In 1938, Alfred Kazin began work on his first book, “On Native Grounds.”
The child of poor Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, he had studied at City
College. Somehow, with little money or backing, he managed to write an
extraordinary book, setting the great American intellectual and
literary movements from the late nineteenth century to his own time in
a richly […]

Within nine years the National Helium Reserve will be depleted,
according to an article in Science Daily. It quotes Dr. Lee Sobotka, of
Washington University in St. Louis: ‘Helium is non-renewable and
irreplaceable. Its properties are unique and unlike hydrocarbon fuels
(natural gas or oil), there are no biosynthetic ways to make an
alternative to helium.

Researchers at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology have developed an exoskeleton for farmers. The idea is to assist the aging Japanese farmers in their daily routine by giving them greater strength to complete their work, much of which is manual labor.

This is cool!  The Evolution Keyboard is a split extended
keyboard that can be used on a desktop or mounted to a chair. It separates
the left and right hand sides of the keyboard into two separate […]

The small software applications
known as widgets let users share music, photos and videos on social
networks. They’re hot right now because they help boost social network
traffic and ad revenue, according to a January 2008 Forbes article.

A concept "Sky Commuter aircraft" that absorbed $6 mil in startup capital is for sale on eBay. The seller appears to be one of the engineers, and the long description associated with the listing is a heartbreaking (and eccentrically punctuated) story of a beautiful, dashed dream.

A historic passenger jet flight from Australia to Antarctica touched down smoothly on a blue ice runway Friday, launching the only regular airlink between the continents.

After solemnly reading their wills, seven perfectly healthy university students climb into caskets in a dimly lit hall.
"I want to give all of you one more day to live, but it’s time to be placed into coffins," a man in a black suit says in a resounding voice. "I hope your tired flesh and bodies […]

No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz.

Some people are said to drink like a fish, but in a recent event here it was the fish that were getting their fill of alcohol. The fish were the drinkers in a strange ceremony dating back to the Edo Period in which lively carp are made to consume a large dose of sake as […]

Geoff Ramsey: While video and social networks are among the hottest new ad formats today, they will account for only
$2.9 billion, or about 10% of total online advertising dollars projected for
2008. I believe that these trends, while important, are superseded by three deeper,
more fundamental transformations taking place in the media world.

Markus Frind, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” —
in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face
could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online
dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on
autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty […]