Dog Risks Life In Rescue

I Believe In Reincarnation.

I've read about this boy in my death and dying class.

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Officers Who Cracked Missing Girl Case: Something Wasn't Right

(CNN) -- Call it mother's intuition. Call it a police officer's intuition. But Allison Jacobs knew something was wrong.

The University of California, Berkeley, police officer was sitting in on a meeting with a man named Phillip Garrido, who wanted to hold an event on campus, and Lisa Campbell, special events manager for the university police. Garrido brought along two young girls, introducing them as his daughters.

Jacobs' and Campbell's intuition, authorities said, led to the arrest of Garrido, a registered sex offender who along with his wife, Nancy, now faces 29 felony charges in connection with the 1991 kidnapping of Jaycee Dugard, who was then 11. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Police have said Garrido kept Dugard in a series of sheds in his backyard for 18 years, fathering two children with her -- the 11- and 15-year-old girls he brought with him to the meeting.

In a Friday interview with CNN's "AC360," Campbell said Garrido had approached her August 24 with the two girls in tow, asking about holding his event. She had another commitment, so she asked him to return the following day.

"He was clearly animated, he was very passionate, he was full of life about the things he wanted to talk about," Campbell said. "The girls sort of were recessed in the background. And they were young. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. They weren't in school. They were pretty much unresponsive emotionally, extremely pale ... there was just something about the girls that wasn't right."

She thought the encounter was strange enough to run a background check on Garrido, which revealed that he was on parole after a rape conviction and was a registered sex offender. Campbell asked Jacobs to sit in on the meeting the next day.

Jacobs said she began talking to the girls, trying to engage them in conversation. Checking for any abuse, she asked one girl about a bump on her eye, and the girl told her it was a birth defect, she said.

"They both said that they were home schooled," Jacobs said. "And when I asked about that, they said that the mom and the dad both home schooled them. And then they mentioned an older sister."

"The youngest girl was across from me," Jacobs said. "And she was very intently staring at me and smiling in a very eerie way. The older daughter was looking at Mr. Garrido, and not looking at us, not making eye contact with us. And her eyes were darting around at the ceiling, and [she] would give really quick, clipped one-word answers and would glance at us and back up at him."

She said, "My police intuition was kicking in, but I would say it's more of a mother's intuition. I was worried for these little girls. I knew something wasn't right. I could kind of see it in their eyes, although I really didn't know what it was. And just being the protective mom that I am, my reaction was to try and do what I could to help them."

Jacobs called Garrido's parole officer to tell him about the meeting. "And he stopped me dead in my tracks," she said. "And he said, 'He doesn't have daughters.' And that's when my heart kind of sunk down into my stomach. And I said, 'Well, he introduced them as his daughters. They had his blue eyes. They were calling him "Dad." They even mentioned an older sister at home. So I had no reason to believe that they were anything but his daughters.' "

The parole officer called Garrido in for a meeting Wednesday. He attended, along with his wife, the two girls and another woman named Allissa, police have said. "Allissa" was eventually identified as Dugard. Scott Kernan, undersecretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told reporters Thursday that Garrido admitted abducting Dugard.

"The parole agent called me on my way home from work," Jacobs said Friday. "And he was all excited ... and he said that ... he was involved with a kidnapping case and ... because I called it in, it helped solve this FBI case that was 18 years old."

"We're never going to forget this day," she said. "And I'm glad that Jaycee is safe and working on her road to recovery."

Police acknowledged Friday that someone called 911 in 2006 to report that children appeared to be living in tents in a neighbor's backyard. Contra Costa County Sheriff Warren Rupf told reporters a deputy visited the Garrido home after the call, but did not go in the backyard. "This is not an acceptable outcome," Rupf said.

In a jailhouse interview Thursday with CNN affiliate KCRA, Garrido would not discuss the abduction, but said he had "completely turned" his life around in the past several years.

"You're going to find the most powerful story coming from the witness, from the victim," he promised. "If you take this a step at a time, you're going to fall over backward, and in the end you're going to find the most powerful, heartwarming story."

Hawaii Fish Coughs Up Gold Watch

ELEELE, Hawaii - Hawaii resident Curt Carish boasts a timely fish tale: a 10-inch reef fish he caught by hand in shallow water coughed up a ticking gold watch.

Carish says he was enjoying a picnic Wednesday on Port Allen beach when he saw the nenue fish awkwardly swimming close to shore.

He says a friend gave him a bamboo stick and told him to get the fish. So he jumped into the waist-high water and hit the nenue until it went limp.

He noticed the fish had an abnormally large belly as he tossed it into a cooler.

A friend opened the cooler later to discover a gold watch next to the fish's mouth.

Carish says the watch was ticking and keeping correct time.

Cat Parasite Affects Everything We Feel and Do

ABCNews:
"The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, has been transmitted indirectly from cats to roughly half the people on the planet, and it has been shown to affect human personalities in different ways...

Research has shown that women who are infected with the parasite tend to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure." (ARTICLE)

Dance, Bird, Dance!

(CNN) -- A head-banging parrot who became a YouTube sensation has demonstrated that an ability to appreciate music and keep a rhythm is not unique to humans, scientists say.

Snowball the cockatoo, who appears to bop his head, tap his claws and squawk enthusiastically to the Back Street Boys' "Everybody" is one of several birds apparently capable of dancing to a beat, according to two studies published in the latest edition of the journal Current Biology.

In a study lead by Adena Schachner of Harvard University, researchers examined more than 1,000 YouTube videos of dancing animals and found 14 types of parrot species and one elephant genuinely capable of keeping time.

The video of Snowball has been viewed more than two million times since it was posted in 2007. Another video of Snowball shows him dancing to Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust."

Schachner analyzed the videos frame-by-frame, comparing the animals' movements with the speed of the music and the alignment of individual beats. The group also studied another bird, Alex, an African grey parrot, which had exhibited similar abilities to Snowball, nodding its head appreciatively to a series of drum tracks.

"Our analyses showed that these birds' movements were more lined up with the musical beat than we'd expect by chance," says Schachner. "We found strong evidence that they were synchronizing with the beat, something that has not been seen before in other species."

Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, who led another study of Snowball's performance, said that the bird had demonstrated an ability to adjust the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat.

Scientists had previously thought that "moving to a musical beat might be a uniquely human ability because animals are not commonly seen moving rhythmically in the wild," Patel said.

Schachner said there was no evidence to suggest that animals such as apes, dogs or cats could recognize music, despite their extensive experience of humans.

That leads researchers to believe that an ability to process musical sounds may be linked to an ability to mimic sounds -- something that each of the parrots studied by researchers was able to do excellently, she said.

Other "vocal-learning species" include dolphins, elephants, seals and walruses.

"A natural question about these results is whether they generalize to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species," Schachner said.

Researchers believe a possible link between vocal mimicry and an ability to hear music may explain the development of music in human societies.

"The question of why music is found in every known human culture is a longstanding puzzle. Many argue that it is an adaptive behaviour that helped our species to evolve. But equally plausible is the possibility that it emerged as a by-product of other abilities -- such as vocal learning," music psychologist Lauren Stewart of Goldsmiths, University of London told CNN.

"Parrots and humans both have the ability to imitate sounds that they hear, unlike our closer simian relatives. Once a species has the neural machinery in place for coupling the perception and production of vocal sounds, it may be only a small step to use the same circuits for synchronizing movements to a beat."

Patrick's Tenori-On Skills!!