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Newly independent Rhapsody is giving its iPhone app some bragging rights with an update that lets subscribers listen to tracks even when they’re not online. Users will now be able to download their Rhapsody playlists to their phones; by June, Rhapsody says it will add functionality so users can download individual songs and albums as well.

Rhapsody says the update makes it the “first music service to let people enjoy subscription downloads on their iPhone, iPod or iPad.” But as Rhapsody itself admits in a briefing note provided to reporters its advantage will not last long; the company says that MOG and Spotify have a similar feature in their soon-to-launch apps.

Still, it’s the second aggressive in a month for Rhapsody, which has been losing subscribers. In early April, the company unveiled two new subscription plans—Rhapsody Premier and Rhapsody Premier Plus—that removed any additional costs for mobile streaming.

Rhapsody introduced its iPhone app in September. It’s free to download, although to listen users have to be Rhapsody subscribers. (Rhapsody offers a 14-day trial.) So far, Rhapsody says the app has been downloaded 1.5 million times.

Here’s a demo of the update:

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As predicted by me in my post earlier today, a pair (ha!) of magnitude 5+ earthquakes hit off the Sandwich Islands (ha?) today. One happened at 08:46:32 UTC (before I posted, but I didn’t know at the time) and another, slightly stronger, at 17:04:50 UT.

There was a bigger one — magnitude 6.5 — off the coast of Taiwan, but that was much earlier today, actually yesterday evening US time, so I don’t count that one. But who knows? The day’s not over yet.

Yesterday on the Mall in Washington, DC well over one hundred thousand gathered to show their support for clean energy legislation  in the US. Musical artists Sting, John Legend, Passion Pit, The Roots, and others entertained the throngs of activists and environmentally concerned citizens.

(more…)

It was a couple years ago, when China overtook the U.S. as the largest new car market in the world, that it started to become clear to me the U.S. wouldn’t have the same influence in the development of this next generation of automobiles as we did in the first.

As witnessed by the incredible amount of diversity of green car tech at the Beijing Auto Show this year, China has suddenly become the place to watch for emerging car trends — and it’s getting a larger share of the limelight to boot.

(more…)

It was a bad day for Walmart in the courtroom, as a California appeals court granted class-action status to a gender bias lawsuit against the retail giant. That means that over 1 million current and former female employees are now able to join their names to the largest case of its kind in U.S. history.

The plaintiffs in the suit allege that Walmart has made a practice of both paying women employees less money and offering them fewer promotions than their male counterparts. The original suit was filed nine years ago by six female employees.

Giving the case class-action status means that every woman who as worked at for Walmart since 2001 now has the option of being part of the lawsuit.

Said an attorney for the plaintiff:

Wal-Mart tries to project an improved image as a good corporate citizen… But no amount of PR is going to work until it addresses the claims of its female employees.

Walmart has denied any discriminatory policies and had hoped to fight each case individually.

Wal-Mart Workers Can Sue as Group in Gender Bias Case [BusinessWeek]

YouTube’s first foray into streaming live sports was far more successful than expected, blowing away internal projections and generating five times more views during the 2010 Indian Premier League (IPL) tournament than it initially anticipated.

As part of its first international sports deal, YouTube streamed all 60 matches of the 45-day IPL tournament live on a dedicated YouTube channel at youtube.com/ipl, and on the IPL’s website at www.iplt20.com.

YouTube’s internal “stretch goals” for the event were 10 million views over the course of the six-week tournament. But interest in the IPL well exceed those expectations, generating more than 51 million views, including this weekend’s championship match between the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings. As a result, YouTube says its coverage of the cricket league ranked as the top sports channel worldwide, surpassing global video views of the NBA, NHL, ESPN and UFC. The IPL channel was also the most-viewed and most-subscribed channel in India during that period.

The distribution agreement called for the IPL matches were live-streamed to more than 200 countries worldwide, excluding the U.S. Even so, the U.S. was second only to India in terms of the number of views generated during the event, mainly from on-demand availability of matches after they were aired live. As a result, YouTube opened the semifinal and final matches up to the U.S. audience for live and on-demand viewing.

