Interesting facts about death

(1) More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.
(2) More people are killed each year by coconuts than sharks. Approximately 150 people are killed each year by coconuts.
(3) You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.
(4) Fleas have the distinction of killing more people than all the wars man has ever fought. The "Black Death" plague killed 1/4 of Europe's population in the 14th century, caused by germs transmitted from rodents to humans by fleas.
(5) The animal responsible for the most human deaths worldwide is the mosquito.
(6) The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.
(7) A hundred years ago, the average life expectancy in the United States was forty-seven.
(8) Today, only one in two billion people will live to be 116 or older.
(9) Your statistical chance of being murdered is 1 in 20,000.
(10) There are 5 times as many deaths due to the negligence of doctors as there are deaths due to firearms.
(11) On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
(12) Robert Hershey, of Hershey Chocolate fame, died when he fell into a vat of chocolate and drowned.
(13) Dr. Alice Chase, who wrote "Nutrition for Health" and numerous books on the science of proper eating, died of malnutrition.
(14) Adolph Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.
(15) When Mahatma Gandhi died, an autopsy revealed that his small intestine contained five gold Krugerrands.
(16) When Thomas Edison died in 1941; Henry Ford captured his last dying breath in a bottle.
(17) In 1845, President Andrew Jackson's pet parrot was removed from his funeral for swearing.
(18) Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln, was present at the assassinations of three presidents: his father's, President Garfield's, and President McKinley's. After the last shooting, he refused ever to attend a state affair again.
(19) When Mark Twain was born on Nov 30, 1835, Halley's comet was visible over Florida, Missouri. Mark Twain predicted in 1909 that he would die when it returned. He was right. When he died on April 21, 1910, Halley's comet was once again visible in the sky

Math prodigy now a £130 hooker claim

Monday March 31, 2008

PETALING JAYA: Sufiah Yusof, the child Maths genius who won a place at Oxford University when she was just 13, has been found to be working as a prostitute, according to a report in London’s News of the World.

Sufiah, now 23, whose father Farooq is a Pakistani and mother Halimathon is from Johor, was reported to have entertained an undercover reporter in her flat in Manchester.

Claiming that she had posted her services for £130 (RM829) on the Internet, the newspaper said she had called herself Shilpa Lee on a hookers’ website. She is said to have advertised herself as “a sexy, smart student” who preferred “older gentlemen”.


Better times: File pic of Farooq with Sufiah when she was Oxford-bound.
The story in the newspaper comes just days after her father was jailed for sexually assaulting two 15-year-old girls as he home-tutored them in Maths.

Sufiah passed the Maths A-Level she needed for entry into Oxford at the age of 12.

Three years into Oxford, she sparked a massive police hunt after running away.

At the time her father bizarrely claimed Sufiah had been kidnapped and brainwashed by an organisation seeking the key to her intelligence.

But Sufiah sent an e-mail to her family describing her life under her father as a “living hell”.

She was found in an Internet cafe in Bournemouth where she had been working as a hotel waitress.

She refused to go back to her parents and instead was taken into the care of social services.

By then Farooq was in jail for three years for his part in a £1.5mil (RM9.57mil) mortgage swindle.

Sufiah returned to Oxford to complete the final year of her Masters in Maths but failed to finish the course after meeting trainee lawyer Jonathan Marshall.

They were married in 2004 but her parents and siblings failed to turn up. They divorced a year later.

The report, which carried grainy photographs of a semi-nude woman it claimed was Sufiah, said the girl met the reporter who posed as a client wearing a tiny skirt, leather boots and a tight T-shirt. She was carrying three mobile phones.

She also told the reporter that she was studying for a Masters degree in Economics.

Sufiah gave no indication of any sadness at the jailing of her father the previous day. On Wednesday, Farooq, 50, was sentenced to 18 months at Coventry Crown Court for touching two 15-year-old girls when he was home tutoring them.

The report quoted her friend as saying: “Sufiah has suffered so many knocks in her life. I just hope she can drag herself out of this life she has got herself into.

“She deserves a much better life than this. Her gift has been a curse.”

Early Birds, Night Owls: Blame Your Genes

James Owen
for National Geographic News

January 28, 2008
Those who struggle to get out of bed in the morning may be able to hold their genes responsible, new research suggests.

Scientists have discovered that a person's waking habits are mirrored by body cells that are equipped with their own daily alarm clocks.

"One of the big surprises was that so much of our daily behavior was genetically encoded," Brown said.

"The idea that skin cells are telling us anything about our behavior was, for me, quite fascinating," he added.

The study investigated the circadian rhythm—the brain-controlled phenomenon that governs various body functions over a 24-hour period—of extreme late and early risers.

Suitable volunteers were recruited by the study team using TV advertisements shown between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.

"We got both our early types and our late types that way," Brown said. "Some had not yet gone to bed, while others were already up."

Skin cells taken from the volunteers were cultured in the lab and injected with a bioluminescence gene found in fireflies.

These altered cells lit up or dimmed according to an individuals sleeping patterns, according to the study, which appears in today's online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows

Mason Inman in Boston, Massachusetts
for National Geographic News

February 14, 2008
No areas of the world's oceans remain completely untouched by humanity's influence, according to a new study.

Every area of the oceans is feeling the effects of fishing, pollution, or human-caused global warming, the study says, and some regions are being affected by all of these factors and more.

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A team led by Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the first global map that shows the various kinds of damage being done to marine ecosystems.

The team assigned scores to 17 human impacts and tallied them up for every ocean region to reveal the overall effect people are having on marine life.

"The ocean is so big, I figured there would be a lot of areas that we hadn't gotten to or that people rarely get to," Halpern said.

"But when you look at the map, there are huge areas that are being impacted by multiple human activities," he said. "It was certainly a surprise to me."

The project revealed that more than 40 percent of the world's marine ecosystems are heavily affected.

Major hot spots include the North Sea off the northern coast of Europe and Asia's South China Sea and East China Sea.

The study will be published tomorrow in the journal Science.

Acid Oceans, Melting ice

Of all the human effects on marine ecosystems, climate change is having by far the largest overall impact, the researchers estimate.

Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are warming up the atmosphere and, more slowly, the oceans, the scientists explain.