Baby pygmy hippo is born at Paris Zoo

PARIS - Aldo looks, eats and lazes like a hippopotamus — but he's only about as big as a human baby, at 21 inches. The pygmy hippo, born this month at the Paris Zoo, is one of only a few dozen in Europe, bred in a special program to boost the rare species.

There are no more than 3,000 around the world, mostly concentrated in west African countries such as Sierra Leone, Guinea Bissau or Liberia, said Juliane Villenain, a biologist at the zoo in the Bois de Vincennes, a park on Paris' eastern edge. According to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, pygmy hippos have already disappeared from Nigeria.

Pygmy hippopotamuses are, unlike their bigger brethren, lonely animals, except during reproduction season. The female takes care of the new born by herself, as little Aldo's mother Anais did, Villenain said.

His older brothers, now 7 and 6 years old, live in Spain and Britain.

Aldo likes alfalfa, carrots, apples and all sorts of vegetables. When captive, pygmy hippos also enjoy grainy feed specially made for them.

The fact that Aldo is a male is good news to the European breeding program. Since the project started in the early 90s, there have been 46 males born and 66 females. Aldo is the 47th male of the species.
Aldo, born June 5, was kept away from the public eye immediately after his birth. He will be on view to visitors starting Wednesday afternoon.

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The baby gorillas who think their keeper is the best mum in the world

For these two baby gorillas, clinging on to mum is the most natural thing in the world - even if she is making a cup of tea, rather than foraging in a tropical forest.

Six-month-old girl Kouki and ten-month-old boy Oudiki were abandoned by their separate mothers soon after they were born.

Since then, they have been hand-reared by zookeepers Donna Honey and Matt Stagg at Howletts Wild Animal Park in Kent.

The western lowland gorillas are now doing so well that they are being primed for a return to the wild in their native Africa.

Miss Honey, 25, said that the secret of mothering her two unlikely charges was to behave as much like a mother gorilla as possible.

"We don't tend to carry them," she said. "We encourage them to grip on to us like they would their mum. We also make gorilla noises to make them feel at home."

Astronaut Sunita Williams Sets the Record Straight, and Long

Call it a great leap forward for women in space.

After six years of people, three of whom have been women, living in space aboard the International Space Station, the female time-in-space endurance record set 11 years ago has been broken.

And it was broken in a single flight.

Image to right: Astronaut Sunita L. Williams, Expedition 15 flight engineer, wearing squat harness pads, poses for a photo while using the Interim Resistive Exercise Device (IRED) equipment in the Unity node of the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

NASA Astronaut Sunita Williams set a new record this morning at 12:47 CDT for the longest duration spaceflight by a woman. At that time, Williams surpassed Shannon Lucid’s mark of 188 days, 4 hours set in 1996.

Williams began her record-setting flight when she launched with the crew of STS-116 in December 2006. The Massachusetts native remained on board the station as a member of the Expedition 14 crew and then joined the Expedition 15 crew in April. Her spaceflight will come to a close when she returns to Earth aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis with the STS-117 crew.

Although this is only her first spaceflight, Williams also became the record-holder for most hours outside a spacecraft by a female by completing four spacewalks during Expedition 14 with a total time of 29 hours, 17 minutes.
“It was very exciting to watch her spacewalks and to watch her accumulate more spacewalk time than any other female in the universe,” said Lucid, who set the previous female space duration record while flying aboard the Russian Mir Space Station. “These [long-term] flights are providing the needed confidence so that some day in the near future we can depart low-Earth orbit and head on out to Mars.”

Image to left: Astronaut Sunita Williams participates in the STS-116 mission's third planned spacewalk. Credit: NASA

During her stay on orbit, Williams has worked with experiments across a wide variety of fields, including human life sciences, physical sciences and Earth observation as well as education and technology demonstrations.

Some of these experiments give scientists critical insight into the effects of weightlessness on our bodies while others show ways to prevent effects we already know about like muscle and bone loss.

In addition to rigorous exercise, Williams also collected and stored her blood while in space to add to an ongoing study on nutrition, another key element of living in space for long stretches of time.

The results of this study may impact nutritional requirements and food systems developed for future ventures in space. “Her mission has been critically important to our overall space program,” said NASA Astronaut Eileen Collins, another female pioneer in spaceflight. Collins became the first woman to command a spaceflight mission during the STS-93 mission on Space Shuttle Columbia.

“She truly is a space marathoner who shows young women everywhere that there's a place in the space program for them.” If her stay in space concludes as scheduled, with her return on Atlantis on June 21, Williams will have flown a total of 194 days in space.