Related content on GigaOM Pro: Why Viacom’s Fight With YouTube Threatens Web Innovation (subscription required)

The internets are buzzing with the news that Larry Summers told PBS Newshour that breaking up the banks is a bad idea.  It’s not clear to me that the core of his argument is actually wrong–100,000 small banks going hog wild on subprime mortgages would not have been obviously better than 100 big ones.  Indeed, it would have been . . . the savings and loan crisis.  However, when the time came to bail out those behemoths, regulators did not go into a lengthy disquisition on the mystery of capital flows, and asset-price bubbles.  They said the institutions they were bailing out were “Too big to fail” without explaining that the risk wouldn’t necessarily have been any safer for the economy if it had been more evenly throughout the banking system. 

(One can argue that it wouldn’t have happened in the first place–but that’s a problem of regulatory oversight, not institution size per se.  We managed to have a lovely Great Depression using only small banks, and a few other ingredients commonly found in most homes.)

Of course, that doesn’t mean that big banks are better for the economy, as Summers suggest.  But there’s one thing he does hint at, though he doesn’t quite come out and say it:  bigger banks might be better for regulators.  It may not be smart to put all your eggs in one basket . . . but it’s probably a hell of a lot easier for a regulator to watch that basket.   Plus, big banks provide nice lots of cushy jobs for regulators to retire into.  Small banks don’t have quite the same incentives (or payrolls).  This may explain something important about what’s happened in our banking system over the last few decades.

In 15 minutes or so, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will call a vote to start debate on Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill. Senate staffers say that the vote will not gain a Republican crossover, and formal debate will not yet begin on the bill. To watch the ongoing debate, see C-Span 2 here.

Everything is connected. And when I say everything, I include you, dear reader, and the tapeworms of Madagascar. They carry a hidden history of our entire species.

I’m sure we’d all prefer that there was no such connection. Tapeworm are not just gross, but they are pretty much the polar opposite of the human existence. They have no brain. They have no eyes. They lack mouths and guts, having turned their body inside out, absorbing food through its surface. Most of their hideously long body is made up of segments, each of which contains its own supply of both eggs and sperm. To reproduce, the tapeworm fertilizes its eggs, either with its own sperm or another tapeworm’s, and then sheds its segments. Once out of the body, those segments can crawl around on the ground on their own.

But, like it or not, tapeworms–or at least the pork tapeworm Taenia solium–has an intimate relationship with us. After all, it can only live in our guts as an adult, where it will dwell for years and grow over 20 feet long. Without us, these tapeworms would simply not exist. From the safety of our guts, they can shed six egg-loaded segments a day, each of which contains 50,000 eggs. If a pig swallows one of these eggs, it hatches in the animal’s instestines, drills its way into the abdominal cavity, and finds a muscle to infect. There it dwells in a barely visible cyst, for years if need be. In order to complete its life cycle, it must get into another human, which it does if a human eats a piece of infected, undercooked pork.

Carrying an adult tapeworm around in your gut may be disturbing, but it’s not the worst thing a tapeworm can do to you. Sometimes people get infected with the eggs of pork tapeworms, rather than the cysts. Instead of developing into an adult, the tapeworm treats you like a pig. It invades your muscles, where it makes a cyst. Sometimes the tapeworms can get into people’s brains. These cysts can trigger dangerous reactions from our immune systems, and can sometimes be fatal. This disease, known as cysticercosis, is relatively rare in the United States. Only 221 people died of it between 1990 and 2002. But in other parts of the world, it’s a lot worse, with ten percent or so of the population of many countries showing signs of having had the disease.

Madagascar is one of those countries. In the highlands, over 20% of people have antibodies to cysticercosis. To get a better handle on the epidemiology of the disease, medical researchers at the Pasteur Institute of Madagascar have traveled around the country, gathering tapeworm from different regions. They isolated DNA from 13 of the samples and then compared their genetic sequences to see how they were related to one another, and to tapeworms from other parts of the world.

The family tree of tapeworms they got was strangely ancient and alien. In many cases, the closest relatives of tapeworms on Madagascar are not other tapeworms on Madagascar. The tapeworms that live in the southwest part of the island are closely related to tapeworms hundreds of miles away, in Africa. The tapeworms in other parts of the island are more closely related to tapeworms thousands of miles away, in south Asia.

