Where you live makes a big difference in how long you live.  After the jump is a list of countries ranked by life expectancy.

 
Two security researchers demonstrated a way to crack cellular phone encryption during this week’s Black Hat security conference in DC:

This is amazing: more than a mile below the surface of the Antarctic waters, scientists have discovered a world of huge worms, giant jellyfish, and spiders as big as dinner plates!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVFnKaXIYM

Eskilstunarevyn, a Swedish comedy group, played Bach’s Air using … 31 (beer?) bottles! The bottles were filled with different volumes of water in order for each to produce a distinct note.
via Neatorama

 
Furious Muslims have heavily criticized Walkers crisps after it emerged that certain varieties of the manufacturer’s products contain trace elements of alcohol.
Some crisp types use minute amounts of alcohol as a chemical agent to extract certain flavors.
The report in Asian newspaper Eastern Eye, highlights concerns raised by shopkeeper Besharat Rehman, who owns a halal supermarket […]

Gatorade erodes teeth faster than Coke, a new study shows.
That doesn’t mean that Gatorade and other sports drinks are necessarily harder on your teeth than are Coke and other soft drinks. But it may be a surprise that they aren’t any better, either, says researcher Leslie A. Ehlen, a student at the […]

Electronics giant Philips is all set to create a sensor bed that keeps a close watch on the health of heart failure patients, a project being funded by the European Union.
One of the aims of the ‘My Heart’ project is to help spot heart problems several days before they become life […]

Italian car designer Leonardo Fioravanti (who worked for Pininfarina for a number of years) has developed a car prototype without windshield wipers. This amazing technological feat is made possible thanks to the use of 4 layers of glass modified using nanotechnology. The first layer filters the sun and repels the water. The second layer, […]

This is very cool. Arthur Benjamin is a “mathemagician”. In this unusual video he races a team of people with calculators to figure out 3-digit squares in his head, and performs a massive mental calculation. Here’s how he does it.

Authorities in a remote Russian region at the centre of dozens of reports of UFO sightings have started work on a £3 million centre to attract alien spotters.

From a distance, the large red aluminum contraption parked on the frozen shore of Lake Superior here looks like a small houseboat perched on skis. Up closer, as schoolchildren pile in with their backpacks and iPods, it becomes clear that the mystery vehicle, with two large fans on the back, is something else entirely.

The loss or misplacement of credit cards is a common worry. No one wants a thief to find it and go on a spending spree. You may not have to worry about it much longer, thanks to this new product in development. It’s a collaboration by Swiss company AXSionics and Siemens.

Ever since US Internet usage became widespread, marketers have been tracking online usage to see if Web time was coming at the expense of TV time.
Now, IDC has found that Internet is the medium on which US online users spend the most time–32.7 hours per week, almost twice as much as they spend watching television. […]

 
They were certainly creative geniuses. But what was the common trait in Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton? Well, both had “autism”.

The Scan-It is a toy airport metal-detector to help your kids train to be productive members of the panopticon police state.

I.B.M. scientists have measured the force needed to nudge one atom.
About one-130-millionth of an ounce of force pushes a cobalt atom across a smooth, flat piece of platinum.
Pushing the same atom along a copper surface is easier, just one-1,600-millionth of an ounce of force.
The scientists report these minuscule findings in Friday’s issue of the journal […]

This house is more of a sculpture than a dwelling. Taking cues from a Nautilus shell, the house is put together using ferrocement construction, a technique involving a frame of steel-reinforced chicken wire with a special two-inch-thick composite of concrete spread over it, resulting in a structure that’s earthquake-proof and maintenance-free. More photos after the […]

A 999-meter-long scarlet wedding dress is displayed in a shopping mall in Dalian, Northeast China’s Liaoning Province, February 21, 2008. The hand-knitted dress features 2,008 pieces of jade, 29 golden phoenixes and 880 peonies that took dressmakers three months to finish. More photos after the jump.

Over the past decade, the leisure activity most closely associated with corporate success in America has been in a kind of recession.
The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods […]

This is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s best speeches ever.

“Intellectual property” is one of those ideologically loaded terms that can cause an argument just by being uttered. The term wasn’t in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency.

People are keeping their cars and trucks longer as quality improves and the uncertain economy makes new purchases less appealing, according to a study released this week by automotive consulting firm R.L. Polk & Co.

A Canadian scientist has found that extra estrogen, which can get into rivers and lakes through the toilet-flushed urine of birth control takers, kills fish. Karen Kidd, an eco-toxicologist at the University of New Brunswick, “poisoned” a small lake in northwest Ontario with estrogen, and she found that the smallest fish in that lake, “fathead […]

Google is reportedly looking into investing in or buying a company called Space Data, which provides wireless voice and data services to remote areas with a fleet of weather balloons fitted with transceivers.

When given the option, 61% of Canadians would actually prefer to look at a newspaper advertisement rather than a TV commercial, according to an online survey conducted by Ipsos Reid on behalf of the Canadian Newspaper Association.
Overall, 66% of respondents indicated that they enjoyed the ads and product inserts found in newspapers. There was some […]