Veterinary groomer fired for kicking dog.

A groomer at an Iowa City veterinary clinic was ticketed for animal neglect and fired from his job after kicking a dog, breaking several ribs. The 22-year-old man will make his initial court appearance on August 25th. The dog had to be kept under observation at an emergency veterinarian for several days afterward. The dog suffered several broken ribs and bruised lungs. The owners of the Creature Comfort Veterinary Center say as soon as they learned of the incident, the man was fired. More

Pets left hungry as smart feeder breaks.

Owners of smart pet-feeding device Petnet were told to "feed their pets manually" after a server problem stopped the device from working. Petnet allows owners to schedule and control feeding via a smartphone app. Adam Simon, an analyst with research company Context, said it was important users "always had a manual back-up" for smart systems."Increasingly, people are becoming dependent on these smart objects, and that could become a problem," he said. "In this case, your pet could be left hungry." Petnet, which now says all systems are back online, had previously told customers: "We are experiencing some difficulties with one of our third-party services. "This is currently being investigated, and we will provide you with more information as we receive it from our partners. "You may experience a loss of scheduled feed and failed remote feedings. "Please ensure that your pets have been fed manually until we have resolved this issue." Watch

Young Africans are swapping the office for the farm.

Farming has an unglamorous image across Africa, but this is changing according to BBC's Sophie Ikenye who met some young professionals who packed in their office jobs and moved back to the family farm. Agriculture is now the beautiful bride sought after by the young and young at heart with many innovative dimensions. City dwellers have also found a way to participate in agriculture,through urban farming to grow vegetables,raise snail,fish and rabbits among st other ventures. This is a story of a vetpreneur, who decided to practice urban agriculture on side walks,sacks and bottles. Echbee farms churning out farm fresh vegetables. This Six years ago Emmanuel Koranteng, 33, gave up his job as an accountant in the US and bought a one-way ticket to Ghana. He now has a successful business growing pineapples in a village one-and-a-half hours away from the capital, Accra. He says that even when he was far away from the farm, it was always in his thoughts. Dimakatso Nono, 34, also left her job in finance to return to the family farm in South Africa.She left her lucrative job five years ago and moved from Johannesburg to manage her father's 2,000 acre farm three hours away in Free State Province. She says she wanted to make an impact. "I knew that if I came to assist my father, I would be able to actually make meaningful change." She began by counting his cows. At the beginning, we were not sure about what the animals were doing and where they were in the fields, so for me it was important to ensure that every single day, every activity that we do is recorded." Life on the farm has not been easy. This year's drought across Southern Africa put an end to her apple, maize and sunflower crops. So does she ever have days when she thinks she made the wrong move away from the corporate world? "No, not at all, not for me. "I'm not always on top of the world but on such days I appreciate the fact that if need to rest or recuperate, there's no better place than here where you have the nature to support you." A World Bank report from 2013 estimates that Africa's farmers and agribusinesses could create a trillion-dollar food market by 2030 if they were able to access to more capital, electricity and better technology. "Agriculture has a bright future in Africa," says Havard University technology expert Calestous Juma, to encourage more young people to return to the land, he suggests a simple solution: A name-change. "The best way to attract young people into farming is to define it as agribusiness - this entails making agriculture entrepreneurial and technology-driven. This means making the finished product, rather than just growing crops and selling them. The focus should be on the entire value chain - from farm to fork, not just production. Claudius Kurtna farms fish in western Kenya,but he doesn't sell those fish. Instead he makes them into high-protein, high-energy biscuits. The 28-year-old entrepreneur wanted to make a product which had both a long shelf life and high nutritional value. The product has been certified by Kenya's Bureau of Standards and local schools have ordered his biscuits.The motivation behind this was nutrition, for children in remote places from poor backgrounds, even refugees. Anywhere you can't get fish in its natural state," he says. These biscuits aren't made by hand, but by special machines, which are costly. That is likely to be true for any farmer who wants to copy this model. So for Mr Juma, in order to attract more younger people to farming, you need to provide funding with conditions they can meet. "Agriculture needs the same types of credit and risk-reducing incentives that are given to industrialists. Watch

Farmer grows breast after sex with neighbor's wife.