The scientists then tallied up the mutations in each lineage of tapeworm to figure out how long ago they had split off from a common ancestor. All the T. solium tapeworms the scientists studied descend from a common ancestor that lived about 680,000 years ago. The southwest Madagascar tapeworms and the tapeworms of Africa share a common ancestor that lived 235,000 years ago. All of the Madagascar and Asian tapeworms share a common ancestor that lived about 260,000 years ago. The Madagascar tapeworms and their very closest Asian relatives share an ancestor that lived 85,000 years ago.

So how on Earth did one remote island end up with two such deeply split lineages of tapeworms in their pigs? The answer is like a guided tour thorugh the evolution of our species, rolling right on through the history of civilization.

Along with pork tapeworms, there are two other species of Taenia that live in humans. One, T. asiatica, also cycles between people and pigs, but only in Asia as the name suggests. The other, T. saginata, moves between people and cows. Both of these human tapeworms use domesticated hoofed mammals (known as ungulates) as their intermediate hosts. Pigs and cows were only domesticated within the past 11,000 years or so. The best way to find clues to how these tapeworms colonized us is to compare them to the 39 species of Taenia tapeworms that infect wild animals. Eric Hoberg, a parasitologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and his colleagues have found that most Taenia tapeworms form cysts in wild ungulates, such as antelopes, and then become adults in the carnivores that eat their intermediate hosts. The closest relatives of all three human tapeworms live in Africa. Hyenas are the hosts of the closest relatives of pork tapeworms, while lions are the hosts of the closest relative to the other two species, T. saginata and T. asiatica. Hoberg and his colleagues compared the mutations in the DNA of T. saginata and T. asiatica and found that their common ancestor lived somewhere between 780,000 and 1.71 million years ago.

The new results from Madagascar fit in nicely with Hoberg’s results. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our ancestors lived in Africa, where they scavenged meat from ungulates. In so doing, it appears, they stepped into the life cycle of Taenia tapeworms. Tapeworms that might have ended up in the gut of a hyena or a lion ended up in the gut of our ancestors instead. Over thousands of years, some populations of these tapeworms adapted to our scavenger ancestors. These were the common ancestors of today’s human tapeworms, whose great antiquity is now recorded in the DNA of living tapeworms.

As hominins expanded their ranges both within Africa and beyond it, they carried their tapeworms along for the ride. As hominins scavenged new game, the tapeworms adapted to new intermediate hosts. Hominins gradually developed the skills and weapons to hunt game, offering still more opportunities for their tapeworms. Neanderthals and other hominins hunted wild boar as well, and it’s likely that we infected them with the ancestors of today’s pork tapeworms.

Starting about 11,000 years ago, humans domesticated pigs many times over, both in East Asia and in the Near East. Now the trip from host to host became riduclously easy for the tapeworms. Instead of waiting for its wild boar host getting speared by a hunter, it could make the journey on the dinner plate. Judging from the deep split in the evolution of pork tapeworms, the parasites must have made two separate shifts from wild boar to domesticated pigs, in both East Asia and the Near East.

The genealogy of the tapeworms also matches up nicely with the human history of Madagascar. People only arrived on the island 2000 years ago. They came from two directions. Bantu farmers sailed from the west from Africa across the Mozambique channel. Asians came from the east, traveling thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean from Indonesia. Malagasy culture emerged from the mingling of these two origins. That culture also includes the livestock that the Bantu and Indonesians brought to the island. And those animals brought parasites with them that had been separated for almost 700,000 years, reaching back to a time when our ancestors had to invent fire or spoken language.

[Image: Chiang Mai University]

»  Motorola (NYSE: MOT) is replacing Google’s location service with Skyhook’s in “much” of its Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android-based phone lineup worldwide. [SAI]

»  Six Japanese mobile companies team up to create its own mobile app platform in March 2012. [Mobile Entertainment]

»  Five reasons iPhone vs. Android isn’t like Mac vs Windows. [O’Reilly Radar]

»  Apple’s iPad is no longer banned in Israel. [eWeek]

»  Some guidelines for using iPhone and Androids for your company. [InfoWorld]

»  Universal Music Group and mobile platform Mozes Connect expand content offerings and services for Spanish-speaking and bilingual music fans. [Release]

That’s how much Microsoft lost in Q3 with its the Online Services Division. (Read: Bing)

From the link:

During Microsoft’s fiscal third quarter, which ended March 31, the Online Services Division, or OSD, reported a 12 percent increase in revenue, which rose to US$566 million on the back of higher advertising revenue. That wasn’t enough to offset a surge in operating expenses during the period. The division’s quarterly loss grew by 73 percent to $713 million, compared to a loss of $411 million during the same period last year.

