Recipe for perfect sandcastle

A lesson learned by centuries of beachcombers has been distilled to a physicist's formula: to make the perfect sandcastle, use eight parts sand to one part water.

The physicists' study, released on Wednesday before publication in the journal Nature Physics, is entitled, rather grandly, "Maximum angle of stability of a wet granular pile."

And while it deals with sandcastles, it could also help determine the stability of retaining walls and the material they hold back, one of its authors said.

This study and those that follow on this subject might have implications for those preparing for or recovering from a watery disaster like a hurricane, physicist Arshad Kudrolli said in a telephone interview.

"Our study is the first step, in some sense, in trying to understand what's the most stable angle that one can build, say, a retaining wall," he said. "And if it fails, where would the material end up? How much part of the land will give way?"

Inspired by childhood memories of the seaside, the study's authors worked on a simple model of what makes for the most stable construction involving liquid and particles.

In the case of a sandcastle, builders need to use roughly one-eighth the water to the amount of sand, though Kudrolli said there is a range of possibilities that would work.

"You need a mix of the two to get it right," Kudrolli said in a telephone interview. "It could be more than that, or less than that would be just fine.

"It's very forgiving, so that's why we succeed, I guess," he said with a laugh.

Despite the playful nature of the sandcastle example, Kudrolli noted that their model for what keeps a sandpile from disintegrating could lay the groundwork for questions about what kind of retaining walls would be most stable.

Even though engineers have designed such structures for hundreds of years, the science behind them is not very well developed, Kudrolli said.

The study used "idealized sand" -- glass beads the size of sand grains -- and water, seeing how the piles would stack up and when they would topple.

In an even simpler example of a pile of particles and liquid, Kudrolli and his colleagues envisioned four baseballs, stacked in a pyramid, with three on the bottom and one on top, bonded with "liquid bridges," bits of water that got between and among the baseballs and helped bond them together.

Hungary drivers to get lemons and apples

Bad drivers in eastern Hungary will be left with a sour taste in their mouths next month when school students will accompany traffic police and hand out pieces of lemon along with a fine.

Good drivers will be rewarded with an apple during the month-long campaign in Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg county, state news agency MTI reported Thursday.

"A penalty coming from a kid for breaking rules generates a stronger feeling of guilt among adults than a simple fine", county police spokesman Gergely Fulop said.

Szabolcs-Szatmar-Bereg, about 200 km (125 miles) from Budapest, is the center of Hungary's fruit industry.

Fake plane emergency lets Gambians see match

A plane carrying Gambian soccer fans to Peru made an unauthorized detour and faked a fuel emergency to land in time for the West African nation's game in a world youth tournament, officials said Wednesday.

The Rum Air plane carrying 289 fans bypassed immigration formalities in Lima by landing in the northern city of Piura about two hours before the African youth champions kicked off against Qatar in the World Under-17 Championship Tuesday.

The apparent emergency sparked a red alert in the coastal city with fire fighters and police racing to the airport and hospitals were told to prepare for an emergency.

"They faked an emergency to land in Piura. They were coming from Brazil and the should have landed in Lima first," Ramon Caminate, a tournament organizer in Piura, told Reuters.

Piura newspaper El Tiempo quoted one fan as saying Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh had chartered the plane.

Long Tambong Tamba, apparently a government official traveling on board, told reporters: "The president gave me the responsibility to lead the team (of fans) here."

A spokeswoman for CORPAC, the state body that runs Peru's airports, said the Tri-Star L1011 plane with 12 crew on board had raised the alarm, saying it did not have enough fuel to fly to Lima and would have to land in Piura instead.

CORPAC said it would issue a statement later on the incident. It was not immediately clear what penalties the airline could face.

Caminate said residents were astonished to see such a large plane. Piura's little airport is for domestic routes only and all international flights to Peru go to Lima.

Immigration officials checked documents in Piura and the fans went straight to the stadium to see their team beat Qatar 3-1 and qualify for the quarter-finals.

Some fans wore just tunics and trunks in the national colors of red, blue and green stripes separated by white bands, and had their faces painted.

The fans later took over five hotels in the small city while the plane was impounded at the airport.

Local prosecutor Carolina Neyra told reporters the stop in Piura was not authorized.

The final of the 16-nation tournament is on October 2 in Lima.

Low-caste man chained up for two years

A low-caste Hindu man in India has been chained to the verandah of his house for more than two years after fellow villagers declared him insane, The Times of India newspaper reported Tuesday.

Upendra Naik, 32, was declared mentally unsound in July 2003 after villagers said he stole a trident from a temple in their village, near the town of Kendrapara in the eastern state of Orissa. They also said he was violent and often hit residents.

"I am an innocent person," Naik, a Dalit -- as Hinduism's lowest "untouchable" caste is now known -- was quoted as saying. "But some unscrupulous villagers have chained my legs."

Naik's wife, after failing to get him freed, has moved back to her parents' house, and Naik's father now brings him meals in the verandah, which is regularly drenched by monsoon rains.

Authorities said they had tried to take Naik to a hospital for a check-up but were stopped by villagers.

"Nobody is ready to accompany Upendra to the hospital," social welfare officer Anjali Das was quoted as saying.

Villagers in India often dish out their own brand of justice, even if it goes against the country's secular and liberal constitution, and Dalits are often the victims.

In May, a government school in impoverished Bihar state stopped serving lunch to its students because Dalit women were cooking the desserts before two Yadavs, a cow-herd caste, objected.

Well, if you can't even trust a hitman..

A Japanese woman called in the police after a hitman she paid to kill her lover's wife failed to carry out the job.

The 32-year-old Tokyo woman was arrested Wednesday for incitement to murder, the Daily Yomiuri newspaper said Friday.

The woman contacted a private detective through a Web site last November and paid him 1 million yen in cash to murder her love rival, the paper said.

The 40-year-old detective accepted the money and suggested he could carry out the job by chasing the victim on a motorcycle and spraying her with a biological agent in a tunnel.

Police also arrested the private detective and found the alleged target safe and well, the paper said.