Holmes Played Childish Games After Aurora Carnage

As police confronted the movie theater carnage and a massive booby trap left behind by accused Aurora gunman James Holmes, the suspect loopily played with hand puppets, tried to stick a metal staple in an electrical socket and clamly flipped a styrofoam cup, according to court testimony today.

Holmes, 25, displayed the bizarre behavior once he was in custody and taken to Aurora police headquarters after the shooting that left 12 people dead and dozens injured, the lead investigator in the case testified today.

While being cross examined by Colorado public defender Daniel King, Police Detective Craig Appel was asked about the observations of two Aurora officers assigned to watch over Holmes in an interrogation room.

Appel said that to preserve possible gunshot residue, police had placed paper bags over Holmes' hands. One officer, King said, noted in a report that Holmes began moving his hands "in a talking puppet motion."

Click here for full coverage of the Aurora movie theater shooting.

King asked if Appel was also aware that the officer "observed Holmes take a staple out of the table and tried to stick it in an electrical socket?" Appel confirmed Holmes' actions.

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The officers also noted that they watched as Holmes began playing with an empty styrofoam cup, trying to "flip it" on the table.

While Holmes was carrying out his childish antics, police were puzzling over a complex booby trap Holmes had left behind in his apartment, according to testimony.

A gasoline-soaked carpet, loud music and a remote control car were part of Holmes' plan to trick someone into triggering a blast that would destroy his apartment and lure police to the explosion while he shot up a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., according to court testimony.

FBI agent Garrett Gumbinner told the court that he interviewed Holmes on July 20, hours after he killed 12 and wounded 58 during the midnight showing of "The Dark Knight Rises."

"He said he rigged the apartment to explode to get law enforcement to send resources to his apartment instead of the theater," Gumbinner said.

His plan failed to prompt someone into triggering the bombs.

Gumbinner said Holmes had created two traps that would have set off the blast.

The apartment was rigged with a tripwire at the front door connected to a mixture of chemicals that would create heat, sparks and flame. Holmes had soaked the carpet with a gasoline mixture that was designed to be ignited by the tripwire, Gumbinner said.

"It would have caused fire and sparks," the agent said, and "would have made the entire apartment explode or catch fire."

Holmes had set his computer to play 25 minutes of silence followed by loud music that he hoped would cause a disturbance loud enough that someone would call police, who would then respond and set off the explosion by entering the apartment.

Gumbinner said Holmes also told him he rigged a fuse between three glass jars that would explode. He filled the jars with a deadly homemade chemical mixture that would burn so hot it could not be extinguished with water.

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World's oldest pills treated sore eyes

In ancient Rome, physicians treated sore eyes with the same active ingredients as today. So suggests an analysis of pills found on the Relitto del Pozzino, a cargo ship wrecked off the Italian coast in around 140 BC.

"To our knowledge, these are the oldest medical tablets ever analysed," says Erika Ribechini of the University of Pisa in Italy, head of a team analysing the relics. She thinks the disc-shaped tablets, 4 centimetres across and a centimetre thick, were likely dipped in water and dabbed directly on the eyes.

The tablets were mainly made of the zinc carbonates hydrozincite and smithsonite, echoing the widespread use of zinc-based minerals in today's eye and skin medications. Ribechini says there is evidence that Pliny the Elder, the Roman physician, prescribed zinc compounds for these uses almost 250 years after the shipwreck in his seminal medical encyclopaedia, Naturalis Historia.

The tablets were also rich in plant and animal oils. Pollen grains from an olive tree suggest that olive oil was a key ingredient, just like it is today in many medical and beauty creams, says Ribechini.

The tablets were discovered in a sealed tin cylinder called a pyxis (see image above). The tin must have been airtight to protect its contents from oxygen corrosion.

"Findings of such ancient medicines are extremely rare, so preservation of the Pozzino tablets is a very lucky case," says Ribechini.

The cargo of the wreck, discovered in 1989, is rich in other medical equipment, including vials and special vessels for bloodletting. This suggests that one of the passengers may have been a physician.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1216776110

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Hagel draws fire as Obama's Pentagon pick

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama named Chuck Hagel on Monday to lead the Pentagon, setting up an ugly confirmation battle as Republican opponents said he was too hard on Israel and too soft on Iran.

Obama's choice of John Brennan to replace scandal-tainted David Petraeus as CIA chief was seen as more straightforward despite the counter-terrorism czar's defense of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the US drone war.