OSD includes Microsoft’s online advertising business, the Bing search engine, and its various MSN websites.

We kind of heard in the background a few times today that Whirlpool (WHR) had reached a new all-time high today, but we didn’t quite believe it.

But it’s absolutely true. After today’s strong earnings, the company is now above its all-time housing bubble highs again. This is the ultimate V.

From StockCharts.com:

Here’s a longer-term perspective (via Yahoo Finance) that really shows the jaw-dropping V.

Join the conversation about this story »

A couple of weeks ago, Netflix announced that it had reached a “deal” with Fox and Universal movies studios, in which it agreed to delay the release of their DVDs to its subscribers by 28 days. Netflix did the deal in order to maintain its access to movies for its streaming service, and the studios think it will help them sell more DVDs. The studios tried to get DVD rental service Redbox over a similar barrel by threatening its access to their DVDs. Redbox had already caved to Warner Bros., and has now done a similar deal to Netflix’s, with Fox and Universal. And, just like all the earlier deals, this one’s pretty stupid on the part of the movie studios. Let’s go over why.

Redbox offers two main benefits to its customers: convenience and price. Its machines are everywhere these days, and its $1 per night price capitalized on the widespread consumer displeasure with Blockbuster and other rental chains’ high prices and late fees. The Redbox customer is price sensitive; so is it really very likely that delaying the release of a movie by a month is going to get them to decide to shell out $15-$25 per movie to see it immediately after it’s released? The same goes for Netflix subscribers. If they’re already paying for their subscription service, why would they run out to buy a new release — particularly when they already have to wait to get some new releases anyway. The studios think they can force customers to change their behavior by controlling access to new movies. All this plan is going to do is to illustrate to them that the part of the market they’re aiming for with these delays really doesn’t care enough — or cares about other factors more — to behave any differently.

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Kitten Cannon is a simple game produced by Hands-On Mobile and sold on the Android Market for $0.99. The goal of Kitten Cannon is to launch a kitten, puppy, or baby monkey out of a cannon the longest distance you can by any means possible. After launching your animal of choice, you will notice small TNT packages, trampolines, Venus fly traps, and death spikes. TNT and trampolines propel your animal longer distance while death spikes and Venus fly traps stop you in your tracks.

The cannon has a power meter that goes up and down. The more “full” it is, the further your initial shot goes. You also pick the level of the cannon for your shot as well. Of course the large part of the game is to hit the TNT and trampolines which are randomly placed along the trajectory of your cannon. For added difficulty, they are not placed in same spot every shot, meaning that no two shots are the same. This adds a great re-playability to the game, as you cannot simply find a certain power and angle to shoot to get the best distance. Instead, you must experiment and have a bit of luck to succeed.

Pros:

• Added Facebook and Twitter support for posting scores.
• Scoreboard
• $.99 price
• More than one option for projectile

Cons:

• Currently the only sound effects are for the Kitten. For a game as polished and well known as this, I would expect to have sound effects for all options, not just one.
• No Baby Seal choice

Final Verdict:
Like many games for your cellphone, you want something quick and fun that will keep you occupied and keep you interested. With the recent update slowing the power meter to a more reasonable speed and the addition of Facebook and Twitter support, this game has been taken to a new level. If support is added for better sound effects and more animals, this game would be a solid 10. Until then, rest assured that it is well worth the $.99 and will you keep you, your friends, and/or kids well occupied.

Note: This review was submitted by Adam Litke as part of our app review contest.

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by Agence France-Presse

Electric taxi in Tokyo.Photo: Better PlaceTOKYO—The world’s first taxis with easily replaceable batteries hit the streets of the Japanese capital Monday in a government-funded experiment.

The purpose-built cars that can run on easily swapped batteries—rather than wait to be recharged or switch to other fuels—were launched in Tokyo by Japan’s energy agency.

