Last Starbucks Standing During Hurricane Sandy Mobbed By Thirsty Midtown Caffeine Addicts

Hordes of people traipsed to midtown Manhattan Monday, traveling by foot and by cab to stand in long lines for an important commodity that Hurricane Sandy had made suddenly scarce.

The must-have item was neither batteries nor bottled water, however: These New Yorkers had journeyed to Times Square for Starbucks coffee.

"It was scary not having Starbucks,” said Bethany Owings, who told the New York Post she walked 10 blocks with her 18-month-old daughter Ava to get her daily dose.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Starbucks Corp. closed all of its New York City and Long Island locations at 4 p.m. Sunday so its employees could return homebefore the MTA shut down all trains.

Stores were supposed to remain closed on Monday, but the Starbucks on the main floor of the Marriott Marquis on West 45th Street was catering to a steady stream of caffeine-obsessed patrons.

Owings told the Post she found out about the rogue store via Facebook, but word spread quickly on other social media networks, including Twitter.

For those who made the trip, the long lines were a small price to pay. Alex Mwangi, a Starbucks "gold card" holder, walked more than 20 blocks looking for a store -- a trek he said was totally worth it.

“I’m a Starbucks fanatic," he told The New York Post. "I go four or five times a day. I like the way they make their coffee and the way they present it to you. Elsewhere is standard, regular coffee.”

Other chains like Dunkin Donuts were closed on Monday, Gothamist reports.

However, those closings meant more business for shops that planned to stay open during the storm.

When local 7-Eleven manager Khagendra Bhattarai heard the Dunkin Donuts across the street would be shutting its doors, he immediately put on extra coffee. He told The Huffington Post he planned to stay open all night.

Visit The New York Post to read what other "coffee junkies" had to say about getting their Starbucks fix.

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Jordan's Petra Is Still Alluring Two Centuries Later

Petra's entrance is waking up from its reverie, its rock-cut tombs, temples and rose red walls sleepy with shadows. Even the alley leading up to the entrance gate, typically flanked with busy hawkish vendors, is starkly quiet. Morning is still in Petra.

A group of adventurers, eager to get that crack Canon shot, visit Petra at sunrise. We're all too eager to capture the Treasury being slowly bathed in pure sunlight. It would appear that we couldn't get enough of this structure, even 200 years after the Swiss Explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt discovered the tomb studded valley deep in the heart of Jordan in 1812.

Now, decades later, Petra is the jewel that everyone who visits Jordan comes to see, despite the country's vast other treasures. I walk down the long gravel path, past Bedouins peddling horse rides, to the long and gracefully winding Siq. Arabic for "shaft", the Siq is the main entrance to the ancient city -- a teaser. Dimly lit, endlessly fascinating and smoothed down by water erosion, the sinuous cobblestone path is like an endless trailer to a spectacular Feature Film, although the trailer is long and the suspense mind-numbing. The Siq is so narrow in places that you feel as the striated walls are determined to touch each other. In the early morning, the sounds of the few visitors reverberate, ricochet off the rose-red walls.

I talk to a French couple whose gaze, much like mine, fixates on the crack of blue sky above us. "We are stunned, it is more beautiful than we thought it would be," one says. And we're not even at the Treasury yet.

The Nabataeans who were heavily into merchant trading, established a presence in Petra as early as 312 B.C. as a stronghold of their caravan route. These were avant-guard thinkers and "the world's earliest publicists," our tour guide jokes, gesturing towards the latte colored gods and goddesses studding the Treasury. These were nods to Greece, Rome and Nabataean culture. Marketing managers can still learn from Petra today: the tradesmen wanted to please many, and alienate none.

Like the illustrious Egyptians, the Nabataeans built Petra as a grandiose sign of respect for their deceased.

In this aspect, a visit to Petra could have been creepy: these are glorious tombs after all. But while they were formerly filled with mummy like bodies and treasures, they are now empty, concealing nothing but shadows, cobwebs, memories.

I walk down the Siq carefully but eagerly, taking care not to get in the way of several Roman style, passenger-laden chariots that come careening down the path. The rather expensive entrance ticket includes the price of a horse ride to the Treasury, and visitors can clip clop their way to the main attraction. The opulently-decked chariots, a nod to the Roman civilization that was a stronghold in Jordan, except that the Romans did not take over Petra (the fact that Petra remained somewhat independent until an earthquake in 747 AD).

