Hotel Bedroom Under the Sea

Walkways in aquariums are impressive, but they've got nothing on this underwater hotel bedroom in the Maldives. Can you imagine waking up with the Indian Ocean and its sea life floating around you?

The Maldives, a chain of atolls located about 250 miles south of India, are notable for being strikingly beautiful and also being the lowest country in the world. On average, the land is only about two feet above sea level — meaning that the country is in a particularly perilous position due to climate change and rising seas. While the hotel room is novel, beautiful, and luxurious, the threat the nation faces is very real. To hammer home the reality, the president has even held a meeting of his cabinet underwater.

India reveals massive uranium discovery

A new mine in south India could contain the largest reserves of uranium in the world, a government official said in remarks reported Tuesday, signalling a major boost for the energy-hungry nation.

The Tumalapalli mine in Andhra Pradesh state could provide up to 150,000 tonnes of uranium, Srikumar Banerjee, secretary of the Department of Atomic Energy, told reporters after a four-year survey of the site was completed.

"It's confirmed that the mine has 49,000 tonnes of ore, and there are indications that the total quantity could be three times that amount," Banerjee was quoted as saying in The Times of India.

"If that be the case, it will become the largest uranium mine in the world," he said.

Previous estimates suggested that only about 15,000 tonnes of uranium would be produced at the mine, which is due to start operating by the end of the year. No details were released on the quality of the material in Tumalapalli, a key factor as other uranium mined in India has been inferior to imports being procured from France, Kazakhstan, Russia and elsewhere.

"The new findings would only augment the indigenous supply of uranium. There would still be a significant gap. We would still have to import," Banerjee was quoted as saying in The Hindu newspaper.

India gets less than three percent of its energy from atomic power and it hopes to raise the figure to 25 percent by 2050.

Pasta Is Not Originally from Italy

Myth: Pasta originally comes from Italy.

Worldwide, pasta has become synonymous with Italian cuisine. Italian immigrants themselves brought pasta everywhere they went. While it is true that the most famous varieties and recipes of cooking pasta really do come from Italy, surprisingly, the actual origin of pasta lies elsewhere!

So how did pasta make its way to Italy? One of the more popular theories was published in the ‘Macaroni Journal’ by the Association of Food Industries. It states that pasta was brought to Italy by Marco Polo via China.  Polo ventured to China in the time of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) and the Chinese had been consuming noodles as early as 3000 B.C. in the Qinghai province. There is even some evidence there of 4,000-year-old noodles made from foxtail and broomcorn millet.

Unfortunately, there are problems with this theory, least of which is that the noodles they were making in China aren’t technically considered pasta.  Polo also described Chinese noodles as being like “lagana”, which implies he was possibly already familiar with a pasta-like food before going to China.  Further, in 1279, there was a Genoese soldier that listed in the inventory of his estate a basket of dried pasta.  Polo didn’t come back from China until 1295.  For those who don’t know, Genoa is a sea port in Italy.  Further, the modern pasta like we know it was first described in 1154 by an Arab geographer, Idrisi, as being common in Sicily. So Marco Polo could not have brought pasta to Italy via China.  It was already in Italy at that time.

So how did it get there?  Most food historians believe that Arabs (specifically from Libya) are to be credited for bringing pasta, along with spinach, eggplant and sugar cane, to the Mediterranean basin. In the Talmud, written in Aramaic in the 5th century AD, there is a reference to pasta being cooked by boiling. It is thought, then, that pasta was introduced to Italy during the Arab conquests of Sicily in the 9th century AD, which had the interesting side effect of drastically influencing the region’s cuisine. It also known that by the 12th century, the Italians had learned from the Arabs methods for drying pasta to preserve it while traveling. Further support for this theory can be found by the fact that, in many old Sicilian pasta recipes, there are Arab gastronomic introductions.

Chinese village bites into snake business

Residents stand next to cobras at a snake farm in Zisiqiao village, Zhejiang Province.

This sleepy village nestled in the heart of vast farmland in China's eastern Zhejiang province hides a deadly secret.

A step into the homes of any of the farming families here brings visitors eye-to-eye with thousands of some of the world's most feared creatures - snakes, many of them poisonous.
Cobras, vipers and pythons are everywhere in Zisiqiao, aptly known as the snake village, where the reptiles are deliberately raised for use as food and in traditional medicine, bringing in millions of dollars to a village that otherwise would rely solely on farming.

"As the number one snake village in China, it's impossible for us to raise only one kind of snake," said Yang Hongchang, the 60-year-old farmer who introduced snake breeding to the village decades ago.
"We are researching many kinds of snakes and the methods of breeding them."
In 1985, Yang started selling snakes he caught around the area to animal vendors. He soon began to worry that the wild snakes would run out and thus began researching on how to breed snakes at home.
Within three years, he had made a fortune - and many other villagers decided to emulate his success.
Today, more than three million snakes are bred in the village every year by the 160 farming families.
Snakes are renowned for their medicinal properties in traditional Chinese medicine and are commonly drunk as soup or wine to boost the person's immunity.

Yang has now started his own company to make his business more formal and build a brand, and also to conduct research and development for his products, which range from dried snake to snake wine and snake powder.
"Our original breeding method has been approved and recognised by the province and the county. They see us as the corporation working with the farming families," Yang said.
"So the company researches on the snakes and they hand them over to the farms for breeding. They said this model was working very well."

The original breeding method was simply putting males and females together, but now meticulous research is done on how the snakes breed, how to select good females, investigation into their diet, and how to incubate eggs so survival rates rise.

Study Says: 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13

WASHINGTON — Some 7.5 million of the 20 million minors who used Facebook in the past year were younger than 13, and a million of them were bullied, harassed or threatened on the site, says a study released Tuesday.

Even more troubling, more than five million Facebook users were 10 years old or younger, and they were allowed to use Facebook largely without parental supervision leaving them vulnerable to threats ranging from malware to sexual predators, the State of the Net survey by Consumer Reports found.

Facebook's terms of service require users to be at least 13 years old but many children, or their parents, get around that rule by giving a false birth date when they sign up for the social networking site.

Parents of kids 10 and younger who use Facebook "seem to be largely unconcerned" by their children's use of the site, possibly because they think a young child is less vulnerable to Internet risks, the study says.

But while a 10-year-old might not download pornography on the Internet, he or she does "need protection from other hazards that might lurk on the Internet, such as links that infect their computer with malware and invitations from strangers, not to mention bullies," the study says.

More than five million US households have been exposed in the past year to "some type of abuse" via Facebook, including virus infections, identity theft and bullying, says the study, for which 2,089 US households were interviewed earlier this year.

Consumer Reports urged parents to delete their pre-teens' Facebook accounts -- or ask Facebook to do so by using the site's "report an underage child" form -- and to monitor teenage kids' accounts by friending them or keeping an eye on their activity via siblings' or friends' Facebook pages.

It also called on Facebook to "beef up its screening to drastically reduce the number of underage members."