Wednesday, July 25, 2007

$2000 For 70 At 11% = $30M

If you put aside $2000 each year, beginning the year that your child is born, and keep that money invested in the stock market, at age 40, your child will be a millionaire, and at age 70, your child will have over $30 million.

This is contingent upon the market’s past 70-year return of 11% on average repeating itself, but if you, then later, your child work on putting away and investing just $2000 per year each year, there might just be a $30 million nest egg as your child’s reward when they hit 70.

Financial advisors recommend that you set up a trust that your child cannot touch, though, because your child will come into control of a $100,000 party fund on their 18th birthday.

 Of course, there is no guarantee that your child will not be just as frivolous with the nest egg at 40 or 50, but with your discipline and your child’s discipline, a fantastic retirement nest egg is possible.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Whale Survived 1890 Attack

Each year, under the supervision of the International Whaling Commission, 10 Alaskan villages are allowed to harvest 255 whales, which are still used as a major source of food for Alaska’s natives.

This year’s hunt revealed something absolutely amazing.

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast had a 3 1/2 inch arrow-shaped projectile under its blubber that researchers dated back to 1890 through old manufacturing records.

These researchers believe that the arrow-shaped projectile was a bomb-lance cylinder used in whaling around 1890, and matches a similar find from a whale hunted in 1980.

Researchers place this bowhead at somewhere between 115 and 130 years old.

While this whale is an amazing find because of the rarity of whales this age, it is widely believed that some of the oldest bowhead whales live to be to nearly 200 years old.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

We Didn't Need To Find Nemo...

The orange and white clownfish star of the hit cartoon movie “Finding Nemo” really is able to find his own way home after spending months at sea, an Australian-led team of international researchers said on Friday.

“When they are out in the open water they are actually quite sophisticated. They can swim well, they can smell, they can see, they can hear well, and they use a whole suite of senses,” joint team leader Glenn Almany told Reuters.

Studying a tiny coral reef in Papua New Guinea, the researchers found 60 percent of baby clownfish find their way back to their home reef - only 1,000 feet wide - after being swept into the open ocean at birth.

The fish were identified using a world-first tagging method in which adult clownfish and butterflyfish were injected with a harmless barium isotope which they then passed on to their offspring, allowing identification of their juveniles.

The finding, announced in the international journal Science, will help researchers understand the extent to which young fish return to their home area or go off to interbreed with more distant populations.

That in turn could help determine which populations needed protection or better management for sustainable fishing.

Almany said the team still had no idea how the clownfish knew which reef they came from, or how far they travelled in open sea during a journey lasting around 11 days.

“How they actually determine whether that reef is home or not is anyone’s guess, but as an educated guess I would say that there might be some sort of chemical imprinting going on when they are born,” he said.

The team of Australian, French and U.S. scientists, working out of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at Queensland’s James Cook University, planned follow up studies in Australia with larger fish species.