The final Harry Potter book will have a record-breaking, backbreaking first printing of 12 million copies, publisher Scholastic Inc. announced Wednesday.

Benjamin Franklin heard a performance on a set of musical glasses in Cambridge by Edmund Delaval—probably in 1761—and decided to invent a more ‘convenient arrangement’. He initially named his invention the ‘glassy-chord’, but changed it in early 1762 to the ‘armonica’, named after the Italian word for ‘harmony’. (w/video)

It could prevent "The Big Sleep."  Japanese scientists are working on a car seat which can detect when a driver is about to fall asleep at the wheel.

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was canceled after one of the explorers got frostbite.

Through a study by CNW Marketing called “Dust to Dust,” the total combined energy is taken from all the electrical, fuel, transportation, materials (metal, plastic, etc) and hundreds of other factors over the expected lifetime of a vehicle. The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles – [...]

Seth Godin:  My best advice:  Fire half your salesforce.  Great salespeople are not just better than good. They’re playing a totally different game. 

When people exercise, their muscles consume energy and generate heat as a byproduct. When enough heat accumulates internally, it can limit exercise performance. Two Stanford biologists have developed a method for cooling that maximizes heat transfer through the palms of the hands.

The Hong Kong Food and Environmental Hygiene Department is planning to introduce coffins made of recycled paper, which have multiple advantages over the traditional wooden coffins in terms of cost, time and energy consumption.

Consumers said that they search online after exposure to ads or products in magazines (47%) and newspapers (42%), on TV (43%) and while reading articles (44%).

Two-thirds of Canada’s rapid population increase over the past five years came from immigration – a force that in coming decades will account for almost all of the country’s growth, according to census figures released Tuesday.

Despite a 3.4% decline in ad spending in 2005, the last full year for which figures are available, at $21 billion in overall spending the automotive industry is still the single-largest US advertising category. So, where auto ad dollars go often determines where other marketing budgets follow.

Consumers are bombarded with warnings about identity theft. Publicised threats range from mailbox thieves and lost laptops to the higher-tech methods of email scams and corporate data invasions. Now, experts are warning that photocopiers could be a culprit as well.