US man impaled through eye with pruning shears

An 86-year-old Arizona man is lucky to be alive after he accidentally impaled himself with pruning shears.

Leroy Luetscher was working in his back garden when he dropped a pair of pruning shears, which landed point-side down in the ground.

A pair of pruning shears embedded in the head of Leroy Luetscher 

 

When Luetscher went to pick them up, he lost his balance and fell face-down on the handle. The handle penetrated his eye socket and went down into his neck, resting on the external carotid artery. Half the shears were left in his head, while the other half was sticking out.

An X-ray of Mr Luetscher's head showed the severity of the injury.

"You wouldn't believe your eyes," said doctor Julie Wynne.

Mr Luetscher was rushed to the hospital, where surgeons removed the shears and rebuilt his orbital floor with metal mesh, saving his eye.

Doctors say Mr Luetscher still has slight swelling in his eyelids and minor double vision but has otherwise recovered.
He has thanked the doctors at the University Medical Center for their remarkable work.
"I am so grateful to the doctors and staff at UMC," he said.

Offender breaks curfew after security staff tag his false leg

Christopher Lowcock, 29, wrapped his prosthetic limb in a bandage and fooled G4S staff who failed to carry out the proper tests when they set up the tag and monitoring equipment at his Rochdale home.

Lowcock could then simply remove his leg - and the tag - whenever he wanted to breach his court-imposed curfew for driving and drug offences, as well as possession of an offensive weapon.

A second G4S officer who went to check the monitoring equipment also failed to carry out the proper test.

Managers became suspicious last month, but when they returned to the address a third time Lowcock had already been arrested and was back in custody accused of driving while banned and without insurance.

A G4S spokeswoman said: ''G4S tags 70,000 subjects a year on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

''Given the critical nature of this service we have very strict procedures in place which all of our staff must follow.
''In this individual's case two employees failed to adhere to the correct procedures when installing the tag. Had they done so, they would have identified his prosthetic leg.
''Failure to follow procedure is a serious disciplinary offence, and the two employees responsible for the installation of the tag have now been dismissed.''
A Ministry of Justice spokesman added: ''We expect the highest level of professionalism from all our contractors, and there are strict guidelines which must be followed when tagging offenders.
''Procedures were clearly not followed in this case and G4S have taken action against the staff involved.
''Two thousand offenders are tagged every week and incidents like this are very rare.''
As well as the electronic tagging of offenders, G4S also runs private prisons including Altcourse, in Liverpool; Parc, in Bridgend, south Wales; Rye Hill, in Willoughby, near Rugby; and Wolds, in Brough, East Yorkshire.
It will also run Birmingham Prison when it becomes the first to be transferred from the public to private sector in October.

Future heart health 'shaped by diet'

 

What we eat as a child has long-term effects on our heart, say researchers

 

Growing up starved of calories may give you a higher risk of heart disease 50 years on, research suggests.

Researchers in The Netherlands tracked the heart health of Dutch women who lived through the famine at the end of World War II.
Those living on rations of 400-800 calories a day had a 27% higher risk of heart disease in later life.
It's the first direct evidence early nutrition shapes future health, they report in the European Heart Journal.
The Dutch famine of 1944-45 gave researchers in Holland a unique opportunity to study the long-term effects of severe malnutrition in childhood and adolescence.
A combination of factors - including failed crops, a harsh winter and the war - caused thousands of deaths among people living in the west of The Netherlands.
The women, who were aged between 10 and 17 at the time, were followed up in 2007.
The team, from the University Medical Center Utrecht and the University of Amsterdam, found those who were severely affected by the famine had a 27% greater risk of developing heart disease than those who had had enough to eat.
Diet impact
Lead author Annet van Abeelen said: "The most important message is that it is good to realise that disturbing the development of children through acute malnutrition can have implications for later adult health.
"It's not only the short-term direct consequences that matter. Even 50 years later, there is still a higher risk of adult coronary heart disease."
Victoria Taylor, senior heart health dietitian for the British Heart Foundation, said: "This study showed a link between children and young adults experiencing famine and the likelihood of them developing heart disease later on in life.
"Although it wasn't clear exactly what changes occurred in the body to increase the risk, this highlights how our environment can have a long-term impact upon our heart health.
"Fortunately, the problems of famine seen in other countries have not been an issue in the UK in recent times. But that doesn't make this study irrelevant for us.
"It adds to the importance of providing a healthy diet for children and young people because of the way it can shape their future heart health."