The main tomb, Al Khazneh, first seen narrowly through a bend in the Siq, is mirage-like. I rub my overworked eyes: the structure is much larger than you've anticipated, studded into the sandstone cliff like an unannounced but welcome visitor. There is a giant urn on top of the Treasury, and the initial settlers though that this urn contained gold, so they started shooting at it. But alas, no gold was found.

The Treasury is just one of the surprises; I walk past it and see a Malthusian explosion of tombs carved in rock, in the open air. At one end of Petra lies a Crusader-period castle, near the tomb that is popularly known as "the Monastery." I climb 900 well-worn and smooth stone steps, looking back at the valley, and catch my breath. The view is unforgettable.

More than anything else, I feel a deep sense of living history. After all, I'm walking on paths and staring at carvings that date back to 300 BC. To really appreciate the phrase "cradle of civilization," it is essential to walk the path the Nabataeans once did. The marvelous thing is that Petra still stands so pristine and intact, after thousands of years.

Here too, are encounters with historical artifacts. A frail old man sits in a corner, playing the rebab, one of the oldest musical instruments in the Arabic world. A bowed instrument, its strings are made from horse tail hair. He plays it with such soul: Petra becomes Carnegie Hall to us, and we watch him pour his heart into music stemming from just a few strings. Every area of this valley has a story to tell, and most of the stories are timeless.

The sun finally rises and bathes the Treasury with a gentle gold light, and one by one, statue after statue, the structure comes to life and unfolds like a tale from Scheherazade. It is a magical moment, and one that I am glad I came so early to see.

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Happy Second Birthday Windows Phone 7- This Is Your Life

Windows Phone 7, Microsoft’s big return to the smartphone stage after Windows Mobile’s gradual decline and demise, turns two today, according to a tweet by Joel Belfiore, Microsoft’s head of Windows Phone product definition and design. So I thought it would be fitting to take a look back at Windows Phone 7′s life up until now, and what the mobile OS has or hasn’t done for Microsoft so far.

On October 21, 2010, the first Windows Phone 7 handsets officially went on sale in New Zealand, Australia and parts of Europe and Asia. 10 launch devices brought the mobile OS to users, made by HTC, Dell, Samsung and LG (early highlights of the lineup included the LG Optimus 7, Samsung Omnia 7 and HTC HD7), spanning 60 carriers in 30 countries, and expanding to more in 2011. Early sales were promising in some markets, and even generated lines according to an AT&T spokesman, but overall failed to impress, with only 40,000 total units reportedly sold in the first day of U.S. availability.

In December, Microsoft Corporate VP of the Mobile Communications Business and Marketing Group Achim Berg revealed in an interview posted to Microsoft’s official blog that Microsoft had sold over 1.5 million devices – but that was to carrier partners, not sales through to customers, which meant there was no telling how much of that was sitting on store shelves or in stock storerooms. Berg hedged against potential criticism in that interview, saying that Windows Phone 7′s “numbers [were] similar to the performance of other first generation mobile platforms.”

The news didn’t improve terribly in January the following year, when Microsoft announced passing the2 million mark about 10 weeks after its Windows Phone 7 launch, but again, those numbers were to retailers, not overall sales to customers. By most accounts, users seemed pleased with the OS, but growth rates still looked to be a considerable challenge.

A month later, in February 2011, Nokia and Microsoft announced a broad partnership, with the aim of using Nokia’s hardware expertise to boost Microsoft’s struggling mobile OS. The idea seemed sound: Nokia was enjoying flagging fortunes in the worldwide handset market, having trouble competing with Android and iOS device gains, and Microsoft needed a focused hardware partner it could work closely with to both guide the future Windows Phone’s software design, and also make sure device/OS integration was as tight as possible. Here are three crucial bullet points from the press release announcing the arrangement:

• Nokia would adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy, innovating on top of the platform in areas such as imaging, where Nokia is a market leader.
• Nokia would help drive the future of Windows Phone. Nokia would contribute its expertise on hardware design, language support, and help bring Windows Phone to a larger range of price points, market segments and geographies.
• Nokia and Microsoft would closely collaborate on joint marketing initiatives and a shared development roadmap to align on the future evolution of mobile products.

