BBC classic news clips over the past 50 years

Open News Archives from BBC

Some good but mostly ghastly things in history... but good selection. Refresh your memory but to view the clips you have to download them.

Cute cute cute....

The Cute Factor from NYTimes

If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn't enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick.

"Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"

"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!"

"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"

A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."

cute isn't it :) However, there is more to read in this article.

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.

Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.

The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.

Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.

First non-depressing post of the year :)

New seven wonders: Taj in contention from HT

Here is the list:
Taj Mahal, India
Acropolis, Greece;
Alhambra, Spain
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Chichen Itza, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
Colosseum, Rome
The statues of Easter Island
Eiffel Tower, Paris
Great Wall, China
Hagia Sophia, Turkey
Kiyomizu Temple, Japan
Kremlin, Moscow
Machu Picchu, Peru
Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
Petra, Jordan
Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
Statue of Liberty, New York
Stonehenge, Britain
Sydney Opera House, Australia
Timbuktu, Mali.

Domino effect

RR Package: A 'tribute' to minister from bar girls pushed into one-night stands from The Telegraph [via India Uncut]

Caste cruelity

Woman, 5 children burnt alive in Bihar from The Hindu

RAGHOPUR: A woman and her five minor children, including two girls, were burnt to death in Rampur-Shyamchak village of Vaishali district early on Sunday, after her husband refused to withdraw a police complaint about the theft of a buffalo. The complainant, Bijendra Mahto, belonging to the extremely backward Kahar caste, with 90 per cent burns, is battling for life at the Patna Medical College Hospital.

According to the police, about 10 persons tied up Bijendra Mahto and set fire to his thatched hut past midnight. When Mahto lodged the complaint, Jagat Rai, his son and nephew were arrested and later let off on bail. Mahto charged that Rai had been insisting that he withdraw the complaint.

According to witnesses, Rai led the mob that torched the house and also fired in the air to prevent others from coming to the rescue of the family.

Fascinating facts

Why I'm Happy I Evolved from NYTimes

Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.

Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.

And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.

It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.

Just think: the Indus River dolphin doesn't sleep as you or I do, or indeed as most mammals, for several hours at once. Instead, it takes microsleeps, naps that last for a few seconds, like a driver dozing at the wheel.

Or consider this: a few days after its conception, a pig embryo has become a filament that is about a yard long.

Or: the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast.

Female Infanticide

Lajja [via Times of India]

Today after a looooong time I went to Times of India site and came accross this blog. DO TAKE TIME TO READ... also go through the comments.