Goring-on-Thames tortoise fitted with wheels

 

Bill Jackson said Yuri the pet tortoise was "speeding around" on her new set of wheels

A 100-year-old tortoise that woke from hibernation unable to move her back legs is mobile again thanks to a set of furniture wheels.

Owner Bill Jackson, 71, from Goring-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, said Yuri had difficulties after sleeping for over two months.
"She was dragging herself around the garden looking rather miserable," he said.
But a visit to his local hardware shop solved the problem.
Tanya Brown, from Goring Hardware, said: "We established we needed swivel casters so the tortoise could still rotate on its back legs.
"It was one of our most unusual cases but we do rise to the challenge."
Ms Brown described the ensuing operation as "fairly straightforward".
Removable double-sided sticky tape was used to attach the wheels to the underside of Yuri's shell.
Mr Jackson said: "She's happy now. She's eating, walking and speeding around.
Temporary measure "She comes out the moment the sun comes out but doesn't go quite as far as she used to."
It is hoped the wheels are a temporary measure and that Yuri will regain movement in her legs.
Mr Jackson said he has taken Yuri for several visits to the vet but he was unable to diagnose the problem.
Jimmy Reynolds, reptile zookeeper at Cotswold Wildlife Park, said: "It sounds like it's worth a shot if she's getting on with life and seems happy.
"You can be in the game for a long time and not hear every story."
Mr Jackson has owned Yuri for 40 years, inheriting the pet from a previous owner who said they could not cope.
He and his wife also own horses, chickens, two dogs and a parrot.
Yuri's favourite foods include strawberries, bananas and brown bread.

Women waste 50bn litres of water shaving legs in shower

They may already be used to complaints about blunt razors from boyfriends or husbands, but women who shave their legs in the shower now face criticism from environmentalists.

Research has shown that one in three women leave the shower running while they shave their legs, wasting around 50 billion litres of water a year. 

Shaving in the shower

 

Thames Water, which commissioned the study, said the amount wasted would be enough to supply the whole of London for 25 days.

The research also found that one in four people leave the sink tap running while they brush their teeth, which accounts for around 120 billion litres of water wasted per year.

A spokesman for Thames Water said yesterday: “It may seem like it’s always raining, but we’ve had below average rainfall across our region for nine of the past 12 months.

''Our research proves that the majority of people have a 'water conscience’, with more than

Woman collects £35,000 in small change from toilets

A German woman is being investigated by tax officials after hoarding more than €40,000 (£34,880) in loose change she gathered from public toilets.
The woman, who operates 50 toilets across Germany, paid cleaners minimal wages while pocketing the change they collected from the toilet floors and didn't declare the income.
But her policy looks to have backfired after it was reported that one of the cleaners tipped off the state prosecutor who launched a tax investigation.
When visited by police at her home in Bonn, Germany, the suspect resisted arrest before finally giving in. When she finally gave in police found her garage knee-deep in coins.
The bags of coins had to be loaded away by shovel into a 7.5 tonne truck.
Though the haul seems astounding, it is estimated that there is more than £42.9 million in loose change down the back of British sofas alone, with £385 million squirreled away in change jars.
Research from Halifax has found that there is an average £1.61 caught down each sofa in Britain, while figures from Money.co.uk show the nation's coin jars have an average of  £24.54 in them each, making the toilet floor find look like small change.

