Professional Biology Research
The job of determining stress levels in whales is itself apparently stressful.
The most reliable information about tension lies in hormones most accurately measured by researchers’ boarding a boat, sidling up to a whale and waiting until it blasts snot out of its blowhole. By catching enough of it (or wiping it off of their raincoats), scientists can run the gunk through chemical tests.
However, a team of engineering researchers at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts, told The Boston Globe in September that they were on the verge of creating a radio- controlled, mucus-trapping drone that would bring greater civility to the researchers’ job (and reduce the add-on stress the whales must feel at being stalked by motorboats).
War Is Hell
The newly inaugurated “Al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent” (a project of Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri) failed spectacularly in its maiden mission in September when it attempted to commandeer an American “aircraft carrier” in port in Karachi, Pakistan. Actually, the ship was a misidentified Pakistani naval vessel that did not even vaguely resemble an aircraft carrier, and Pakistani forces killed or captured all 10 jihadists.
• A September raid on an ISIS safe house in Syria turned up, among other items (according to Foreign Policy magazine), a Dell laptop owned by Tunisian jihadist “Muhammed S.,” containing (not unexpectedly) recipes for bubonic plague and ricin, and (less likely) a recipe for banana mousse and a variety of songs by Celine Dion.
First-World Dilemmas
Ten parking spaces (of 150 to 200 square feet each) one flight below the street at the apartment building at 42 Crosby St. in New York City have been offered for sale by the developer for $1 million each — nearly five times the median U.S. price for an entire home.
