Some people talks to dogs, cats, or even ghosts. Others talk to shopping carts…

Dan Phiffer found this image on a message board, and by his calculations, he says it’s accurate.
Left: All the water in the world (1.4087 billion cubic kilometres of it) including sea water, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds, etc.
Right: All the air in the atmosphere (5140 trillion tonnes of it) gathered into a ball at [...]

You know you have a problem when you have to start selling off your nuclear assets to pay the cleanup costs for your nuclear assets, all while acquiring new nuclear assets.
It may seem odd, but that’s just what the British government is doing. Thursday night, assets from Britain’s nuclear power stations were made available to [...]

Our favorite frightening new discovery is a toy-sized helicopter that’s the latest rage in police technology.
The “microdrone” may be small, but for police it’s a powerful new weapon. It’s equipped with an array of technological weaponry, including video and infrared cameras. Images from the camera can be beamed to operators as far as 500 yards [...]

Some animals use a bad smell for defense; others find it attractive in each other. Environmental Graffiti has seven of the most vile. Believe it or not, the skunk came in at only #3!
There are 11 species of skunk, two in Asia and nine in the Americas. All of them have the ability to [...]

Regardless of nationality, as soon as a student completes the 8th grade, the clock starts ticking. From that very moment the child has approximately -…Two Million Minutes until high school graduation…Two Million Minutes to build their intellectual foundation…Two Million Minutes to prepare for college and ultimately career…Two Million Minutes to go from a teenager to [...]

Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, [...]

They operate from a bare apartment on a Chinese island. They are intelligent 20-somethings who seem harmless. But they are hard-core hackers who claim to have gained access to the world’s most sensitive sites, including the Pentagon.

In 2005, Microsoft made a “Jump In” ad for their Xbox 360 console that never aired. The ad, deemed too controversial, showed commuters on a subway platform playing “shoot ‘em up” with their fingers (Bang!).

We don’t know exactly what to call this, but we’ll go with “steampunk taxidermy”, a new art form being developed by Lisa Black.  More photos after the jump.
 

 
Women like these at a clinic in Anand can earn much more as surrogate mothers than at normal jobs.
An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as [...]

Studies show that children with odd names get worse grades and are less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They are overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.

Of those surveyed  in Pew’s March Report, between October and December 2007, 51% said it would be hard to give up their mobile phone. Only 45% said so for the Internet, 43% said television and 40% said their landline phone.
This is a sharp reversal from 2002, when the same questions were asked. Back then, 63% [...]

 
China’s economy grew by 65.5 percent over the past five years, or an average annual increase of 10.6 percent, to become the world’s fourth largest economy, Premier Wen Jiabao said at the annual parliament session on Wednesday.
He said the country’s gross domestic product reached 24.66 trillion yuan (US$3.425 trillion) last year, while total government revenue [...]

 
If you have been contemplating going back to school to get a degree, this might convince you: a study by the Harvard School of Medicine has shown that people with a better education tend to live longer.
“Between the 1980s and 2000, life expectancy increases occurred nearly exclusively among high-education groups,” the [...]