Cocoa

BBC News – A stray parrot was reunited with its owner in Japan after repeating its name and address at the local veterinary clinic that took it in, police said.

Police captured the red-tailed African Grey, Yosuke, earlier this month after a woman called to say it was sitting on a fence in her backyard near Tokyo.

The parrot was then handed over to the animal clinic to be cared for.

It began by greeting people and singing popular children’s songs, before repeating its name and address.
Police matched the name with its owner, who was reunited with Yosuke earlier this week.

The parrot had become lost two weeks ago after flying out of its cage in Nagareyama city, Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo.

“I’m glad I had taught him my address and name,” the Daily Yomiuri newspaper quoted his owner as saying.

The African Grey parrot is considered one of the most intelligent birds and is said by experts to have the cognitive ability of a six-year-old.

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LONDON (Reuters) – Aliens from outer space have been visiting Britain for years and UFO sightings doubled after the film Close Encounters was released in 1977, according to secret files collating reports by members of the public.

The alien craft come in all shapes, sizes and colors but their occupants are uniformly green, the Ministry of Defence files show.

The archives (at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ufos) are the first batch of a four-year release programme of all the ministry’s UFO files from 1978 to the present day.

The ministry dismisses 90 percent of the reports as having mundane explanations and leave 10 percent with a question mark and the assurance they are no defence threat.

A 1983 report from a 78-year-old out fishing at midnight tells of following aliens in green overalls on to a spaceship and then being told to go away because he was too old and decrepit for their purposes.

Two years later, a typewritten letter to the ministry tells of an alien spaceship being shot down in the river Mersey in northern England by another spacecraft and of the author developing a warm friendship with an alien called Algar.

Just as Algar was about to reveal himself to the government he was killed by other aliens, the author of the letter writes. He was still in telepathic contact with an alien called Malcben from the planet Platone in the Milky Way, the author added.

Written at the top of the letter is the terse comment “No reply.”

The ministry has files on 11,000 sightings dating back to the 1950s. A few of the sightings made it into the national press and all were checked out in case they were Soviet aircraft probing Britain’s defences during the Cold War.

“Clearly some reports remain unexplained but we have found no evidence that these phenomena represent a threat to national security and therefore cannot justify devoting Defence resources to their investigation,” said an official letter in 1985.

WORKING PARTY

The term Unidentified Flying Object was coined in a U.S. Air Force report three years after the description ‘flying saucer’ was applied to a sighting in Washington State in June 1947.

In Britain, so worrying was the spate of reports that a secret Flying Saucer Working Party was formed to check them out.

Like the U.S. Air Force, it concluded flying saucers did not exist. But its final report in 1951 was still classified “secret/discreet” and given very limited circulation.

Not all sightings can be easily dismissed as the working of overwrought or intoxicated minds, or triggered by watching Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Royal Air Force personnel, civil aviation pilots and air traffic controllers have also reported sightings and radar tracks that remain unexplained despite high-level investigation.

Among the most famous was the sighting on two occasions of unexplained bright lights landing near a U.S. airbase in Rendlesham Forest in southern England. Even the deputy commander of the base put his name to that 1980 report.

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Will Meek, Ph.D – Some provocative research covered by the Chicago Tribune has proposed that the brains of liberals and conservatives work differently.

David Amodio, the primary investigator, found that the anterior cingulate cortex for liberals performs differently, allowing them to think more flexibly.

The work grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences.

It appears that conservatives have not responded well to this work, and some have taken offense. I personally think this kind of work is a fascinating way to try and understand political orientation, but I wonder how much effect this really has.

Furthermore, it would be even more interesting to find out how this brain region could be influences by environmental factors. Like could learning flexibility as a child create more of this ability structurally as an adult? No matter what, this certainly won’t be the last study on politics and psychobiology.

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Houston (Reuters) – Authorities in Texas have filed corpse-abuse charges against two men who allegedly removed a skull from a grave and used it as a bong.

The Harris County District Attorney’s Office confirmed on Thursday that misdemeanor abuse of corpse charges have been filed in the case.

One of the men allegedly told police they dug up a grave in an abandoned cemetery in the woods, removed a head from a body and smoked marijuana using the skull as a bong.

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