WEIRD NEWS

Party foul

A British teenager was airlifted
to the hospital and his father’s nose
was broken after party-crashers went
on a rampage. The 100 uninvited
teenagers found out about the 16th
birthday party after its details were
posted on YouTube.

The teens stole whiskey and
champagne, smashed windows
and started fights. The man’s nose
was broken by a punch in the face,
delivered after he tried to refuse
entry to a group of youths. His
18-year-old son was badly beaten.
Doctors at a hospital in Bath suspect
he has spinal injuries. The party was
for the boy’s brother.

Drunk and disorderly Father

A Mexican priest found himself
in jail after punching a police officer
who caught him drunkenly driving
through the city of Monterrey. The
priest was not wearing clerical dress
but was holding a prayer book when
he was arrested. He launched at the
traffic cop and became violent after
he learned his car was going to be
towed away.

The priest paid the fines for his
offenses and was released a few
hours after his arrest.

Monterrey and Mexico City are
employing a tough new clamp-down
on drunken driving, which is a
widespread problem there because
of tequila- and beer-fueled lunches
and parties.

40 million years without sex

Despite remaining celibate for
tens of millions of years, one microscopic
organism has managed to
thrive, thanks to a neat evolutionary
trick. Asexual reproduction has
allowed duplicate gene copies of
single-celled creatures called bdelloid
rotifers to change over time.
This unique ability gives the rotifers
a wider pool of genes, helping
them to adapt and survive. Previous
research had shown that the
translucent, waterborne organisms
could survive for up to 40 million
years without sexual relations.

The question then became how
the creatures accomplished this feat
without the gene-swapping made
possible by sexual reproduction.
Recent studies found that these
creatures get around that problem
with an evolutionary trick that
allows their genes to drift apart and
evolve on their own, after using
molecular cloning techniques.

Methane showers

The weather in the bright Xanadu
region of Saturn’s largest moon,
Titan, has been found to be a
steady drizzle of liquid methane.
New images from Hawaii’s W.M.
Keck Observatory and Chile’s Very
Large Telescope shows almost global
cloud-cover at high elevations and
morning drizzle that dissipates
around midmorning local time,
which is about three Earth days
after sunrise.

Scientists expected rain in the
atmosphere of the planet-sized
moon, but for the first time, these
near-infrared images have revealed a
persistent drizzle of methane in the
western foothills of Xanadu. Titan is
known to have hydrocarbon lakes
and methane clouds. 2006 Radar
images of Xanadu showed deep
channels cutting through plains and
winding around hills.

Scientists are wondering if the
methane is sitting in the clouds or
falling from the sky. One researcher
thinks it must be falling, given the
massive size of these raindrops. The
drops are believed to be about 1,000
times bigger than those on Earth.

Raindrops on Earth are micrometer
sized, but on Titan they
appear to be a millimeter or bigger
in size.