Heavy Element Needs a Name

This past five or six weeks of news has been bulging with interesting items to make
your days sunny and bright. Let's take a look at some of them.


NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The leaders of a village in the Indian state of Rajasthan ordered 150 men to dip their hands into boiling oil to prove their innocence after food was stolen from a local school, a newspaper reported Sunday.

**That's the bad news. The good news is they got off easy ... just think what they
would have suffered had they been in the USA.

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NEW YORK - Neanderthals survived for thousands of years longer than scientists thought, with small lingering bands finding refuge in a massive cave near the southern tip of Spain, new research suggests.

**I have two words for this ... rap bands.

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BANGKOK (Reuters) - The Thai armed forces seized power on Tuesday without firing a shot, dismissed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's government, revoked the constitution and promised a swift return to democracy after political reforms.

General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, overwhelmingly Buddhist Thailand's first Muslim army commander-in-chief, took the reins of power without a government title.

**Which reminds me of my dream to have a 1940 ford coup at least once in my life.

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BOSTON (Reuters) - Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said on Wednesday.

**Six figure incomes... how DO they get by?

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LONDON (Reuters) - Stimulating a certain area of the brain can produce a creepy feeling that someone is watching you when no one is, scientists said Wednesday.
... findings may be a step toward understanding the mechanisms behind psychiatric
manifestations such as paranoia, persecution and alien control," said Olaf Blanke, of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, in the journal Nature.

**Religion and tinfoil hat wearers...finally explained!

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LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. - At Walt Disney World's Animal Kingdom, head veterinarian Mark Stetter demonstrates the 5-foot contraception tool for a procedure that he hopes will help control Africa's elephant population: vasectomies.

**Yes folks, elephants are breeding like rabbits.

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And last but not least...

WASHINGTON - Revisiting one of physics' most embarrassing cases of scientific
misconduct, researchers from Russia and the United States announced Monday that they have created a new super-heavy element, atomic number 118.

**Since the element is super-heavy, I propose to name it TedKennedium. It'll make a great holiday gift.



Well, we went around the world with this one, and we're back safe and sound. Now it's time to get ready for Halloween.

Write on!!