Hailstones the size of golf balls have hit the suburb of Melton, in Melbourne’s west, as a line of storms moved through western Victoria.

Winds of more than 60 miles per hour have been recorded at Melbourne Airport while nearly 1.5 inches of rain fell at Rockbank, west of Melbourne.

Streets across Melbourne’s CBD have been flooded and police are warning people not to drive through the flooded areas after some motorists became trapped.

Source – ABC News

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Eleven major airports will begin using body scanners to screen passengers as the Transportation Security Administration launches a plan to buy 1,000 of the machines over the next two years.

The scanners can look under passengers’ clothing in order to detect weapons and explosives.

Boston Logan International Airport received one new scanner this week and will get two more next week. All will go into the same terminal. Among the other airports getting the scanners are Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare and Charlotte Douglas International.

Full Report – USA Today

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George W. Bush had his slew of off-color statements that Liberals took feverish delight in tearing apart.

Well, Barack Obama has had his fair share of ridiculous statements that give the other side plenty of ammunition to fire right on back.

Here are the eight most cringe-worthy moments in all their glory…or horror, depending on which way you look at it.

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Thursday morning, employees at a Best Buy in South Brunswick walked into the store to find a pile of debris, a hole in the roof, and a bunch of missing laptops.

Theft, to be sure — but how did the plunderers avoid the spider web of alarms? According to Police Sgt. James Ryan, the thieves managed to climb a gas pipe to scale the building, and used some type of suction device to lift a hole in the roof.
Ryan speculates that they then lowered themselves through the hole into the store, managing somehow to keep themselves ten feet above the floor at all times, evading the store’s motion sensors.

They even kept behind store banners throughout the operation, thus shielding their faces from security cameras. Upon swiping $26,000 worth of Apple laptops, they scurried out the same way they’d come in.

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One of the interesting side effects of last year’s stimulus bill was $400 million in funding for ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. And in this week’s first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he put that stimulus money to use by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water.

In about four hours, water treated with Nocera’s catalyst can produce 30 kilowatt-hours of energy. Moreover, the process is cheap. So cheap, in fact, that Nocera has no problem envisioning a day when each house generates its own fuel and electricity from photosynthesis.

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