Computer hackers have managed to shut down power to entire cities by breaking into the systems of electricity companies and then demanding money, a senior CIA analyst has claimed.

What would happen if all the women were to disappear from a town, leaving the
men to not only work, but also to take care of the family and the
home? That is what the BBC plans to find out in this small Canadian town.

A farmer who secretly built a castle and lived in it for four years while it was disguised as a stack of straw is now battling to save it from demolition.

Your car exhaust is a barbeque now…

With the Buffalo keyboard and built-in Skype phone,
you’ll have everything you need to communicate with the outside world
right at your fingertips. This is one of those technolgy that could instantly push Skype and other VOIP services to a whole new level.

When I think of fiber optic lighting, all that comes to mind are those awful 1970s starburst lamps. So I was so thrilled when I came across these beautiful organic designs
which use the same basic lighting technology that begat such ugliness in the first place. (w/pics)

It is well known that too much soda can increase the risk of diabetes and obesity. But when it comes to kidney problems, is there a difference between colas and other kinds of soda?

Booby-trapped web pages are growing at an alarming rate with
unsuspecting firms acting for nurseries for botnet farmers, according
to a new study. Security watchers at Sophos are discovering 6,000 new infected
webpages every day, the equivalent of one every 14 seconds. Four in
five (83 per cent) of these webpages actually belong to innocent
companies and individuals, unaware that […]

The idea that there may be life on Mars has been around for
centuries, but the theory got a dubious boost from recently released photos of
the surface of Mars (taken by the NASA robot Spirit) apparently showing a
human-like figure. Several Internet sites have glommed onto the image and
suggested the figure could be alive. (w/pic)

India’s second largest IT
company, Infosys Technologies Ltd, made a presentation the business roadmap to
2020 at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Here are some of their conclusions.

Social media network growth may be overhyped. Nearly seven out of 10 senior media executives surveyed in December 2007 by AdMedia Partners said they thought so. However, a majority of
respondents said that growth predicted for mobile content, integrated ad networks and gaming was accurate.

German scientists recently showed what many of us suspected but
could not prove — some people just don’t learn. The German researchers
have found a genetic factor that affects our ability to learn from our errors.
The scientists demonstrated that men carrying the A1 mutation are less
successful at learning to avoid mistakes than men who do not carry […]