MADISON, Wis. - This is one passenger no one wants in their rental car. A man found a slithery surprise Sunday when a ball python stuck its head out from between his legs while he was driving a rental car Sunday.
"He was completely in shock," said Officer Laura Walker, who responded to the scene. "I mean he said he was lucky he didn't crash the car."
When Walker and animal control officer Tim Frank arrived at about 4:30 p.m., the 2 1/2-foot constrictor snake was coiled around the seat's base, Walker said.
With some effort, Frank removed the black and gold snake and took it to the Dane County Humane Society, which will put it up for adoption after seven days if no one claims it, Frank said.
The man had rented the car the night before and had driven it to Milwaukee and back and around Madison Sunday, Walker said.
The snake was slightly dehydrated and was probably there for at least a week, Frank said.
A team of astronomers have found a colossal black hole so ancient, they're not sure how it had enough time to grow to its current size, about 10 billion times the mass of the Sun.
Sitting at the heart of a distant galaxy, the black hole appears to be about 12.7 billion years old, which means it formed just one billion years after the universe began and is one of the oldest supermassive black holes ever known.
The black hole, researchers said, is big enough to hold 1,000 of our own Solar Systems and weighs about as much as all the stars in the Milky Way.
"The universe was awfully young at the time this was formed," said astronomer Roger Romani, a Stanford University associate professor whose team found the object. "It's a bit of a challenge to understand how this black hole got enough mass to reach its size."
Romani told SPACE.com that the black hole is unique because it dates back to just after a period researchers call the 'Dark Ages,' a time when the universe cooled down after the initial Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. That cooling period lasted about one billion years, when the first black holes, stars and galaxies began to appear, he added. The research appeared June 10 on the online version of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Invisible to the naked eye, black holes can only be detected by the radiation they spew and their gravitational influence on their stellar neighbors. Astronomers generally agree that black holes come in at least two types, stellar and supermassive. Stellar black holes form from collapsed, massive stars a few times the mass of the Sun, while their supermassive counterparts can reach billions of solar masses.
A supermassive black hole a few million times the mass of the Sun is thought to sit at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, and some of the largest supermassives seen date have reached up to two billion solar masses, researchers said.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Blood-sucking leeches -- used for thousands of years in medicine -- now have the U.S. government's approval as a tool for healing skin grafts or restoring circulation, regulators said on Monday.
The Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) approved an application from French firm Ricarimpex SAS to market leeches for medicinal purposes. The company has been breeding leeches for 150 years, the FDA (news - web sites) said.
Doctors have used the small aquatic worms for several thousand years in the belief that bloodletting helps to cure a wide range of complaints from headaches to gout. They reached their height of medicinal use in the mid-1800s.
Today, doctors around the world use leeches to remove blood pooled under skin grafts for burn patients, or to restore circulation in blocked veins by removing pooled blood, the FDA said in a statement.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drug that seems to drive female rats mad for sex may offer the first real scientific aphrodisiac for women, U.S. and Canadian researchers said on Monday.
The drug, Palatin Technologies Inc's PT-141, is being developed for use to fight impotence in men, but the researchers said tests showed it also aroused female rats.
"Accordingly, PT-141 may be the first identified pharmacological agent with the capability to treat female sexual desire disorders," they wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (news - web sites).
James Pfaus of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada and colleagues there and at Palatin tested the drug on female rats and found it affected their mating behavior.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Forget about hair of the dog. A hangover cure may be locked inside the common prickly pear cactus, researchers said on Monday.
The finding came from tests on a group of 55 adults between the ages of 21 and 35 who were given extracts of Opuntia ficus indica, a type of prickly pear cactus, before being fed dinner and told to get drunk.
The men in the study averaged five to six drinks while the women had three to five before they were driven home. They were offered a choice of vodka, gin, rum, bourbon, scotch, or tequila, but told to stick with only one.
Those in the study who received the extract instead of a placebo reported milder hangovers when tested the next morning, according to the research conducted at Tulane University in New Orleans and published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (news - web sites).
The study was funded in part by California-based Extracts Plus Inc., which markets a product with the same extract called "Hangover Prevention Formula." The Veterans Affairs Administration and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute also financed the study.
Originally posted by princess Where were these taken at fudpuck? I'm asking cause I noticed the EOD trailer from Tennessee..
Bonnaroo was in Manchester, Tennessee. There were about 90,000 people there. It's just a huge 600 acre farm, and they bring in about 70 bands. Fun times.
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Originally posted by Raven Are you all packed for your trip to Hedonism, sweetie?
I'm working on that among other things. Trying to get laundry done.. Have to get the kids packed to go to their dads.. they leave for his house before I leave.. soo.. And I'm tryng to make sure work ends are tied up.
I haven't been gone for 7 days in many many years.. So this is stressing for me..
Originally posted by princess I'm working on that among other things. Trying to get laundry done.. Have to get the kids packed to go to their dads.. they leave for his house before I leave.. soo.. And I'm tryng to make sure work ends are tied up.
I haven't been gone for 7 days in many many years.. So this is stressing for me..
You'll be fine, once you get on the plane...order your first vodka/tonic...
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