For days, New Yorkers had walked past workmen installing a pet shop. Spotting what appeared to be a leopard and monkey through the window on 7th Avenue, a few had even marched in to complain about the small space in which the wild animals were confined. But yesterday, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill was revealed to be the latest work by the street artist Banksy, complete with convincingly real "animatronic" creatures that moved around the store to beguile onlookers. The pet shop is open for business every day until midnight until 31 October and although people cannot buy its contents, they can walk in and view the "exhibition", Banksy's first in New York. Artworks inside include two fish fingers floating in a fish bowl, robotic rabbits wearing pearl necklaces, a couple of chicken nuggets which appear to be sipping ketchup, hot dogs writhing underneath heat lamps and a CCTV camera nurturing its young. A middle-aged man in overalls, employed by Banksy, dragged an "Open for Business" sign on to the pavement yesterday to mark its opening.
For days, New Yorkers had walked past workmen installing a pet shop. Spotting what appeared to be a leopard and monkey through the window on 7th Avenue, a few had even marched in to complain about the small space in which the wild animals were confined. But yesterday, The Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill was revealed to be the latest work by the street artist Banksy, complete with convincingly real "animatronic" creatures that moved around the store to beguile onlookers.
The pet shop is open for business every day until midnight until 31 October and although people cannot buy its contents, they can walk in and view the "exhibition", Banksy's first in New York.
Artworks inside include two fish fingers floating in a fish bowl, robotic rabbits wearing pearl necklaces, a couple of chicken nuggets which appear to be sipping ketchup, hot dogs writhing underneath heat lamps and a CCTV camera nurturing its young. A middle-aged man in overalls, employed by Banksy, dragged an "Open for Business" sign on to the pavement yesterday to mark its opening.
Austrian far-right politician Joerg Haider has been killed in a road accident, police reports say. Haider died near Klagenfurt in Carinthia, his political stronghold. He was driving alone when his car came off the road and he suffered severe head and chest injuries, police told the Austrian APA news agency. The 58-year-old was a former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies. Police investigators in Klagenfurt told the BBC that investigations into the crash were under way. He had reportedly been due to attend his mother's 90th birthday celebrations later in the day. "For us this is the end of the world," the deputy leader of Haider's Alliance for Austria's Future, Stefan Petzner, told Austrian news agency, APA.
He was driving alone when his car came off the road and he suffered severe head and chest injuries, police told the Austrian APA news agency.
The 58-year-old was a former leader of the Austrian Freedom Party, and was known for his anti-immigration and anti-EU policies.
Police investigators in Klagenfurt told the BBC that investigations into the crash were under way.
He had reportedly been due to attend his mother's 90th birthday celebrations later in the day.
"For us this is the end of the world," the deputy leader of Haider's Alliance for Austria's Future, Stefan Petzner, told Austrian news agency, APA.
ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) -- The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit). D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Living alone, D. audaxviator must build its organic molecules by itself out of water, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen from ammonia in the surrounding rocks and fluid. During its long journey to the extreme depths, evolution has equipped the versatile spelunker with genes - many of them shared with archaea, members of a separate domain of life unrelated to bacteria - that allow it to cope with a range of different conditions, including the ability to fix nitrogen directly from elemental nitrogen in the environment. [...] "We knew from previous work in these mines, using molecular biology techniques, that there seemed to be very simple communities living down there," says Fred Brockman of the Biology Department of PNNL in Washington state, where the DNA was extracted from the filtered cells. "We expected we'd have a good chance of assembling one entire genome of the most dominant species, or perhaps 70 to 80 percent of several species." Says Chivian, "What we instead discovered was that there was only one organism present in the sample. More than 99.9 percent of the DNA came from that single organism, and the tiny remainder appeared to be trace contamination from the mine and the laboratory."
ScienceDaily (Oct. 10, 2008) -- The first ecosystem ever found having only a single biological species has been discovered 2.8 kilometers (1.74 miles) beneath the surface of the earth in the Mponeng gold mine near Johannesburg, South Africa. There the rod-shaped bacterium Desulforudis audaxviator exists in complete isolation, total darkness, a lack of oxygen, and 60-degree-Celsius heat (140 degrees Fahrenheit).
D. audaxviator survives in a habitat where it gets its energy not from the sun but from hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay of uranium. Living alone, D. audaxviator must build its organic molecules by itself out of water, inorganic carbon, and nitrogen from ammonia in the surrounding rocks and fluid. During its long journey to the extreme depths, evolution has equipped the versatile spelunker with genes - many of them shared with archaea, members of a separate domain of life unrelated to bacteria - that allow it to cope with a range of different conditions, including the ability to fix nitrogen directly from elemental nitrogen in the environment.
[...]
"We knew from previous work in these mines, using molecular biology techniques, that there seemed to be very simple communities living down there," says Fred Brockman of the Biology Department of PNNL in Washington state, where the DNA was extracted from the filtered cells. "We expected we'd have a good chance of assembling one entire genome of the most dominant species, or perhaps 70 to 80 percent of several species."
Says Chivian, "What we instead discovered was that there was only one organism present in the sample. More than 99.9 percent of the DNA came from that single organism, and the tiny remainder appeared to be trace contamination from the mine and the laboratory."
copyright Ken Cedeno
What's with the Presidential trousers? Is he shrinking? You can't be me, I'm taken
