Lead Story
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Researchers at the UK’s University of Birmingham announced in May that they’d powered a small electric fan using hydrogen excreted by E. coli bacteria that had been fed caramel and nougat waste from a chocolate factory. And in March Mayu Yamamoto of the International Medical Center of Japan said that her team had successfully synthesized vanillin, the primary element in vanilla extract, from cow manure. Although the manure-derived vanillin is identical to vanilla flavoring made from other sources, Yamamoto conceded it could probably be used only in products like shampoo or candles, as “it would be difficult for people to accept it in food.”
Government in Action
In May the Times of London reported on the village of Shingo, Japan, believed by many Japanese to be the final resting place of Jesus. According to local tradition, Jesus spent most of his 20s and early 30s in Japan, returned to Judaea to preach at age 33, then escaped crucifixion (his brother took his place on the cross), went back to Japan, married, and lived as a farmer in Shingo till his death at age 106. Meanwhile in the same month the Post of Durban, South Africa, reported on Katherine Jhawarelall, who claims that two years ago, on her 33rd birthday, she received divine notification–via a swollen arm and a message written on her skin–that she was Jesus. Jhawarelall, who holds a degree in criminology, suggested that this claim has been met with resistance because she is “female and a Hindu.”
Just like they planned it: In May a 30-year-old man from Waterfoot, England, apparently attempted suicide by putting a noose around his neck, fastening the other end of the rope to a telephone pole, and driving off in his car; the rope snapped, but conveniently the man lost control of the car and was killed when he crashed into a nearby house. And in June a man tried to hang himself from the Adams Avenue bridge in Huntington Beach, California, but the rope broke and he fell 30 feet to the riverbed below, where, according to police, he then slit his wrists and died.