It was a bold move on both sides, and one that seemed on the surface to have at least some potential to help both companies rally in the increasingly competitive mobile ecosystem. But it would take until October before consumers got any inkling of what kind of hardware we’d see from the partnership, with the official unveiling of the Nokia Lumia 800, and another month after that before it would ship to consumers. The Lumia 800 was fairly well-received by reviewers, and included Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango,” a significant update that brought a number of features to the OS users thought were missing in the original release. Mango also made it to a lineup of other devices from manufacturers besides Nokia, though by this time, it already seemed like some of Microsoft’s other hardware partners might be losing interest, owing to its special relationship with Nokia.

Nokia Windows Phone 7 sales failed to impress, and Microsoft remained mum on the subjectduring the first conference call it had following the Mango device launches, which wasn’t reassuring anyone. Then, in June, Microsoft essentially dealt Windows Phone 7 a killing blow, saying that it wouldn’t be possible to upgrade devices running Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8. They announced Windows Phone 7.8 at the same time, which would bring some functionality from the newer OS to older devices, but the damage it did to existing hardware sales was evident in Nokia’s most recent earnings, as it only sold 2.9 million Lumia devices, with its smartphone sales overall taking a sizeable blow.

In July 2012, a Nielsen report put Windows Phone 7′s market share relative to other smartphone operating systems at just 1.3 percent, and predictions from analysts at the time only saw it rising to around 4 percent by end of year. Windows Phone 8 will prove important for Microsoft in terms of its ability to gain ground on the other mobile operating systems out there, and at least one analyst firm believes Windows Phone will still become the second most popular smartphone OS by 2016. As for Windows Phone 7, it will live on in 7.8 updates pushed out to existing owners of Lumia and other devices, but for all intents and purposes, it’s on the path to oblivion. But despite not taking the world by storm, Windows Phone 7 may have paved the way for a return to mobile prominence for Microsoft, even if it’s hard to see that happening based on the current state of affairs.

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Beluga whale 'makes human-like sounds'

Researchers in the US have been shocked to discover a beluga whale whose vocalisations were remarkably close to human speech.

While dolphins have been taught to mimic the pattern and durations of sounds in human speech, no animal has spontaneously tried such mimicry.

But researchers heard a nine-year-old whale named NOC make sounds octaves below normal, in clipped bursts.

The researchers outline in Current Biologyjust how NOC did it.

The first mystery, though, was figuring out where the sound was coming from.

When a diver at the National Marine Mammal Foundation in California surfaced saying, "Who told me to get out?" the researchers there knew they had another example on their hands.

The whales are known as "canaries of the sea" for their high-pitched chirps, but while a number of anecdotal reports have described whales making human-like speech, none had ever been recorded.

Once they identified NOC as the culprit, they caught it on tape.

They found that vocal bursts averaged about three per second, with pauses reminiscent of human speech. Analysis of the recordings showed that the frequencies within them were spread out into "harmonics" in a way very unlike whales' normal vocalisations and more like those of humans.

They then rewarded NOC for the speech-like sounds to teach him to make them on command and fitted him with a pressure transducer within his nasal cavity, where sounds are produced, to monitor just what was going on.

They found that he was able to rapidly change the pressure within his nasal cavity to produce the sounds.

To amplify the comparatively low-frequency parts of the vocalisations, he over-inflated what is known at the vestibular sac in his blowhole - which normally acts to stop water entering the lungs.

In short, the mimicry was no easy task for NOC.

"Our observations suggest that the whale had to modify its vocal mechanics in order to make the speech-like sounds," said Sam Ridgway, president of the National Marine Mammal Foundation and lead author on the paper.

"The sounds we heard were clearly an example of vocal learning by the white whale."

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Dinosaur 'thief' arrested in Florida

NEW YORK — A US man accused of smuggling 70 million year old dinosaur skeletons into the United States, including a toothy relative of the bigger Tyrannosaurus rex, was arrested on Wednesday in Florida, officials said.

Eric Prokopi, 38, was charged with conspiracy to smuggle illegal goods, smuggling into the United States, and selling stolen goods, which carry possible sentences of five, 20 and 10 years in prison respectively.

New York chief federal prosecutor Preet Bharara called Prokopi a "one-man black market in prehistoric fossils" and said the earlier seizure of a Tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton from the Florida dealer was "merely the tip of the iceberg."

Prokopi tried to sell the Tyrannosaurus bataar at auction in New York in May this year, but Mongolia's government claimed the bones were illegally removed from the Central Asian country and could not be sold. US authorities impounded the remains shortly after.

Prokopi, who has denied trafficking, spent a year restoring and remounting what had been a loose collection of bones to recreate the skeleton, said Heritage Auctions, which attempted to sell the dinosaur on his behalf.

