Archives for June 2006

Live Science has a list of the top ten deadliest animals. Click here to read the full list or scroll down to see a few selections.

Poison Dart Frog

These pint sized frogs aren’t for kissing. Their backs ooze a slimy neurotoxin that is meant to keep predators away. Each frog produces enough of the toxin to kill 10 humans

Australian Box Jellyfish

Also known as the sea wasp, this salad-bowl sized jellyfish can have up to 60 tentacles each 15 feet long. Each tentacle has 5,000 stinging cells and enough toxin to kill 60 humans.

Do you have a bad boss. If so you might be interested in this story.

‘WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. labor movement is asking workers to move their complaints about their bosses from the water cooler to the Web.

Working America, the AFL-CIO union federation’s affiliate for nonunion workers, invited workers throughout the country on Monday to share their best stories about their worst bosses in its “My Bad Boss Contest.”

Top prize is a one-week vacation.

“It’s an opportunity for people to get this off their chests and to see what’s happening out there and to shine a spotlight on this,” said Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum.

It’s also an opportunity for the worker advocacy group, which has more than 1 million members, to pick up new members, since contestants must go to www.workingamerica.org to enter.

Standing by to weigh in with on-line comments about the worst-boss stories are author Barbara Ehrenreich, who chronicled the plight of the working poor in “Nickel and Dimed,” comedian tuned liberal talk show host Al Franken and liberal commentator Jim Hightower.

Voting for the best worst-boss stories will be done by Web readers over the next six weeks. Each week’s top vote-getter will be eligible to compete for the grand prize, a seven-night vacation getaway and $1000 for a round trip air fare, to be announced by August 16.”

Click here for the full story.

I thought that this story was pretty interesting. Technology continues to change the world.

“BETHESDA, Md., June 17 — Almost every Thursday during the academic year, a bus carrying a dozen or so Naval Academy midshipmen leaves Annapolis for the 45-minute drive to Bethesda, where Navy doctors perform laser eye surgery on them, one after another, with assembly-line efficiency.

Nearly a third of every 1,000-member Naval Academy class now undergoes the procedure, part of a booming trend among military personnel with poor vision. Unlike in the civilian world, where eye surgery is still largely done for convenience or vanity, the procedure’s popularity in the armed forces is transforming career choices and daily life in subtle but far-reaching ways.

Aging fighter pilots can now remain in the cockpit longer, reducing annual recruiting needs. And recruits whose bad vision once would have disqualified them from the special forces are now eligible, making the competition for these coveted slots even tougher.

But the surgery is also causing the military some unexpected difficulties. By shrinking the pool of people who used to be routinely available for jobs that do not require perfect eyesight, it has made it harder to fill some of those assignments with top-notch personnel, officers say.

When Ensign Michael Shaughnessy had the surgery in his junior year at the Naval Academy, his new 20-20 vision qualified him for flight school. And that is where he decided to go after graduating last month ranked in the top 10 percent of his class, rather than pursuing a career as a submarine officer.

“The cramped environment in submarines is something that turned me off,” Ensign Shaughnessy, 22, said.

For generations, Academy graduates with high grades and bad eyes were funneled into the submarine service. But in the five years since the Naval Academy began offering free eye surgery to all midshipmen, it has missed its annual quota for supplying the Navy with submarine officers every year.”

Read the whole thing.