The recent, heavy rainfall on the East Coast and other parts of the country has coincided with the cooler fall weather to create a huge wild mushroom crop this year. And as the shrooms started popping up, so did the cases of accidental mushroom poisonings.
The symptoms of mushroom poisoning can be subtle or blatant. After eating the wrong mushroom, victims may experience abdominal pain, vomiting, fever, diarrhea, and even liver failure. The severity of symptoms depends on the mushroom’s type of poison.
So far in New Hampshire this year, there have been 31 cases of mushroom related illness, with 18 of them occurring in September alone. Maine has seen a whopping 176 cases thus far in 2011.
A 64-year-old east coast man is recovering after falling into a canyon in Utah and crawling through the desert for four days, while suffering from a broken leg, dislocated shoulder and dehydration.
Wayne Richards of Concord, North Carolina spent four days crossing a small portion of the Utah desert after breaking his leg on a solo hike.
Without cell phone service to call for help, and with only two protein bars to eat, Richards began crawling back to his car across the rocky terrain. He filled his water bottles with occasional rain water as he painstakingly retraced his steps, eventually dragging himself a distance somewhere between five and seven miles. He used his camera bag to pad his knees against the pain of crawling over the rocks.
On the small French island of Reunion, off the east coast of Africa and just the other side of Madagascar, a top surfer has been killed after a quick and brutal shark attack last week. Mathieu Schiller, 32, was dragged off his board on Boucan Canot Beach by a man-eating tiger shark. He was killed in less than 30 seconds.
Schiller was a European team bodyboarding champion in 1995, and was part of a large group of surfers in the area that day. Fellow surfers tried to recover Schiller's body, but police later said that it had been carried away by the current. "There were around 20 people in shallow water and about five surfers out deeper when it happened," a witness told a local news agency.
"We saw the shark's nose emerge and then the man just vanished. It was very sudden, then the animal just swam off. "Some of those nearby tried to reach him but his body was dragged away by the current."
An old decommissioned NASA satellite crashed to earth over the weekend and and officials say that some parts were scattered across the U.S. It was the largest piece of space junk to fall in the past 30 years, and I’d like to think of it as some of our tax dollars returning to this planet.
NASA officials monitored the dead, 6.5-ton spacecraft closely to estimate when the debris would will fall. While it is still too early to tell where the majority of the satellite hit, NASA believes that some parts might have landed in Oregon.
While hurtling satellite preparedness may not sound like a realistic form of emergency management or preparation, it is still interesting to think about the vulnerability of the modern home, vehicle and workplace to solids falling from the sky—be it a meteorite, large hail, blue ice from an airplane or even space junk.
And there actually has been a legitimate case of space junk hitting a person.
On September 5, a mysterious young man reportedly wandered into Berlin City Hall in Germany. The first words he spoke were in English and with a curious accent. He simply stated, "I'm alone in the world. I don't know who I am. Please help me."
He told an English-speaking city employee that he thought his name was Ray, and that he had spent the last five years living in a forest with his father, who had recently died as the result of injuries from a fall. Although the authorities are searching through missing person reports the identity of the "forest boy" is still a mystery.
"We have sent appeals for help to all European countries via Interpol... We really have no idea where he comes from," says Michael Maas, a spokesman for the Berlin police. The Daily Telegraph reported that: "He seemed calm, not scared at all, but quiet. He said he had been told to go to Berlin if he ever needed help and had taken several weeks to walk here."
He arrived at City Hall wearing some winter clothes and carrying a backpack containing a tent, sleeping bag and some survival tools, including a compass.
Across the globe, there are many nutritious wild foods that fall into the category of “delicacies” (read here: nasty stuff). Whether it’s some poor creature’s eyeballs or a revolting fungus, you need a cast iron stomach to eat these little treats from Mother Nature.
The Most Chewy
Though it’s high in protein and minerals, and heavily used in processed meats, few of us ever try lung “meat” by itself as a food. If you try to cook lung slices, you’ll quickly find out why it’s not a popular item: It’s as chewy as a rubber tire. In fact, I would argue that it is un-chewable by human teeth. I have both fried it and boiled it, to no avail. While I could chew it like bubble gum, and it didn’t taste bad, I just couldn’t chew it down small enough to swallow any of the pieces.
Here’s what we know: A small northern Russian village had an unpleasant visitor last week. A polar bear wandered through town and considered having a local woman for a snack. The name of the town hasn’t surfaced yet, nor has the woman’s name or the extent of her injuries.
In the clip you can see the animal clawing at her and flinging her body into the air like a rag doll before the polar bear is finally scared away. The bear retreats after one bystander makes a great shot, hitting the bear in the face with a can.
Would you rush toward a burning vehicle with a random group of bystanders in order to lift that vehicle off a man trapped underneath? Would you do so if there was a very real danger that the burning car could explode at any second?
One lucky motorcycle rider had better start working on a good way to say “thank you” to a group of a dozen good Samaritans who performed the dangerous and heroic task of lifting the burning, 3,800-pound car to pull him to safety. Remarkably, the whole rescue was caught on video by a Utah State University graduate student.
Being a traditionalist, I have always been a map-and-compass guy when it comes to navigation. But that was before I found out how easy navigation can be with Bushnell’s D-Tour GPS. No, I’m not planning to throw my compass away, but I have warmed up to the usefulness of this user-friendly navigation device.
This handy little guy is a bantam weight at 6 ounces, but it gives you digital compass, clock, thermometer, altitude reading, walking speed, distance covered and it provides latitude/longitude coordinates. I know you’re probably thinking, “Where’s the catch?” If there is a problem, I haven’t found it.
To operate the D-Tour, all you have to do is:
• Mark the spot where you start your trip with the push of one button
• Go anywhere
• Get back to where you started by simply following the big, easy-to-read arrow
Power crews have restored electricity to much of the southwest today, a day after a freak power outage left millions in the dark throughout Southern California, Arizona and across the border in Mexico.
The authorities spent the day trying to figure out how this massive outage could have been caused by the mistake of a single Arizona Public Service Co. worker making a simple repair in Yuma. Although the heat and high electrical demand during hot days could have played part in this grid hiccup, the outage is being attributed to the electrical worker removing a piece of monitoring equipment at a power substation in southwest Arizona, according to APS officials.
"This was not a deliberate act. The employee was just switching out a piece of equipment that was problematic," said Daniel Froetscher, an APS vice president. "That work should not have caused this," said Damon Gross, who is a spokesperson for the Phoenix-based utility.
The regional officials have asked residents to ease the strain on the system by doing without major electrical hogs like big appliances, and even air conditioners, despite the late-summer heat. Homeowners and businesses alike were warned that the electrical grid was still fragile after this outage.