The Florida dealer is also accused of illegally importing a Saurolophus angustirostris skeleton from Mongolia and a Microraptor skeleton from China.

He was expected to appear Wednesday before a federal court in Gainesville, Florida, but also in New York federal court on October 22, Bharara said.

Bharara told the presiding Florida judge that strict conditions should be put on Prokopi's bail, because "the allegations against the defendant are unusual. Among other things, the Complaint sets forth a pattern of frequent international travel and manipulation of United States customs forms."

"Overall, there is a significant risk of flight," Bharara concluded.

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Off this planet: climate models work for Mars too

Computer models have accurately forecast conditions on Mars and are valid predictors of climate change on Earth, US and French astronomers said on Tuesday.

These computer programs predicted Martian glaciers and other features on Earth's planetary neighbor, scientists found.

"Some public figures imply that modelling of global climate change on Earth is 'junk science,' but if climate models can explain features observed on other planets, then the models must have at least some validity," lead researcher William Hartmann of the Planetary Science Institute said in a statement.

The team's findings were presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's planetary sciences division in Reno, Nevada.

Some climate change skeptics, notably US Senator James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, dismiss human-spurred global warming as a hoax. Others accept that Earth's climate is changing, but discount a human cause. Still others, including Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, accept the idea of climate change, but maintain the science is inconclusive.

The science of climate change prediction is dependent in part on complex computer models that take into account multiple factors that influence Earth's climate, including the level of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

Many such models have forecast the globally averaged temperature will rise by 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) this century if greenhouse emissions continue at current levels.

Recent global temperature increases support these predictions. On Monday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that September 2012 was tied for the warmest month on Earth in the modern record, and was the 331st consecutive month above the 20th century average.

Modelling martian snows

Hartmann, a senior scientist at the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said he and his team confirmed the earthly computer models' effectiveness by using them to forecast conditions on Mars.

New satellite observations of glaciers, ice flows and other features on the red planet showed that the models' predictions corresponded with what was on the Martian surface, Hartmann said in a telephone interview.

One key difference between Earth and Mars is their tilt, he said. Earth's axis is fixed, with very small variations, at 23.5 degrees, held steady by the gravitational pull of our moon. This tilt is responsible for changing seasons as Earth moves through the year, alternately tipping its northern and southern hemispheres toward the sun.

Mars lacks a big moon to stabilize its tilt, and its rotational axis can vary as much as 70 degrees toward the sun. When that happens, polar ice evaporates and puts moisture into the Martian atmosphere, which dumps snow, ice and ultimately glaciers in Mars' mid-latitudes. The last time this happened, astronomers say, was between 5 million and 20 million years ago.

Factoring in the planet's varying tilt, topography, atmosphere and other information, the climate models forecast specific regions for massive snowfalls, and the remnants of those snowfalls are right there, Hartmann said. So are ice flows and other features, viewed by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

"We do have a lot of public figures, in our country particularly, saying that the global climate modelling studies have very little value," Hartmann said. "If the global climate modelling people can run these models on Mars and we actually see things that come out of the model on another planet, then the climate modelling people must be doing something right."

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Bachelor Racial Discrimination Suit: Case Dismissed

Well, back to the ole mating game.

A federal judge has granted ABC's motion to dismiss a racial discrimination lawsuitfiled against The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in Tennessee by two men who said that they both tried out to be the titular rose bearer in 2011 and were passed over because they're black.

But score one for the reality-TV masterminds, because the court ruled that casting choices remain the sole discretion of those working on the show.

ABC defends The Bachelor,Bachelorette: "Casting is protected by First Amendment"

"As the defendants persuasively argue, casting decisions are a necessary component of any entertainment show's creative content," wrote U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger in her decision.

View the documents

"The producers of a television program, a movie, or a play could not effectuate their creative vision, as embodied in the end product marketed to the public, without signing cast members. The plaintiffs seek to drive an artificial wedge between casting decisions and the end product, which itself is indisputably protected as speech by the First Amendment. Thus, regulating the casting process necessarily regulates the end product. In this respect, casting and the resulting work of entertainment are inseparable and must both be protected to ensure that the producers' freedom of speech is not abridged."

The suit was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can't be refiled at a later date.

"We felt from the onset this case was completely without merit and we are pleased the Court has found in our favor," ABC and Warner Bros. said in a statement to E! News. 

The plaintiffs' attorney hasn't yet responded to a request for comment.

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