From the Turkish Airline workers who sacrificed a camel at Istanbul airport to celebrate a job well done to the German who invented snug spray-on condoms, the world was full of offbeat news in 2006.

Huge celebrations have been held in Romania and Bulgaria to mark their accession to the European Union, 17 years after the fall of Communism. Their entry brings EU membership to 27 - up from 15 three years ago - and a population of half a billion.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have demonstrated a prototype that could offer a new way to power gadgets. The prototype, which consists of plastic and flexible electronics, can wirelessly supply power to any device that touches its surface.

A magnetic resonance imaging machine at the University of Illinois at Chicago tracks neurons in a way that reveals how real-time thoughts form, a report says.

Astronauts are trained to withstand as much as nine times the force of gravity. (Three Gs, by comparison, could make the average guy pass out.) But even the toughest among them fall out of the running when it comes to a launch concept from a small civilian company in Goleta, California. To survive the ride […]

Trying to avoid the chill that sweeps through the office during the winter months, we have been forced to either remain stationary, or do a bunny hop to get around in our USB heating slippers.

Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania have announced details for a suspended-load ergonomic backpack that reduces the force of a backpacks load on the wearer by 86%, allowing wearers to run far more comfortably with heavy loads.

China as a nation has grown in stature since unleashing its economy more than two decades ago but so have its people, who are getting taller, Xinhua News Agency reported.

Pregnant women who eat fish more than three times a week could be putting their baby at risk because of higher mercury levels in their blood, according to a study by Taiwanese researchers.

According to the NPD Group, the smartphone market in the US has entered a "growth spurt." October 2006 sales soared 230% from January of this year, rising from 216,000 units to nearly 715,000.

People with coronary artery disease who are taking aspirin to thin the blood and thereby lower their odds of having a heart attack, run the risk of having a major adverse cardiac event if they stop taking aspirin, according to a new report.

Recently the flourishing virtual economy of online community Second Life produced its first real-life millionaire, estate agent Ailin Graef, and announced it had reached the one million member mark. However, all’s not entirely well in the virtual world.

The more your belly sticks out, the greater your risk of developing heart disease, a new study shows.

IBM took a look at the future - five years out, bringing together 150,000 people from 104 countries to pitch in their prognostications. Then the company narrowed that list down to the five innovations that were the "most impactful, and probably the most likely to be successful" by 2012, said George Pohle, IBM’s vice president for business […]

Robert Cringely:  Several readers asked me to comment this week on a very entertaining blog post from New Zealand: A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection, by Peter Gutmann (it is in this week’s links). The essay characterizes the Digital Rights Management in Windows Vista as a suicide note from Microsoft because Vista’s DRM […]

Dissatisfied with existing designs, a small Amherst, Mass., company called Skyacht Aircraft is working on building a better hot-air balloon. Actually, Skyacht is touting its project as a "personal blimp"–that is, "a hot-air balloon that can be maneuvered in nearly perfect quiet," according to the company’s Web site.

Named in honor of Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, the Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.

Maryland and Virginia are moving ahead with a form of congestion pricing on the Beltway and Interstate 95. In exchange for building additional lanes, contractors will be allowed to collect tolls that will vary by the minute. When traffic is heavy, the price will rise to whatever level is needed to keep the express lanes […]

Big charities keep getting bigger. But are they the best places for most people to send their hard-earned dollars? With so much money flowing to the most élite fund raisers, it’s a fair question.

Millions of Americans live on the margins of the American economy, depending on the likes of payday lenders and pawnshops, who charge excessive interest rates and superhigh fees for their services.

Moderate housework can help women substantially to cut their risk of developing breast cancer, according to a study.

Michael Rogers:  Laptop computers now outsell desktops in stores; for the majority of consumers, the smaller devices serve perfectly well as their main computer.  That would have been hard to imagine back in the mid-Eighties, when IBM and Apple introduced their first primitive laptops, each weighing in at about twelve pounds. And for long after […]

A Supreme People’s Court spokesman on Thursday reiterated China’s intentions to exert strict controls over the application of the death penalty ahead of January 1, 2007, the date the Supreme People’s Court takes back the power of death penalty review.

A US company claimed to have developed a weight reduction pill which works better and faster than existing drugs and also could cut the risk of heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

Contrary to the customary downbeat drumbeat of economic decline, the most recent numbers actually show a pickup in manufacturing and a bottoming in the housing slump.