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To: Shoot1st who wrote (16285)	9/25/2000 3:13:25 PM
From: SIer formerly known as Joe B.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 62549

Monkeys Pelt Vehicles with Fruit on Highway news.excite.com Updated 8:20 AM ET September 25, 2000 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A trio of monkeys threw bananas and crabapples at vehicles on the main interstate highway on the East Coast, a Virginia state police spokeswoman said. The monkeys, described by police as brownish-gray, skinny and between two and three feet tall, were seen by drivers last Sunday along a stretch of Interstate 95 close to the Virginia-North Carolina border. No one was injured, though several vehicle windows were smeared with fruit. Virginia state trooper Mike Scott was alerted to the renegade primates when he noticed a vehicle on the shoulder of I-95 north of the small town of Jarratt, Virginia, around 9:30 a.m. Sunday, according to spokeswoman Corinne Geller. He saw what looked like a banana smeared on the rear window and when he approached the car, he found the driver with a cellphone in her hand and a strange expression on her face, Geller said. "You might think I'm crazy, but I think two monkeys threw a banana at my car," the driver told Scott. Interstate 95, which stretches from Maine to Florida, is known for high-speed truck traffic and lengthy areas of congestion, not for marauding monkeys. The driver said she was a paleontologist who takes pictures of primates and she told Scott, "I'm pretty sure those were monkeys about a mile south of here." Sure enough, a mile to the south, Scott found two more vehicles pulled to the side of the highway's northbound lanes, and a small crowd looking into the trees along the side. They were searching for the monkeys that hit them. "And just about that time a crabapple comes out of the trees and hits one of the vehicles," Geller said. Scott then saw the three miscreants, before they ran across the interstate. He and another trooper pursued them, as the monkeys swung from tree to tree, she said. But the three split up then and the troopers lost them in the underbrush. ------------------------------------------------------------ One Mower Way to Get Even news.excite.com Updated 8:40 AM ET September 25, 2000 WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Apartment dwellers have a new weapon to use on noisy neighbors, with a New Zealand man recording a compact disc of 64 minutes of lawnmower noise. "If your neighbors have a party Saturday night fairly late...what you do is you get up at seven o'clock in the morning, put the hour of lawnmowing sound on and go out to a cafe," Wellington noise man and cafe owner Geoff Marsland told Reuters Monday. The astro-turf covered CD offers listeners general lawnmower sounds along with feature moments such as the emptying of the catcher and stones hitting the blades. Five thousand of the CDs are on the market, of which more than 4,000 have been snapped up by local retailers, Marsland said. The album is his second. He previously sold around 4,200 copies of an album of urban noise such as a car alarm sounding off and a revving motorcycle. That album -- entitled Urban Assault -- also featured three minutes of a baby crying, which Marsland described as the ultimate contraceptive. --------------------------------------------------- Male Couples Could Conceive Child? news.excite.com Updated 8:20 AM ET September 25, 2000 LONDON (Reuters) - Male couples could in future conceive their own children, a leading British scientist said on Monday. Calum MacKellar, a lecturer in bioethics and biochemistry at Edinburgh University, said male chromosomes could be inserted into a woman's egg and then fertilized with male sperm. "This is a technique that would be called egg nucleus transfer," he said. A healthy egg of a woman would be emptied of its genetic material and then chromosomes from a sperm could be inserted, creating "a sort of a male egg. "Then you could fertilize this male egg with sperm from another man," MacKellar told BBC radio. A surrogate mother would then be needed to bring to full term a child conceived in the laboratory using the egg nucleus transfer technique. MacKellar described the science involved as realistic but added: "It's not yet possible and I am sure it's going to take quite a few years before it is possible." He said scientists had already tried the technique with mice but had not developed it. "But some scientists are quite optimistic that this could be a possibility," said MacKellar, who runs European Bioethical Research, a non-profit body. Obstacles remained, he said, as an embryo created using only male DNA lacked the maternal genes required for it to develop normally. -----------------------------------------------------