Species count put at 8.7 million

 

The black-capped woodnymph of Colombia was identified as recently as 2009

The natural world contains about 8.7 million species, according to a new estimate described by scientists as the most accurate ever.

But the vast majority have not been identified - and cataloguing them all could take more than 1,000 years.
The number comes from studying relationships between the branches and leaves of the "family tree of life".
The team warns in the journal PLoS Biology that many species will become extinct before they can be studied.
Although the number of species on the planet might seem an obvious figure to know, a way to calculate it with confidence has been elusive.
In a commentary also carried in PLoS Biology, former Royal Society president Lord (Robert) May observes: "It is a remarkable testament to humanity's narcissism that we know the number of books in the US Library of Congress on 1 February 2011 was 22,194,656, but cannot tell you - to within an order of magnitude - how many distinct species of plants and animals we share our world with."
Now, it appears, we can.
"We've been thinking about this for several years now - we've had a look at a number of different approaches, and didn't have any success," one of the research team, Derek Tittensor,said.
"So this was basically our last chance, the last thing we tried, and it seems to work."
Dr Tittensor, who is based at the UN Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (Unep-WCMC) and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, worked on the project alongside peers from Dalhousie University in Canada and the University of Hawaii.
The vast majority of the 8.7 million are animals, with progressively smaller numbers of fungi, plants, protozoa (a group of single-celled organisms) and chromists (algae and other micro-organisms).
The figure excludes bacteria and some other types of micro-organism.
Linnaean steps About 1.2 million species have been formally described, the vast majority from the land rather than the oceans.

The natural world in numbers

• Animals: 7.77 million (12% described)
• Fungi: 0.61 million (7% described)
• Plants: 0.30 million (70% described)
• Protozoa: 0.04 million (22% described)
• Chromists: 0.03 million (50% described)

The trick this team used was to look at the relationship between species and the broader groupings to which they belong.

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus developed a comprehensive system of taxonomy, as the field is known, which is still - with modifications - in use today.
Groups of closely related species belong to the same genus, which in turn are clustered into families, then orders, then classes, then phyla, and finally into kingdoms (such as the animal kingdom).
The higher up this hierarchical tree of life you look, the rarer new discoveries become - hardly surprising, as a discovery of a new species will be much more common than the discovery of a totally new phylum or class.
The researchers quantified the relationship between the discovery of new species and the discovery of new higher groups such as phyla and orders, and then used it to predict how many species there are likely to be.
"We discovered that, using numbers from the higher taxonomic groups, we can predict the number of species," said Dalhousie researcher Sina Adl.
"The approach accurately predicted the number of species in several well-studied groups such as mammals, fishes and birds, providing confidence in the method."
And the number came out as 8.7 million - plus or minus about a million.
Muddied waters If this is correct, then only 14% of the world's species have yet been identified - and only 9% of those in the oceans.

 

The rate of species discovery has remained about even ever since Haeckel compiled his Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms of Nature) a century ago

 

"The rest are primarily going to be smaller organisms, and a large proportion of them will be dwelling in places that are hard to reach or hard to sample, like the deep oceans," said Dr Tittensor.
"When we think of species we tend to think of mammals or birds, which are pretty well known.
"But when you go to a tropical rainforest, it's easy to find new insects, and when you go to the deep sea and pull up a trawl, 90% of what you get can be undiscovered species."
At current rates of discovery, completing the catalogue would take over 1,000 years - but new techniques such as DNA bar-coding could speed things up.
The scientists say they do not expect their calculations to mark the end of this line of inquiry, and are looking to peers to refine methods and conclusions.
One who has already looked through the paper is Professor Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
"I think it's definitely a creative and innovative approach, but like every other method there are potential biases and I think it's probably a conservative figure,"
"But it's such a high figure that it wouldn't really matter if it's out by one or two million either way.
"It is really picking up this point that we know very little about the species with which we share the planet; and we are converting the Earth's natural landscapes so quickly, with total ignorance of our impact on the life in them."