Day: September 18, 2013

What’s it like to live on just $4.50 a day, the rough cost of a Burger King Whopper Jr. meal? Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich, who makes $3 million a year, is finding out himself and telling the world about it.

Through participation in the SNAP challenge, a program in which he will live for a month on the average daily benefit provided by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (better known to those who are compelled to live on it as food stamps), Shaich says he will experience what it is like to do without.

“Despite everything I have learned about hunger and the various efforts I’ve undertaken to try to make a dent in the problem, I have never actually experienced hunger firsthand,” said Shaich, who was inspired by an article in The New York Times, and is recording his experience through posts on his Linked In…

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life of the nineteenth-century, French physicist Léon Foucault, and features one of his most impressive inventions: the Foucault pendulum.

Back in the 19th century, it was well known that the earth rotated on its axis, but scientists had struggled to find a simple way of demonstrating this concept. Some particularly ambitious researchers tried dropping weights from high altitudes, or even launching a cannon balls vertically upwards and hoping the earth rotated sufficiently while the projectile was airborne that the ball’s launch point and landing point would deviate in a measurable fashion.

(PHOTOS:History of Google Doodles)

Luckily, before anyone could get seriously injured by these types of experiments, Foucault came to the rescue. He devised a stunningly-elegant test using a multi-directional pendulum. The pendulum would be released over a thin layer of sand, at such a height that the pendulum’s bob would barely graze…

In a groundbreaking report released this week, the Centers for Disease Control says the agricultural use of antibiotics for raising livestock is a major contributor to the threat posed to humans by antibiotic-resistant illnesses.

Each year, according to the CDC, at least two million people in the United States are infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, 23,000 of whom die as a result. The CDC’s new report, titled Antibiotic resistance threats in the United States, 2013, is a “first-ever snapshot” of this grave threat to public health.

The CDC announcement is significant for several reasons. According to the report, more antibiotics are used in industrial agriculture in the U.S. than on people. In addition, though the nation’s health-threat watchdog has reportedly issued statements on the problem in the past, this is the first time it has unambiguously identified agriculture as a major component of the antibiotic resistance problem. “CDC has (quietly)…

Officials in DeQuincy, Louisiana have been twerking hard this week to debunk a prank press release announcing a city ban on the dance craze recently popularized by Miley Cyrus at MTV’s Video Music Awards.

“It’s a bunch of hogwash,” DeQuincy Mayor Lawrence Henagan told NOLA.com. The announcement, reportedly circulated by press release distribution site PRLog, included fake names for DeQuincy’s mayor and sheriff and condemned twerking as a ”defiant act against Jesus and his teachings.” Those who broke the law would be sentenced 30 days in county jail, E! Online reported.

The joke is the third time that the city near the Texas border has been the subject of fake news, including faux city initiatives banning Korean residents and giving guns to students. Mayor Henagan told NOLA.com that he thinks one prankster is behind these DeQuincy jokes because all of the releases used the same fake names for city officials.

Updated at…

Navy Yard gunman Aaron Alexis originally attempted to purchase an assault rifle from a Virginia gun shop, the New York Times reported Tuesday, but had to settle for a pump-action shotgun because state law prohibited the sale of the military-style AR-15 to an out-of-state buyer, even though Alexis passed a background check.

Had Alexis instead gone online, he would have easily found about 200 such weapons for sale by private sellers, most within an hour’s drive of D.C., according to a TIME analysis of postings on ArmsList.com, the most popular site for prospective gun buyers and sellers to connect.

Though federal law typically limits private gun sales to in-state buyers, gun-control advocates like New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg charge that the site enables illegal gun sales by giving ineligible buyers access to unscrupulous sellers. A December 2011 report by Bloomberg’s office found that 54 percent of ArmsList sellers

The mother of Aaron Alexis, the suspected gunman in the Navy Yard shooting that left Alexis and 12 others dead, has given a formal statement expressing profound sorrow over the tragedy, CNN reports.

“His actions have had a profound and everlasting effect on the families of the victims,” Cathleen Alexis said. “I don’t know why he did what he did and I’ll never be able to ask him why.

“Aaron is now in a place where he can no longer do harm to anyone, and for that I am glad.”

To the families of those hurt or killed in the Navy Yard shooting, Ms. Alexis said, “I am so, so very sorry this has happened. My heart is broken.”

[CNN]

It walks, has wings, breathes fire and it now holds a world record.  This 51-foot (4.5 meters) robotic dragon named “Tradinno” was awarded the 2014 Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Walking Robot. German’s Zollner Elecktronik AG conceived and built the 11-ton dragon to scare festival goers at the Drachenstich (“Slaying of the Dragon”), a traditional folk play held every August in Bavaria for the past 500 years. The impressive trailer by the company shows the complex engineering process and the dramatic results.

LIST:Wackiest Highlights from the 2014 Guinness World Records