He was arrested in December 2012 by Metropolitan Police officers as part of Operation Yewtree an investigation which was set up to investigate child sexual abuse committed by DJ Jimmy Savile who died in 2011, and by other people. In 2014, he was tried at Southwark Crown Court for 11 counts of indecent assault against teenage girls. On 28 April 2014 he was convicted of 8 counts. On 2 May 2014, he was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment and is now incarcerated at HM Prison Littlehey in Cambridgeshire. He collapsed in his cell and was taken to hospital, where he died of a heart attack.
Jack Ramsay
John T. "Jack" Ramsay (February 21, 1925 – April 28, 2014), also known as "Dr. Jack", was an American basketball coach. He coached Saint Joseph's Hawks from 1955 until 1966, Philadelphia 76ers from 1968 until 1972, Buffalo Braves from 1972 until 1976, Portland Trail Blazers from 1976 until 1986 and Indiana Pacers from 1986 until 1988. He entered the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Ramsay died in his sleep from cancer on the night of April 27, 2014. He was 89.
Birthday Girl
Birthday Girl is a 2001 British-American crime-thriller movie. It is set in St Albans, Hertfordshire. It stars Nicole Kidman and Ben Chaplin. It is a bank clerk in St Albans who finds a Russian mail-order bride, Nadia, played by Kidman.
The movie received mixed reviews.
Harry Firth
Harry L. Firth (18 April 1918 - 27 April 2014) was an Australian racing driver and team manager. Firth was a leading race and rally driver during the 1950s and 1960s and continued as an influential team manager with first the Ford works team and then the famed Holden Dealer Team (HDT) well into the 1970s. He was born in Orbost, Victoria.
Firth died from natural causes, aged 96.
Rolling and wheels in the natural world
There are two ways that natural and man-made things can use rotation to move around. One way is for the entire thing to roll. The other way is for part of the thing to turn while the rest does not, like a wheel or a propeller. Some living things move around by rolling, but no living things seem to use wheels. Biologists have written about the reasons for this. Writers of science fiction and fantasy have invented many animals with wheels.
Wheels are a very useful technology for people. Many technologies that people use are also found in nature, like wings and lenses.
It may seem strange, then, that wheels have never evolved in nature, but there are two reasons for this. First, there are natural limits to what kinds of things can exist in nature. Living things change slowly over time, a process called evolution by natural selection. This process can create many different answers to a problem, but it can't always create every answer that can be imagined. Also, the ways that new living things build themselves (a process called developmental biology) can't always create every kind of part that can be imagined. Second, wheels are sometimes less useful than other ways of moving, like walking, running, or slithering like a snake. For the same reason, some groups of people in the past have given up using wheels completely.
Some living things move around by rolling. These are not true examples of wheels, because the whole organism rotates, without any parts that stay still, like an axle.
Some kinds of animals form their bodies into a circle. In some cases, they do this to protect themselves, and in some cases they do it to be able to roll. Animals that do this include some caterpillars, tiger beetle larvae, myriapods, mantis shrimp, and salamanders. Other animals form into a ball instead. These animals include pangolins, hedgehogs, armadillos, the armadillo Lizard, isopods, the wheel spider, and fossilized trilobites. These animals may roll "passively", meaning they are pushed by gravity or wind, or "actively", meaning they push themselves by changing their shape. Tumbleweeds are a part of a plant that grows above the ground. Tumbleweeds break off from their roots and roll in the wind in order to spread their seeds.
Dung beetles form round balls of animal feces. They roll these balls with their bodies. Although the ball rolls instead of the beetle, the beetles have many of the same problems as rolling animals.
A kind of skin cell called a keratinocyte moves itself by rolling, as part of the process of healing.
A kind of tiny animal called a rotifer uses a ring of cilia (small hair-like parts) moving in rhythm to move and feed itself. The word "rotifer" in Latin means "having wheels", but rotifers do not actually have any parts that rotate.
No known multicellular organism (an organism made of many cells) can spin part of its body while keeping the rest of its body still. However, there are at least two examples of rotating parts used by cells. One example is a molecule called ATP synthase. ATP synthase is used to store and move energy. For example, it is used in the processes of photosynthesis (a way of storing energy from the sun) and oxidative phosphorylation (a way of releasing stored energy). ATP synthase is similar to flagellar motors, which are talked about below. Biologists (scientists who study life) think that ATP synthase is an example of modular evolution. In modular evolution, two parts with different jobs join together and pick up a new job.
The only known example in nature of a part that can spin all the way around to push an organism is the flagellum. The flagellum is a tail used like a propeller to push single-celled prokaryotes. The bacterial flagellum is the best known example. About half of all known bacteria have at least one flagellum. This means that rotation may actually be the most common way of moving around found in nature.
At the bottom of the bacterial flagellum, where it meets the cell membrane, a motor protein acts as an engine. This engine gets its power from proton motive force, the flow of protons (hydrogen ions) across the cell membrane. This is caused by a concentration gradient (a difference in the number of protons on each side of the membrane) created by the cell's metabolism. (Bacteria called "Vibrio" use two kinds of flagella, one of which is powered by sodium ions instead.) Flagella are very efficient, meaning not much energy is wasted. They can push bacteria as fast as 60 times their length every second. The motor at the bottom of the flagellum has a similar structure to ATP synthase. Bacteria called spirillum have twisted bodies with flagella on both ends. Spririllum bacteria spin around as they move.
A kind of organism called archaea, which are different from bacteria, also use flagella powered by rotating motor proteins. The two kinds of flagella evolved from different parts. Eukaryotic cells are a more complex kind of cell found in plants and animals. Some of these cells also have flagella called cilia, but these flagella do not rotate at the bottom. Instead, they bend so that the tip of the flagella moves in a circle.
The science of evolution can help to explain why multicellular organisms have not developed wheels. To put it simply, a complex structure (one made of several parts working together) can't evolve unless its early, unfinished form helps the organism to live and to have children.
In the modern science of evolution, adaptations (changes that affect the fitness of an organism) appear slowly, over many generations, by means of natural selection. Because of this, genetic changes usually only spread in a population if they do not lower the fitness of individuals. Neutral changes (changes that don't raise or lower fitness) can spread by genetic drift. In some cases, changes that lower fitness can spread, but large changes that take many steps can only spread if each of the steps raises fitness. The biologist Richard Dawkins describes the situation this way: