Free Republic

Sun rises at 11am and sets at 2:30pmA remote Omani village located nearly 2,000 metres above sea level has one of the shortest days in the world, not exceeding 3.5 hours. Newspapers in Oman and other Gulf countries said the sun rises in Wekan around 11am and sets about 2.30pm. The village, accessible by donkeys, horses and four-wheel vehicles, is situated in the Northern Al-Batinah province, nearly 150km from the capital Muscat. The Saudi daily ‘Ajel’ said the village has one of the shortest fasting times in the world but it was not clear whether the Wekanians follow that...

The project, known as RAMA (Reconstituting Asteroids into Mechanical Automata), is part of Made In Space's long-term plan to enable space colonization by helping make off-Earth manufacturing efficient and economically viable. "Today, we have the ability to bring resources from Earth," Made In Space co-founder and chief technology officer Jason Dunn told Space.com. "But when we get to a tipping point where we need the resources in space, then the question becomes, 'Where do they come from and how do we get them, and how do we deliver them to the location that we need?' This is a way to...

Prehumans living around 800,000 years ago in what's now southeastern Spain were, literally, trailblazers. They lit small, controlled blazes in a cave, a new study finds. Discoveries in the cave provide the oldest evidence of fire making in Europe and support proposals that members of the human genus, Homo, regularly ignited fires starting at least 1 million years ago, say paleontologist Michael Walker of the University of Murcia in Spain and his colleagues... If the age estimate for the Spain find holds up, the new report adds to a "surprising number" of sites from deep in the Stone Age that...

WHY I QUIT MY JOB TO TRAVEL THE WORLD (New Yorker)

Here at the world's busiest airport -- with seven concourses and more than 200 gates -- a gate for the Super Jumbo Airbus A380 could not be provided. That forced Qatar Airways passengers to deplane Wednesday via mobile stairs and shuttle buses. Atlanta's airport has only one gate that can accommodate the A380 -- the world's largest airliner. The airport and resident hub carrier Delta Air Lines said they could not make that gate available. The very public battle between Delta Air Lines, the world's second largest airline, and competitor Qatar Airways represents a microcosm of the national debate over...

We returned on a Saint Louis to Dallas flight after burying my wife's brother - a decorated Master Chief who served in Vietnam, did covert work for the CIA and ferried battle orders from the Pentagon to Saudi Arabia during Desert Storm. When we got to Dallas we noticed both our bags partially open. Some meds were gone from my wife's bag; some coins from mine - nothing valuable. The bags were not rifled so the baggage handlers didn't do it. The TSA baggage screeners x-ray every bag so they did it. Here's the kicker: to get to the meds...

Six people were hurt when shots were fired at a tourist bus on a motorway in south-east France, police say. The bus carrying 75 Czech tourists, some schoolchildren, was travelling from Spain to the Czech Republic when it was hit on Saturday night. Two shots smashed the front and rear windows, Alex Perrin, a prosecutor in the Drome region, said. Le Dauphin Libere newspaper said more police were stationed on bridges over the road in case of repeat incidents. It is believed the attacker was using a hunting rifle to target the bus from a bridge over the A7 motorway...

At the Converge tech conference in Hong Kong, Baidu’s Wang Jing says driverless cars will reduce traffic and be used as a sharing vehicle that can talk with police.

Linking to a YouTube video showing Cruise ship Infinity slamming into berth 3 Ketchikan Alaska. I use the float adjacent to pick up clients from here till September (fishing charter) My wife left work less than hour before collision and could hit this berth with a rock from her office. We had high winds today gusting 40 knots plus. You can see thrusters in full on mode and I understand pilot/captain attempted to drop anchor. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fEPNfLmcUO0

Delta Air Lines paid for and installed a pair of "innovation lanes" at its hometown airport in Atlanta. The lanes are much better designed than the standard security checkpoints found at airports around the US, and the airline hopes it can double the throughput thanks to some clever ideas. Rather than having TSA agents use hand-pushed carts to bring empty trays from the exit back to the entrance of the line, the new lanes use an automated conveyor belt system. And instead of having travelers stack up behind one another to drop off their belongings to be scanned, there are...

Was travelling from Saudi Arabia to SudanAn American woman travelling from Saudi Arabia to Sudan threatened to blow up the aircraft after the crew refused her request to change seat. The woman, of an Egyptian origin, was travelling from the Western Saudi Red Sea port of Jeddah to Khartoum aboard a Saudia flight when the argument erupted. “She insisted on changing her seat but the crew members asked her to stay in her seat…she then threatened to blow up the plane,” Sada newspaper said, adding that the captain called in security men, who took the passenger away.