A farmer who had been warned against sleeping with a neighbor’s wife has confessed to developing sagging breasts after ignoring the warning. James Mutua, 39, had been told by the woman’s husband that he would be taught a haunting lesson if he crossed the red line. He has since been watching breasts resembling those of the woman he slept with grow on his chest for the last six months. The hubby who issued the warning lived in the same village as Mutua. Unlike normal breasts that have black nipples, Mutua’s are reddish and sagging like those of a lactating woman. Mutua, a former farm manager of a prominent person in Makueni County, Eastern Kenya explained he has been living like this from 2015, and it all started after he slept with my neighbor’s wife back in the village where he was working. He felt a sensation around the chest and before long the breasts started developing and became big, forcing him to wear a bra and baggy jackets. It all began

Youth in agriculture village.

The Youth in Agriculture (YIA) village, to be set up at this year’s Denbigh Agricultural, Industrial and Food Show, will focus on entrepreneurship among young farmers.The village, themed ‘My Dream: Agripreneurship’, is an added feature at this year’s show, which will be held on the Denbigh Showgrounds in May Pen, Clarendon, from July 30 to August 1. An initiative of the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, Agriculture and Fisheries, the Youth in Agriculture Programme (YAP) is being spearheaded by the Jamaica 4-H Clubs to increase young people’s involvement in agriculture. According to executive director of the Jamaica 4-H Clubs, Dr Ronald Blake, the entrepreneurship focus came out of the 4-H Clubs’ observation of the high level of unemployment among youth in the country.He noted that there will be competitions to reinforce the theme, with persons between 17 and 25 years of age from high schools, tertiary institutions and the community taking part. Blake said in addition to visits to the booths, the young people will compete in designing products that will enhance the agricultural sector, through technology. The competitions include creating a mobile app, business plan/model, jingles, budding and grafting, cattle judging, a social media agri-promotion, and an agri-processing/nutraceutical contest. “These competitions will stimulate the youngsters’ minds, encourage them to create businesses from their yields, which is very important to the transformation of the agricultural industry in Jamaica,” Dr. Blake explained. He said that in addition to the business opportunities, the village will provide information that will encourage youth to pursue vocational studies in agriculture. continue

Pitt bull mutt bites off housekeeper's toe in Brooklyn apartment.

A pit bull mutt being dog-sat in a Brooklyn luxury apartment gnawed off a housekeeper’s toe moments after she arrived to start her shift, police said. The 62-year-old woman had just walked into the 20 Bayard St. apartment in Williamsburg around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday to start cleaning when the nervous dog attacked her. The pooch, which belongs to a friend of the homeowner, chomped down on the woman's left pinky toe, ripping it clean off her foot, cops said. EMS personnel were called to the apartment and immediately put the severed toe on ice. The woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but it was not certain if doctors were able to reattach the toe, cops said.The NYPD's Emergency Service Unit was also called to the apartment and coaxed the dog into a portable cage before bringing it to an Animal Care and Control Center facility. An ACC spokeswoman said the female canine is being held on a 10-day rabies screening pending a Department of Health investigation. More

Solar Cells converts Co2 into hydrocarbon fuel.

A new finding reported in the July issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy. The conventional solar cells, convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, but this new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently. Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study explained that the new solar cell is not photovoltaic but rather it’s photosynthetic. He remarked that instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight. While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels. The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete. Chemical reactions that convert CO2 into burnable forms of carbon are called reduction reactions, the opposite of oxidation or combustion. Salehi-Khojin explained that engineers have been exploring different catalysts to drive CO2 reduction, but so far such reactions have been inefficient and rely on expensive precious metals such as silver. Salehi-Khojin and his coworkers focused on a family of nano-structured compounds called transition metal dichalcogenides — or TMDCs — as catalysts, pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell. The best of several catalysts they studied turned out to be nanoflake tungsten diselenide.“The new catalyst is more active; more able to break carbon dioxide’s chemical bonds,” said UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi, first author on the Science paper. continue