Children snatched off the streets to work as slaves

More than 1,000 children may have been kidnapped and sold into slave labour in a brutal human trafficking ring that has shocked and outraged China.

The children, some as young as 8, worked in brick kilns for 16 hours a day with meagre food rations. They were guarded by fierce dogs and thugs who beat their prisoners at will.

Many were abducted right off the streets of cities in the region and sold to factories and mines for as little as 400 yuan (£27). The unfolding scandal, involving negligent law enforcement and even collusion between government officials and slave masters, burst into the open this week.

Horrified Chinese have followed the stark, uncensored images of the slaves on television as they were rescued by police. Some children still wore their school uniforms.

They lived in squalid conditions with many adult workers, sleeping on filthy quilts on layers of bricks inside the brickworks, with the doors sealed from the outside with padlocks and the windows barred with pieces of wood.

Many children had festering wounds on their black feet and around their waists, apparently from burns. Some were even beaten to death by their guards.

Some 35,000 police have raided 7,500 kilns in Henan and Shanxi provinces in central China and rescued 468 people. Local officials said that 250 people had been arrested. They said the number of children forced to work in the kilns could rise to more than 1,000.

The abuses came to light only after 400 parents of missing children posted a letter on the internet pleading for official attention to their plight.

Filmed by television reporters from Henan province who accompanied the parents into the kilns to try to find their missing sons, several boys stood dazed and almost mute.

Asked if he wanted to go home, one boy gripped his filthy shirt and sobbed: “I want to. I want to.”

Zhao Yanbing, a foreman who fled a brickworks where 31 men were rescued a few days ago, described on state television how he had beaten a man in his late fifties for not working hard enough. “His performance was so bad, so I thought that I would frighten him a bit. When I raised the shovel over him I never thought that he would get up and confront me, so I slammed the shovel down on his head.” The man never got up again.

The revelations have sparked nationwide disgust. The Polit-buro, the Communist Party’s top decision-making body, sent a team of officials to Shanxi yesterday to investigate.

The People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the ruling Communist Party, said: “How could officials in the area have connived with such audacious and appalling behaviour to allow this situation to arise under their very eyes?” Parents of missing boys have complained repeatedly directly to government offices in Henan and Shanxi.

Yuan Cheng said that his 16-year-old son disappeared on March 28 while training to install steel window frames at the Golden Port construction site in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province. He told The Times: “When Yuan Xueyu went missing I felt numb. But now I’m even more worried because if I can’t find him when there is so much public attention, then there is no hope.”

Mr Yuan said that more children had been disappearing in the past two or three years as a building boom across China has fuelled demand for bricks.

He had joined 100 other parents at sit-down protests outside government and police offices in Henan. “They just ignored us. But the lower-level police must be protecting these illegal factories and that’s why it’s so difficult to search.”

Robin Munro, of the China Labour Bulletin, based in Hong Kong, said: “My impression is that this is not a common problem, but this kind of thing by definition is off-screen and makes me wonder just how widespread this is. It is one more sign among several of increasing lawlessness in China.”

One mother has been more fortunate than Mr Yuan. After seeing footage on Henan television, she contacted local reporters saying she thought she had seen her missing son. They accompanied her to a brickworks whose owner said all his workers were volunteers. But loading bricks beside a kiln was her missing son. She flung her arms around the teenager and burst into tears. “I never thought I would see him alive again,” she sobbed hysterically. The boy, Zhang Daohu, looked stunned and dazed.

Overworked and underpaid

A quarter of Fanglin village’s children were killed in 2001 when their elementary school exploded. Only then did the rest of the world discover that the school, in the remote mountain village in Jianxi province, had been turned into a fireworks factory using children as free labour

Merchandise for the 2008 Beijing Olympics is produced using child labourers working 13-hour days for minimal wages, according to a report released this month. The publication, by an alliance of world trade unions, said that official Olympic caps, bags and stationery were manufactured by children as young as 12

Seventy middle school students were rescued by authorities in Ningbo last summer when it was discovered that they were employed in a grape cannery under the guise of a “work-study” programme

Cake-Eating contest

Spring is the traditional wedding-planning season, but a group of budding brides on Tuesday looked to have their cake and eat it too, descending on Times Square in a TV stunt to stuff their faces in hopes of winning $25,000 and being declared a "Bridezilla."

The Associated Press reported that Stephanie Florio, of Sayville, N.Y., was declared the winner, though it wasn't clear just how much cake she consumed.