The second term revamp of the president's national security team was expected to win ultimate approval but several leading Republicans signaled they would make it tough for Hagel even though he is one of their own.

Obama paid particular tribute to retiring Pentagon chief Leon Panetta before giving ringing endorsements to the "outstanding" Hagel and Brennan and urging the Senate not to dally in confirming their important appointments.

"Chuck Hagel is the leader that our troops deserve. He is an American patriot," the president said, heaping praise on a war hero who was awarded two Purple Heart medals for his bravery as a soldier in Vietnam.

"When Chuck was hit by shrapnel, his brother saved him. When his brother was injured by a mine, Chuck risked his life to pull him to safety. To this day, Chuck bears the scars -- and the shrapnel -- from the battles he fought in our name," Obama said.

Some Republicans have never forgiven him for his outspoken criticism of ex-president George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq war, and his closeness to the Democratic president sees him regarded by others as a traitor.

But Obama, who wants to be remembered as a leader who ended wars abroad to set about the tricky task of nation-building at home following a crippling recession, described Hagel as someone perfectly fitted to that mold.

"Maybe most importantly, Chuck knows that war is not an abstraction. He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that's something we only do when it's absolutely necessary," he said.

Administration appointments are often tense affairs in the United States as confirmation hearings provide senators with opportunities to turn away unwanted candidates or score cheap political points, or both.

Hagel, 66, known for a fiercely independent streak and a tendency to speak bluntly, is expected to get particularly rough treatment due to his criticism of America's "Jewish lobby" and opposition to some Iran sanctions.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Hagel would be "the most antagonistic defense secretary towards the state of Israel in our nation's history."

Another Republican senator, John Cornyn of Texas, said he would oppose the nomination, charging it would be the "worst possible message we could send to our friend Israel and the rest of our allies in the Middle East."

But in an interview with The Lincoln Journal Star, a newspaper in his home state of Nebraska, Hagel hit back at his critics.

There is "not one shred of evidence that I'm anti-Israeli, not one vote (of mine) that matters that hurt Israel," he said.

If confirmed by the Senate, Hagel will have to manage major cuts to military spending while wrapping up the US war effort in Afghanistan and preparing for worst-case scenarios in Iran or Syria.

Serving as an enlisted man who never joined the officer ranks, Hagel carries a particular empathy for the unheralded infantry "grunts" in the field.

As he grapples with budget pressures, the former sergeant will likely try to shield frontline troops from the effect of spending cuts.

In his typical straight-shooting fashion, Hagel has called the Defense Department "bloated" and said that "the Pentagon needs to be pared down."

Obama, smarting from watching Susan Rice -- reportedly his first choice to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state -- fold her bid in the face of Republican opposition, pressed hard for the Senate to approve Hagel.

"He would be the first person of enlisted rank to serve as secretary of defense. One of the few secretaries who had been wounded in war and the first Vietnam veteran to lead the department," Obama said, calling his appointment "historic."

Brennan, 57, may get an easier ride but is sure to face questions over his support for the use of certain "enhanced interrogation techniques" under the Bush administration and for his staunch defense of the US drone program.

The 25-year Central Intelligence Agency veteran, an Arabic-speaking Middle East expert, replaces Petraeus, who resigned in November after confessing to an extramarital affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell.

Obama highlighted what he called Brennan's incredible work ethic, saying "John is legendary even in the White House" and reminding everyone of a now-famous quote from August 2010.

Asked if he got any down time or was all work and no play, Brennan replied: "I don't do down time."

In a moment of levity at the White House event, the avuncular 74-year-old Panetta drew loud laughs when he said he would be retiring to his walnut farm and "dealing with a different set of nuts."

- AFP/ac

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France orders Internet provider to stop blocking Google ads

France, unlike the U.S., has had relaxed rules on whether Internet service providers can block online content -- until today that is.

The French government has ruled that one of the country's biggest Web providers, Free, must halt all online ad blocking, according to the New York Times.

"An Internet service provider cannot unilaterally implement such blocking," the French minister for the digital economy Fleur Pellerin said at a news conference, according to the Times. "This kind of blocking is inconsistent with a free and open Internet, to which I am very attached."

The kerfuffle began last week when Free updated its Internet access software, which in turn blocked Google ads, according to the New York Times. Apparently, the company has made no secret of its annoyance that it doesn't get any compensation from carrying large amounts of ad-heavy traffic from Google-owned sites.