She had wounds in a half circle across her torso, teeth marks from her upper right shoulder in the back to her pelvis in front and to the other side of her buttocks in the back. Several ribs were fractured. A lung was punctured. She lost no less than a liter of blood. Doctors looked for teeth that might’ve still been in her body. Maria Korcsmaros, a 52-year-old triathlete and mother of three, survived a shark attack Sunday in Corona del Mar. She lived only because of her own quick thinking, strong work from a pair of Newport Beach lifeguards...

The bounty system would reward arrests “dead or alive,” Duterte said: “If they raise their hands, alive. If they fight back, dead.” With the money left over from his campaign, he said, “I could go as far as maybe 100 persons dead.” He said he would place the rewards, depending on how dangerous those captured are considered, between P50,000 to P3 million, about $1071 to $64,000. The president-elect of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, has promised to use the money left over from his presidential campaign as a bounty to law enforcement officers who kill those suspected of drug dealing. He...

Brett Sanders fought the law, and the law won. Namely, two buckets full of pennies. More than 22,000 of them. The Friso, Texas man was incredulous the city police cited him for going nine miles over the speed limit. And, he was livid a jury decided he deserved the ticket. So, when the city ordered Sanders to pay $212 in fines, he figured he’d make the payment as inconvenient as possible. He decided to pay Frisco in pennies. “I was on my residential street when I got a ticket for going nine miles over the speed limit,” he told CNN....

The Preseli stones from Stonehenge are approximately double the weight as the experimental block, but it is possible that one huge stone could have been brought by a group of just 20 people. The community living in the area during the Neolithic would have numbered several thousand so the absence of just a few dozen people was unlikely to cause any hardship. Doctoral student Barney Harris, who conducted the trial in Gordon Square, London, a stone's throw from UCL's Institute of Archaeology, said he was surprised that so few people had been required to move the block. "We were expecting...

For archaeologists and historians interested in the ancient politics, religion and language of the Indian subcontinent, two UCLA professors and their student researchers have creatively pinpointed sites that are likely to yield valuable transcriptions of the proclamations of Ashoka, the Buddhist king of northern India's Mauryan Dynasty who ruled from 304 B.C. to 232 B.C. In a study published this week in Current Science, archaeologist Monica Smith and geographer Thomas Gillespie identified 121 possible locations of what are known as Ashoka's "edicts." First they isolated shared features of 29 known locations of Ashokan edicts, which were found carved into natural...

Sometimes it’s surprising to discover how little we know about common plants or animals. Consider the ruby-throated hummingbird. If you live in the eastern half of Canada or the United States and have spotted a hummingbird hovering around a feeder in the backyard in summer, this is the bird you saw. But while scientists have documented many of the feeding and mating behaviors of the birds and that the birds migrate south to Central America and Cuba, there are still plenty of mysteries, such as whether the birds go the long way through Mexico when they migrate or whether they...

Centuries ago, a native Central American people terrified of a witch believed to live deep in the earth used to sacrifice children and young women to Nicaragua's Masaya volcano. Today, the crater southwest of the capital Managua is an international tourist magnet, where photo-snapping visitors scramble among sulfurous fumes to get views of its bubbling lava—a rare sight. The only volcanoes in the world to boast lakes of incandescent magma are Masaya, Hawaii's Kilauea and Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of Congo, explained a Nicaraguan geographer and environmentalist, Jaime Incer.

Just for the heck of it, yesterday, I applied for GOES. Supposedly can circumvent the long TSA lines at airports. Although I have also heard that the GOES lines are not so fast these days too. Got to travel thru Chicago in a couple of months and the horror stories were non-stop. Although recently they seemed to have gotten a bit better.

A 23-year-old man died Thursday after being swarmed by bees and stung 1,000 times while hiking in Usery Mountain Park in Arizona, authorities said. Alex Bestler and a friend were on the Merkle Trail when a large swarm of bees descended on them “without provocation or warning” shortly before 9 a.m., according to a Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office news release. The victim’s friend — identified only as Sonya — managed to escape by seeking shelter in a restroom, but Bestler was overcome by the swarm, the release stated. He was lying on the ground covered in bees when Sonya returned...