I bet this was the reporter's idea

Weekend Chuckles

Job Descriptions

1. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

2. An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.

3. A statistician is someone who is good with numbers but lacks the personality to be an accountant.

4. An actuary is someone who brings a fake bomb on a plane, because that decreases the chances that there will be another bomb on the plane.

5. A programmer is someone who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand.

6. A mathematician is like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.

7. A topologist is someone who doesn't know the difference between a coffee cup and doughnut.

8. A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

9. A psychologist is someone who watches everyone else when a beautiful girl enters the room.

10. A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.

11. A consultant is someone who takes the watch off your wrist and tells you the time.

12. A committee is a body that keeps minutes and wastes hours.

Screw polysporin, give me some fibronectin for my owie

Harvard scientists have developed a fabric coated with a protein called fibronectin which has the potential for helping wounds heal quickly sans scarring or possibly as a scaffold for growing organs.

Protein pattern: This computer rendering shows ripples on fabric made from protein. Such fabrics could be used as scaffolds for growing organs. Credit: ACS/ Nano Letters

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25918/?nlid=3315

Ninja baseball player

TV Reporter Bloopers

Top 10 funniest news reporter bloopers

Here are the top 5 clips from the cnet news blog by Don Reisinger

I hope none of these guys are getting behind the wheel of a car

Hilarious video of animals getting drunk from fermented fruit.

Good for a chuckle

A woman went to a pet shop and immediately spotted a large, beautiful parrot. There was a sign on the cage that said $50.00.

"Why so cheap?" she asked the pet store owner.

The owner looked at her and said, "Look, I should tell you first that this bird used to live in a house of prostitution, and sometimes it says some pretty vulgar stuff."

The woman thought about this, but decided she had to have the bird anyway.   She took it home and hung the bird's cage up in her living room and waited for it to say something.

The bird looked around the room, then at her, and said, "New house, new madam." The woman was a bit shocked at the implication, but then thought, "That's really not so bad." 

When her two teenage daughters returned from school, the bird saw them and said, "New house, new madam, new girls."

The girls and the woman were a bit offended but then began to laugh about the situation considering how and where the parrot had been raised.

Moments later, the woman's husband Eric came home from work The bird looked at him and said, "Hi, Eric." 

Worse than an oil spill...farming

The Other Gulf Stain - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com
As if the BP oil spill didn't cause enough damage to the coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico, large amounts of nitrogen and other nutrients from midwest agricultural lands has washed down the Mississippi river and entered the Gulf.

So...what are the repercussions of this?
The abundance of nutrients causes a dramatic increase in the plant life initially (e.g. algal bloom) but then creates what is known as a 'hypoxic zone' or 'dead zone' as all the oxygen dissolved in the water gets used up by the photosynthesizing plants. This has huge ramifications for the animal life in those areas, and could be costlier to the ecosystem and the Gulf fishing economy than the BP oil spill.