Pellerin has now persuaded Free to restore full access to all content on the Web, including Google ads.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has rules that say Internet service providers must not block online content since it can hinder net neutrality. Europe's guidelines are far more lax. However, the French government's decision today may be a sign that those loose guidelines could soon become a thing of the past.

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Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

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Poisoned Lottery Winner's Body to Be Exhumed

The body of a $1 million lottery jackpot winner will likely be exhumed from Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago, according to the Cook County medical examiner, who determined that the winner died of cyanide poisoning.

Last June Urooj Khan, 46, won $1 million in a scratch-off lottery game, or $425,000 after taxes, but he died unexpectedly on July 20. Since there were no signs of foul play or any cause for suspicion, his death was attributed to arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, which covers heart attacks, stroke or ruptured aneurysm.

But a few days after the death certificate was issued, a family member called the medical examiner's office and asked that the death be investigated, said Dr. Stephen Cina, Cook County's chief medical examiner. Cina said he could not disclose the identity of the family member because of the ongoing investigation.

"We are in discussion with the state attorney about whether we are going to do an exhumation. Right now, we are leaning in that direction. We have a cause and matter of death on the books, and we're comfortable with that," Cina told ABCNews.com. "If or when this goes to court, it would be nice to have all the data possible."

Illinois Lottery/AP Photo

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Cina said the final toxicology results came back in late November showing a lethal level of cyanide, which led to the homicide investigation. Melissa Stratton, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, confirmed a murder investigation had been "under way," and that the police department had been working closely with the medical examiner's office.

Khan is survived by his wife, Shabana Ansari, 32, and teenage daughter. The family owned three dry-cleaning businesses in Chicago.

Ansari told the Chicago Tribune that Khan was "the best husband on the entire planet" and "extraordinary, nice, kind and lovable."

Ansari could not be reached by ABC News for comment.

The police are not confirming whether Khan's lottery winnings played a part in the homicide.

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When asked why cyanide, a chemical asphyxiant that binds to red blood cells and prevents the entry of oxygen, was not found in the initial examination of Khan's body, Cina said, "Quite frankly, it's unusual as a cause of death, so it's not at the top of your mind."

He said about 50 percent of people can smell cyanide, but it is more noticeable when the body is opened up.

Sometimes the coloring of blood changes with cyanide poisoning after death, becoming "more reddish than purple," he said.

"In this case that wasn't particularly striking," Cina said, describing the first examination of Khan's body.

"It strangles your red blood cells at a biochemical level," he said.

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Silent Skype calls can hide secret messages

Got a secret message to send? Say it with silence. A new technique can embed secret data during a phone call on Skype. "There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed," says Wojciech Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw, Poland. So his team's SkypeHide system lets users hide extra, non-chat messages during a call.

Mazurczyk and his colleagues Maciej Karaś and Krysztof Szczypiorski analysed Skype data traffic during calls and discovered an opportunity in the way Skype "transmits" silence. Rather than send no data between spoken words, Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that carry speech.

The team hijacks these silence packets, injecting encrypted message data into some of them. The Skype receiver simply ignores the secret-message data, but it can nevertheless be decoded at the other end, the team has found. "The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult," says Mazurczyk. They found they could transmit secret text, audio or video during Skype calls at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls.

The team aims to present SkypeHide at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France, in June.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

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Korean sports star's suicide echoes death of actress-wife

SEOUL: Police confirmed Monday that a former baseball star and ex-husband of a top South Korean actress, whose 2008 suicide shocked the country, took his own life over the weekend.

Cho Sung-Min, a former pitcher for Japanese baseball team Yomiuri Giants, was found dead early Sunday with a belt around his neck by his girlfriend in the bathroom of her Seoul apartment.

"The autopsy result showed death due to hanging," Yonhap news agency quoted a senior police officer as saying, "We've concluded the case as suicide."

In a final text to his girlfriend, Cho had written: "Thank you for everything. Hang tough even after I am gone."

The 39-year-old was the former husband of the hugely popular actress Choi Jin-Sil, who took her own life in similar fashion in 2008, four years after their marriage ended.

Choi, who had two children with Cho, was found hanging from a length of elastic at her Seoul home.

Relatives and friends said she had been depressed since her divorce and troubled by rumours circulating on the Internet that she had caused another actor's suicide by demanding repayment of debts he owed her.

