Can't Possibly Be True!

• A jury's murder conviction, and the 15-to-life sentence it carried, against Daniel Floyd in Brooklyn, New York, for a 2008 killing went for naught in July when the Brooklyn Supreme Court ordered a retrial (with witnesses forced to testify all over again). The sole reason the court cited was a decision by the trial judge on the first day -- to seat the potential jury pool and not Floyd's mother, who, because she was temporarily left standing that first day, argued successfully that her son's right to a "public" trial had been violated. [New York Post, 7-28-2014]

• I (Heart) Strangers: Two age-30ish men knocked on the door of a Sebastian, Texas, woman at 12:30 a.m. on Aug. 3, asking for water and if they could please come inside to charge their cellphone -- and the woman apparently cheerfully invited them in, later offering them use of her backyard shed to grab some sleep. She did not learn until a short time later, when a law enforcement manhunt widened into her neighborhood, that they were wanted for murdering a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Officers arrested the pair inside the shed. [KRGV-TV (Weslaco, Texas), 8-5-2014]

• A team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington announced recently that they had developed a prototype of a wind turbine that might deliver electricity in tiny bursts to devices like smartphones -- since it is about half the size of a grain of rice. (Tiny solar backpacks already exist.) [National Geographic, 6-19-2014]

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