The cakefest promoted the upcoming season premiere of the WE Network reality show "Bridezillas," which follows the lives and wedding preparations of brides-to-be who are determined to have the ideal wedding regardless of how many tantrums they must throw to achieve that dream.

More pictures after the jump. Click on pictures for a larger view.

Two sets of sextuplets born just hours apart

This is the extraordinary moment doctors delivered one of new mother Jenny Masche's sextuplets, all born at just 30 weeks and 3lbs or less in weight.

Remarkably, their birth heralded the arrival of the second set of sextuplets in the United States within a day after a 24-year-old woman delivered six of the best late on Sunday in Minnesota after using fertility drugs.

This rare occurrence could become more common as more couples seek artificial methods of conception.

One of Jenny Masche's miraculous deliveries

Jenny sees one of her new arrivals for the first time

About 10 hours after the Minnesota births, 32-year-old Jenny Masche delivered by Caesarean section. Due to their premature birth the babies suffered acute heart failure but are now stable.

They will be named Bailey Elizabeth, Savannah Jane, Molli Grace, Cole Robert, Blake Nickolas and Grant William. The Masches have yet to decide who gets which.

The heart problems were due to the huge volume of blood that Jenny Masche was carrying in her body while pregnant, Doctor John Elliott said at a news conference at Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Arizona.

The new mother is now stable and is expected to leave the hospital's intensive care unit later today.

Exhausted and wiping tears from his eyes, proud father Bryan Masche said: "I'm very thankful that we had the help of the best physicians, and the best doctors and the best medicine."

Upgrade your memory with a chip inside your Brain

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others. "The main achievement was the fact that we used the inhibition of the inhibitory neurons" to stimulate the memory patterns, says physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, senior author of a paper on the findings published in the May issue of Physical Review E. "We probably made [the cell culture] trigger the collective mode of activity that … [is] … possible."
The results, Ben-Jacob says, set the stage for the creation of a neuromemory chip that could be paired with computer hardware to create cyborglike machines capable of such tasks as detecting dangerous toxins in the air, allowing the blind to see or helping someone who is paralyzed regain some if not all muscle use.

Ben-Jacob points out that previous attempts to develop memories on brain cell cultures (neurons along with their supporting and insulating glial cells) have often involved stimulating the synapses (nerve cell connections). So-called excitatory neurons, which amplify brain activity, account for nearly 80 percent of the neurons in the brain; inhibitory neurons, which dampen activity, make up the remaining 20 percent. Stimulating excitatory cells with chemicals or electric pulses causes them to fire, or send electrical signals of their own to neighboring neurons.

According to Ben-Jacob, previous attempts to trigger the cells to create a repeating pattern of signals sent from neuron to neuron in a population—which neuroscientists believe constitutes the formation of a memory in the context of performing a task—focused on excitatory neurons. These experiments were flawed because they resulted in randomly escalated activity that does not mimic what occurs when new information is learned.

This time, Ben-Jacob and graduate student Itay Baruchi, who led the study, targeted inhibitory neurons to try to bring some order to their neural network. They mounted the cell culture on a polymer panel studded with electrodes, which enabled Ben-Jacob and Baruchi to monitor the patterns created by firing neurons. All of the cells on the electrode array came from the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain known for its role in memory formation.

Initially, when a group of neurons is clustered in a network, merely linking them will cause a spontaneous pattern of activity. Ben-Jacob and Baruchi sought to imprint a memory by injecting a chemical suppressor into a synapse between inhibitory neurons. Their goal: to disrupt the restrictive function of those cells, essentially causing the brakes they put on the excitatory members in the network to loosen. "This is like teaching by liberation," Ben-Jacob says. "We liberate the excitatory neurons to do what they want to do."

The pair chemically treated inhibitory neurons by injecting them with droplets of picrotoxin, an antagonist of gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain. The chemical suppression of the inhibitory neuron created a pattern kicked off by a neighboring excitatory neuron that was now free to fire. Other neurons in the culture began to fire one by one as they received an electrical signal from one of their neighbors. This continued in the same pattern, which repeated for over a day. This new sequence of activity coexisted with the electrical pattern that was spontaneously generated when the neural culture was initially linked.

A day later, they imprinted a third pattern starting at a different inhibitory synapse. Again, it was able to coexist with the other motifs. "The surprising thing is it doesn't affect the other patterns that the network had before," Ben-Jacob says.

The bottom line, the authors wrote: "these findings hint chemical signaling mechanisms might play a crucial role in memory and learning in task-performing in vivo networks." see more information:-Sciam