a prehistoric age or a fantastic creation from Hollywood . But Hercules is very much living flesh and blood - as he proves every time he opens his gigantic mouth to roar. Part lion, part tiger, he is not just a big cat but a huge one, standing 10ft tall on his back legs. Called a liger, in reference to his crossbreed parentage, he is the largest of all the cat species.
On a typical day he will devour 20lb of meat, usually beef or chicken, and is capable of eating 100lb at a single setting. At just three years old, Hercules already weighs half a ton.
He is the accidental result of two enormous big cats living close together at the Institute of Greatly Endangered and Rare Species, in Miami, Florida , and already dwarfs both his arents. "Ligers are not something we planned on having," said institute owner Dr Bhagavan Antle. "We have lions and tigers living together in large enclosures and at first we had no idea how well one of the lion boys was getting along with a tiger girl, then loo and behold we had a liger."
50mph runner... Not only that, but he likes to swim, a feat unheard of among water-fearing lions. In the wild it is virtually impossible for lions and tigers to mate. Not only are they enemies likely to kill one another, but most lions are in Africa and most tigers in Asia . But incredible though he is, Hercules is not unique. Ligers have been bred in captivity, deliberately and accidentally, since shortly before World War II.
Today there are believed to be a handful of ligers around the world and a similar number of tigons, the product of a tiger father and lion mother. Tigons are smaller than ligers and take on more physical characteristics of the tiger. ---
What do you think about weird animals which you may see in Japanese museum. Maybe you will recognize some of them but for some I really don’t know which are. They have very strange look, something what you are not going to see very often.
His musical taste may be more than a little questionable.
But as Snowball bobs, shakes and taps his feet along to American boyband The Backstreet Boys, his talent as a dancer is without doubt.
The dancing cockatoo was yesterday hailed by scientists as proof that humans aren't the only creatures with a sense of rhythm.
Adena Schachner studied Snowball along with hundreds of other birds for a Phd in psychology at Harvard University.
'These birds' movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we'd expect by chance,' she said. 'We found strong evidence that they were synchronising with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species.'
Along with colleagues, she searched the internet site Youtube for videos of animals dancing to music - including parrots, dogs and cats.
She studied each video frame by frame, comparing the speed of the music and the movements of the creatures. Suspect videos - where the music appeared to have been added afterwards - were ignored, as were videos where an animal could have been following movements offscreen.
From more than 1,000 videos, they found evidence that 14 species of parrot and one species of elephant can move in time to music. Chimpanzees, dogs and cats appeared to have no sense of rhythm. The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
'For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans,' added Dr Schachner.
'After all, there is no convincing evidence that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, can keep a beat, and there is similarly no evidence that our pet dogs and cats can line up their actions with a musical beat.