Her death shocked the country and prompted a police crackdown on cyber-bullying.

In 2010 Choi's younger brother, singer Choi Jin-Young, also hanged himself while suffering from severe depression.

Suicide is the most common cause of death among those in their 20s and 30s in South Korea, which has the highest suicide rate among member nations of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

-AFP/fl

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Hey control freaks, Alarm.com has a home system for you

LAS VEGAS -- Designed for the control freak, Alarm.com's all-in-one connected home system offers remote access to nearly every item in your home, meaning you can watch Fido from afar or do something far more practical like turn off the lights.

Launched in 2010, the integrated Alarm.com system and software platform supports home security control, energy management, and video surveillance.

Switch the lights off, adjust the thermostat, close the blinds, watch a live video feed, open the garage door, disarm the alarm, or unlock the front door with a touch button. With the Alarm.com system, home controls are accessible via a Web dashboard or through smartphone applications for iOS,
Android, BlackBerry, and
Windows Phone 7. Customers can also configure push notifications to stay current on household changes as well as view a history of all actions.

"Not surprisingly, a lot of people like using video to watch their cats and dogs when they're traveling or at work," Alison Slavin, vice president of product management, told CNET.

The company works with a variety of established security companies so that people can adopt a do-it-yourself approach to connecting their home devices to Alarm.com's platform.

Alarm.com has 1.4 million households using its home automation system, Slavin said. The company, she added, has a presence at
CES to better get the word out about its product, which it touts as the only system that lets consumers perform a variety of home control functions from one dashboard or application.

The prices for Alarm.com's subscription-based service are based on the number of connected products. Contracts range from $35 to $55 per month. The 12-year-old company also charges an initial setup fee and offers additional for-charge installation services.

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Pastor Accused of Killing Wives Faces Trial

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday for Pastor Arthur Schirmer, who is accused of killing his second wife and then staging a car accident to hide it.

Schirmer, 64, also faces a second trial at a later date for the death of his first wife. He has said he is innocent of all charges.

In 2008, the pastor and his wife, Betty, were involved in what appeared at the time to be a car crash. Schirmer told police at the time that he had been driving 55 mph and swerved to miss a deer, causing him to drive off the road, according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News.

Schirmer also said at the time that his wife's head had come forward and struck the windshield, according to the affidavit. Betty died a day later and her body was cremated at the request of Schirmer.

It wasn't until a grisly suicide in 2010 inside Schirmer's office that authorities decided to revisit the case of Betty Schirmer's death and arrest the pastor.

The man who broke in and shot himself at the desk in Schirmer's office at the Reeders United Methodist Church, Joseph Mustante, was the husband of the pastor's secretary, Cynthia Mustante, Poconos Township Police Detective James Wagner said.

Pocono Record, David Kidwell/AP Photo

Mustante's suicide was prompted by the discovery that his wife and the pastor had apparently been having an affair, Wagner said. He was alone at the time of his death.

Investigators looking into the suicide say that several church parishioners had concerns about the deaths of Schirmer's two wives.

"That suicide eventually exposed the affair publicly and subsequent to that, questions arose about the loss of [Schirmer's] wives and his character became questionable," Wagner said.

Relaunching the investigation into the two deaths, Wagner said he quickly suspected that "foul play existed, and the car crash was staged," allegedly, by Schirmer. Wagner said investigators also believed there was something "suspicious" about the first wife's death, a marriage that investigators had not known about prior to the suicide.

Investigators Look Into Deaths of Rev. Arthur Schirmer's Wives

Schirmer's first wife, Jewel, died in April 1999 from a traumatic brain injury after she purportedly fell down a flight of stairs in Lebanon, Pa., Wagner said.

Lebanon is about 100 miles southwest of Reeders, where Schrimer later moved with his second wife.

At the time of Jewel's death, Wagner said, a relative told police that he suspected Schirmer may have had a hand in his wife's death but that the investigation was "never completed."

On Dec. 11, 2012 -- more than 13 years after Jewel died, a Lebanon County judge ruled Schirmer would be tried for her murder.

When investigators looked at the death of Betty Schirmer, they saw inconsistencies, Wagner said.

"There was no airbag deployment and it simply looked like a car that had driven off the road at a very low speed," Wagner said. "It didn't match the injuries to [Betty's head].

"I know there are people out there who probably know him and feel like there is absolutely no way he would be capable of doing this," Wagner of Schirmer. "But they clearly don't know him."

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