Three cars based on the Nissan Dualis will operate as normal taxis on the city’s streets during the 90-day experiment, a joint project with Better Place, a U.S. firm specializing in providing electric vehicle infrastructure.

“Tokyo can become the capital of electric vehicles,” said Kiyotaka Fujii, president of the Japanese unit of Better Place.

Ordinary Tokyo taxis can clock up as many as 185 miles a day, the company says, and the city is by far the world’s largest taxi market with 60,000 cabs—more than New York, Paris, and London combined.

While taxis represent only 2 percent of all passenger vehicles in Tokyo, they emit about 20 percent of all carbon dioxide from vehicles.

“By building a good business model, we believe this technology can have a significant impact on the economy and society,” said Japanese energy agency official Minoru Nakamura.

Related Links:

Oil rig leak and the week in fossil-fuel industry disasters

Rooftop farming and beekeeping boom in New York

‘Green tea party’ closes out U.S. Earth Day celebrations

Apple recently unveiled iPhone OS 4, which brought many much needed features to the platform, including a lot which our own Charles Jade thought would never make it through. Despite rectifying some long-standing oversights, however, Apple still hasn’t allowed its iDevices to sync wirelessly with people’s home computers.

One user and developer decided not to wait for Apple to implement the feature, and instead created his own iPhone app in order to solve the problem. Greg Hughes, the man in question, created a Wi-Fi syncing app that works with a companion desktop client to sync your iTunes library with your iPhone, iPod touch or even your iPad. Check out the video below to see it in action.

It may sound like something that shouldn’t even be possible using Apple’s closed playground of development APIs, and maybe Hughes is stepping slightly out of bounds, but the YouTube video showing the app in action proves that it does indeed work. Just because it works, though, doesn’t mean we’ll be seeing it available for purchase in the app store anytime soon. I think it’s pretty safe to say Apple won’t let this one ever see the light of day. It’ll probably play the old “feature duplication” card because it may or may not introduce this feature itself somewhere down the road.

It’s a shame because the implementation looks fantastic, and users wouldn’t even have to wait for a new iPhone OS iteration to get it, since it works with iPhone OS 3.X. Judging by the video, the app somehow tricks iTunes into thinking that an iPhone is mounted and then syncs any video and music with that device, so you wouldn’t get the full iPhone sync experience, but it would work perfectly for users like me who are also MobileMe subscribers, since we basically only plug in to update music anyway.

Hughes is doing one thing right: He’s promoting the heck out of the app before it even has a chance to run afoul of Apple’s review process. It worked for Opera Mini, although the organization behind that app has far more visibility and clout than does a single unknown developer acting on his own. Still, even if Apple does block the app, at least people will know it happened and possibly voice their disappointment, rather than just let it pass unnoticed.

We’ll probably see the Wi-Fi Sync app grace the halls of the jailbreak app stores even if Apple never lets it see the light of day through official channels, proving once again that no matter what improvements Apple makes to its software, there’s still always a reason to go rogue. Is Wi-Fi Sync enough justification for you?

It’s safe to say kooky Hollywood pair Randy and Evi Quaid won’t be missing any more court dates. The fugitive couple finally appeared in court over that unpaid hotel bill on Monday and were promptly tossed in the slammer!

Santa Barbara District Attorney Arnie Tolks said: “The court was angry. Judge Ochoa told the Quaids that he felt they’d been disrespectful and brought up the last time they came to court flashing their Golden Globe award. The Quaids apologized and told him that they didn’t mean to be disrespectful. They have been ordered to court on Wednesday for a bail hearing and premliminary hearing setting.”

The fed-up judge remanded them to custody and set bail at $100,000. The Quaids are due back in court on Wednesday.

BMW’s Wind Tunnel Plus Model Equals Nice Video

Harvard capped its nine-day celebration of Earth Day with a lawn festival in the shade of old trees.

On Malkin Quadrangle Saturday (April 24), experts were on hand in all things natural, from chocolate and heirloom squash to massage and planetary science.

The festival is the signature undergraduate event surrounding Earth Day every year, and is sponsored by the Harvard College Environmental Action Committee (EAC). Planning started in the fall, said event co-leader Jane Baldwin ’11, an Earth and Planetary Sciences concentrator. With her was co-leader Sachi Oshima ’13.

