Former University of Alabama football player Siran Stacy filed suit against the Dothan/Houston County E911 Board on Thursday in relation to a 2007 car wreck that left his wife and four of his children dead. The lawsuit, filed in Houston County Circuit Court, accuses the E911 board and the estate of Adam Wayman, the driver who crashed his truck into Stacy’s van on Nov. 17, 2007, of wrongful death and negligence. According to the lawsuit, motorists traveling along Highway 84 that night made multiple 911 calls to report Wayman’s erratic driving, but their calls were transferred to Dale County E911, “preventing any proper and adequate dispatch time in which authorities could have intercepted Wayman’s vehicle.” The suit says Wayman began driving his truck westbound in the highway’s eastbound lane at least 7 miles away from Stacy’s van, which was traveling on Highway 123. The E911 board is accused of neglecting its duty to “exercise reasonable care in the receiving, routing, transferring and/or responding to emergency calls,” while the suit says Wayman had a duty to “operate his motor vehicle in a safe manner.” Stacy’s lawsuit calls for a jury trial to determine the damages. It is filed on behalf of him and his family. The Alabama Wrongful Death Statute only allows the recovery of punitive damages in wrongful death lawsuits, meaning no payment for medical bills or other reimbursements can be gathered. However, the negligence count allows Stacy to seek compensatory damages as well. After the crash, Stacy’s wife, Ellen, and children, Lequisa, Bronson, Sydney and Ellie, were pronounced dead on the scene. Wayman died at Flowers Hospital the next morning.

Members of a gang arrested in Peru have confessed to killing people and extracting their body fat to sell to international cosmetic companies, police claim. Three men were tracked down in the jungle of remote Huanuco province, where officials also found human remains and two bottles of fat. Colonel Jorge Mejia, chief of Peru's anti-kidnapping police, told reporters the trio admitted to the murder of five people - and to draining the corpses. The men revealed one litre of human fat could fetch $15,000 (more than £9,000), he added. Describing the grisly method of fat extraction, Col Mejia said the gang would cut off victims' heads and limbs, take out the organs and then hang the torsos above candles to heat the flesh - letting the fat drip into tubs below. It was then sold on to intermediaries in Peru's capital Lima, before heading to cosmetic and pharmaceutical companies in Europe. However, Col Mejia conceded police could not confirm any fat had been sold. Medical experts have cast doubt on the trade of human fat but said it was used in anti-wrinkle treatments. The fat is normally always taken from a living patient, usually from the stomach or buttocks. "I can't see why there would be a black market for fat," said Dr Adam Katz, a professor of plastic surgery at the University of Virginia medical school. "It doesn't make any sense at all, because in most countries we can get fat so readily and in such amounts from people who are willing and ready to donate that I don't see why there would ever be a black market for fat." Peruvian authorities said at least six men remained at large - including alleged gang leader, Hilario Cudena. One of the men in custody reportedly told police Cudena has been killing people for their fat for more than 30 years.

What would happen if humans could deliberately create a black hole? Well, for starters we might just unlock the ultimate energy source to create the ultimate spacecraft engine — a potential "black hole-drive" – to propel ships to the stars. It turns out black holes are not black at all; they give off "Hawking radiation" that causes them to lose energy (and therefore mass) over time. For large black holes, the amount of radiation produced is miniscule, but very small black holes rapidly turn their mass into a huge amount of energy. This fact prompted Lois Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University to calculate what it would take to create a small black hole and harness the energy to propel a starship. They found that there is a "sweet spot" for black holes that are small enough to be artificially created and to produce enormous amounts of energy, but are large enough that they don't immediately evaporate in a burst of particles. Their ideal black hole would have a mass of about a million metric tons and would be about one one-thousandth the size of a proton. To create such a black hole, Crane and Westmoreland envision a massive spherical gamma-ray laser in space, powered by thousands of square kilometers of solar panels. After charging for a few years, this laser would release the pent-up energy equivalent to a million metric tons of mass in a converging spherical shell of photons. As the shell collapses in on itself, the energy becomes so dense that its own gravity focuses it down to a single point and a black hole is born. The black hole would immediately begin to disgorge all the energy that was compressed to form it. To harness that energy and propel a starship, the black hole would be placed at the center of a parabolic electron-gas mirror that would reflect all the energy radiated from the black hole out the back of the ship, propelling the ship forward. Particle beams attached to the ship behind the black hole would be used to simultaneously feed the black hole and propel it along with the ship. Such a black hole drive could easily accelerate to near the speed of light, opening up the cosmos to human travelers, but that's just the beginning. The micro-black hole could also be used as a power generator capable of transforming any matter directly into energy. This energy could be used to create new black holes and new power generators. Obviously, creating and harnessing black holes is not an easy undertaking, but Crane and Westmoreland point out that the black hole drive has a significant advantage over more speculative technologies like warp drives and wormholes: it is physically possible. And, they believe, worth pursuing "because it allows a completely different and vastly wider destiny for the human race. We should not underestimate the ingenuity of the engineers of the future."

The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2, along with the "contact lens" that corrected the defect in the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror will have a new home. Recently returned to Earth after more than 15 years in space, the two instruments will have a new home in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Astronauts on the Hubble servicing mission in May 2009 replaced WFPC-2 with a new and improved version, bringing the well-used camera back to Earth. "This was the camera that saved Hubble," said Ed Weiler, from NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "I have looked forward for a long time to stand in front of this very instrument while on display to the public." WFPC-2, and the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, or COSTAR, gave Hubble the ability to take the images that have changed the way we see the Universe by providing the iconic images that now adorn posters, album covers, the Internet, classrooms and science text books worldwide. The Hubble instruments will be on display in the National Air and Space Museum's Space Hall through mid-December. They then will travel to Southern California to go on temporary display at several venues. In March 2010, the instruments will return to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, where they will take up permanent residency. After Hubble's launch and deployment aboard the shuttle in 1990, scientists realized the telescope's primary mirror had a flaw, known as a spherical aberration. The outer edge of the mirror was ground too flat by a depth of 2.2 microns, roughly equal to one-fiftieth the thickness of a human hair. This tiny flaw resulted in fuzzy images because some of the light from the objects being studied was scattered. Hubble's first servicing mission provided the telescope with hardware that basically acted as eye glasses. Launched in December 1993 aboard space shuttle Endeavour, the mission added the WFPC-2, about the size of a baby grand piano, and COSTAR, about the size of a telephone booth. The WFPC-2 had the optical fix built in, while the COSTAR provided the optical correction for other Hubble instruments. The WFPC-2 made more than 135,000 observations of celestial objects from 1993 to 2009. The camera was the longest serving and most prolific instrument aboard Hubble. "For years the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 has been taking pictures of the universe," said John Trauger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Today, we are taking pictures of the WFPC-2 and I guess if there was ever a camera that deserves to have its picture taken, this is it."

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