Some visitors carried the Harvard Earth Day Passport, a 17-item checklist of questions. Answer them all, or get a line initialed, and you could get a free Nalgene bottle. The Harvard Outing Club led off the passport session with this zinger: “How many spikes does a crampon have?” (Answer: 12.)

Passport holders had to quiz Sharon, Mass., farmer Jim Ward, the co-owner of Ward’s Berry Farm, on what three heirloom squash he sold to Harvard. (Answer: Long Island cheese squash, New England blue hubbard, and Georgia candy roaster.) Ward also showed onlookers how to cut seed potatoes for planting. And he showed off what was fresh from the farm that morning: stalks of rhubarb piled in a basket.

“The lesson is eating seasonally,” said Ward, a first-timer at the Harvard Earth Day festival. “Savor a thing when it’s in season.”

Heather Henriksen, director of Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (OFS), said 25 to 40 percent of the produce served at Harvard dining halls, in season, comes from regional producers.

Passport or not, quizzes were the language of the day. Lucien Weiss ’10 ran all-comers through the paces of a recycling race. Quick: What can be recycled? Composted? “You guys are on the inside track to victory,” he told one pair of Leverett House visitors, timing them at 27 seconds.

Weiss, a Phorzheimer House chemistry concentrator, is a “REP rep,” one of 20 House-based representatives of the Resource Efficiency Program run by OFS and the Office of Physical Resources at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). They are peer-to-peer counselors on all issues sustainable.

When not timing racers, Weiss gave tours of a faux dorm room set out in the sunlight, a table and bookcase showcasing the right gear: an EPEAT (green-rated) computer, power strip, lamp with CFL (compact fluorescent) bulbs, and reusables  such as a shopping bag, dishes, silverware, and a water bottle.

“They learn stuff,” though fun is the point too, said Henriksen, who helped out at a table demonstrating green building materials. “It captures the enthusiasm of the student groups involved.”

Quizzes, demonstrations and lessons from a local farmer all provide inspiration, said Rachel Mak ’10 of the four-hour festival. “It’s a great way to get people engaged.”

She was awarded one of Harvard’s first student sustainability grants, announced last week (April 23) by OFS. Mak designed a project for creating herb gardens in all the Houses. “We no longer have to buy herbs,” she said of the Adams House pilot this year.

As for growing things: The new Harvard Community Garden was tabling at the Earth Day festival too, inviting visitors to assemble their own sun tea mixes from fragrant sachets of mint, calendula, and other ingredients.

“This is just a preview” of what the garden itself will soon bring, said Louisa Denison ’11, one of the project’s student leaders.

Competing for nose time with the subtlety of garden mint was the aroma of grilling beef patties, courtesy of another festival first-timer, b.good, a Harvard Square restaurant mainstay.

Co-founder and owner Jon Olinto was serving up mini-burgers made from organic, hormone-free, grass-and-grain-fed beef from the Pineland Farms, a Maine-based cooperative.

“I never thought it would be possible,” said Olinto, whose six outlets now serve only regional beef. (In New England, local beef producers are scarce.) His Earth Day-style idea is to support regional farms and trim away the high environmental price of shipping food long distances.

Nearby, giving away fruit and sweet potato chips, were members of Vegitas, aka the Harvard College Vegetarian Society. Their message: A plant-based diet steps lightly on Mother Earth by using fewer resources to create healthier foods.

Along with the mix of smells, food lifestyles, and brain-squeezing quizzes, the festival offered music, including the Harvard-based band Gnome, singer-songwriter Caitria O’Neill ’11, and the Harvard College American Music Association.

But after two acts, there was time out for the festival’s highest moment of noisy drama, the awarding of the Green Cup, the annual eco-competition among Harvard Houses. Looking at the cup, a trash-like tier of recycled objects, Brandon Geller ’08 said, “I would love to have this in my room.” (He is coordinator of the undergraduate REP program.)

Besides the cup itself, the winning House got a check for $1,040. The extra $40, said Geller, is in honor of the 40th Earth Day.

He started the countdown. Third place was a tie between eco-powerhouse Mather and up-and-coming Dunster. Second place went to annual eco-tough guy Lowell. The winner was Adams House.

Tumult and shouting followed, as a joyous scrum from Adams House rushed the stage.