Irrational preferences for rare products are likely to drive the few remaining caviar sturgeon in the Caspian Sea to extinction, warn biologists in France. They have shown that snobbish attitudes drive a strong preference for caviar supposedly from “rare” species, even when the samples are the same.

Your child may be destined to become a walking land yacht
With waistlines increasing rapidly around the world, a group of researchers at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine predict that by 2030, almost 58% of the world’s population will be overweight or obese.

A single 550-kg cow produces between 800 to 1,000 liters of emissions each day.
In an attempt to understand the extent of cow flatulence on global warming, scientists in Argentina are strapping plastic bags to the backs of cows to capture their emissions.

 
Henry Paulson, left, and Ben Bernanke at a House hearing.
Alarmed by the growing financial stress at the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies, senior Bush administration officials are considering a plan to have the government take over one or both of the companies and place them in a conservatorship if their problems worsen, people briefed […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYBLTf3enXc

Gary Rosenzweig goes to the Apple Store at Cherry Creek Mall in Denver, Colorado to check out the line for the iPhone 3G. More videos after the jump.

 
Sperm have great difficulty finding their way out of a fat man
Too many fatty foods are dangerous not only to men’s waistlines, but to their sperm production.
In research presented on Wednesday at a meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, scientists found that obese men have worse sperm than normal-weight men.

 
 Side effects are often worse than the cure
Certain antibiotic drugs such as Bayer AG’s Cipro need stronger “black box” warnings about the risk of tendinitis and ruptured tendons, US health regulators said.

 
Good news for anyone living near an airport: someone’s just thought of a way to quiet down those noisy jet planes. Dimitri Papamoschou at the University of California filed a patent earlier this year for a jet-engine silencer. Recognizing that a great deal of the noise jets create is due to turbulence in fast-flowing air […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFW7PABbJYQ

 The Haboob
This is a video shot on May 27, 2001 while videographer was being chased across northwest Oklahoma by a severe line of storms with 100 mph winds.  Second video after the jump.
 

 
 They will also need a better wiring system
India’s demand for power will soar to a whopping 3,15,000 MW by 2017, requiring an investment of $600 billion if the economy keeps its pace of growth at 8%, a McKinsey report has said.

 
 Is your building immune?
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan (U of S) are designing a ventilation system that could protect schools, hospitals, and other public buildings from chemical warfare and bioterrorist attacks, thus making the buildings “immune”.

Dutch coffee shops face a new challenge when a ban on smoking tobacco in restaurants and cafes came into effect yesterday.
The owners claim the law, which will allow customers to light up potent tobacco-free pure cannabis joints but ban milder spliffs in which tobacco is mixed with cannabis, threatens to put hundreds of them out […]

 
A Dying Breed?
As the birthrate in European countries drops well below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children born to every woman, to somewhere between 1.1 and 1.4 children — the declining population will first be felt in the playgrounds.

 
Parents, beware! Guzzling alcohol at home “to escape” from depression or tension could have a negative effect on kids, irrespective of the amount of the drinks, a new study has revealed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGE92upfQM

How many times do I have to tell you, cutting corners on the explosives never pays
 This is what happens when you don’t use enough explosives to knock down a building.
 

Pretty soon TV watching will become so all-consuming that we’ll have to do it in our sleep
US Internet users ages 12 and older surveyed in June 2008 spent 6.1 hours daily with video-based entertainment, according to Solutions Research Group’s “Multiplatform Video Report.” They concluded that about four hours per day were spent on […]

they’re lining up for it because it works
A peanut butter paste fortified with milk and vitamins is helping to save the lives of thousands of malnourished children in crisis-torn Niger Hilinki Tchadoua’s black eyes sparkle with life. Huge saucer-like objects, they stare out of a tiny face as if she is barely able to believe her […]

 
stop overfishing and the fish increase - no kidding?
A controversial decision to halt commercial and recreational fishing across vast areas of the Great Barrier Reef has proven remarkably effective for reviving coral trout numbers.
“Everyone is a little surprised,” admits Garry Russ, a marine biologist at James Cook University in Townsville.

Chinese hackers
They’re in our computers, reading our files. The Chinese government, that is, according to two U.S. Congressmen who recently accused Beijing of sending hackers to ferret out secret documents stored on Congressional computers. The Chinese deny any involvement, but if they were lying, would we be able to prove it?
The answer, according to computer […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KS0pSwdQfbY

 
Dragon Skin is the most amazing body armour. Even a grenade can’t go through it! Yet the Army still won’t buy it. Details after the jump.

 
Abortion rates in the UK have skyrocketed
Pressure to make sex education compulsory in UK schools is likely to mount as latest abortion figures hovered around the 200,000 mark, with a 10 per cent rise in terminations among under-aged girls.
The official survey showed there were 198,500 abortions last year, up by nearly 30,000 in the […]

 
After a few hiccups and false starts, downloads of Mozilla’s highly-anticipated Firefox 3 web browser are flowing smoothly. But for a period of about two hours, the demand for the open-source browser was too much for Mozilla’s servers to handle.

 
A study by psychologist William Szlemko at Colorado State University in Fort Collins that recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys to their cars has found a link between road rage and the number of personalized items on or in their vehicle.

Little does he know how much they hate him
The image of the United States remains overwhelmingly negative in most of the predominantly Muslim countries surveyed, a latest global poll revealed on its website.
According to the Pew Global Attitudes Project, in Jordan, one of the key regional allies of the United States, 79 percent respondents have […]

 
 Gambling addiction is a serious problem, and this is something casinos will hate
A drug found effective in alcohol addiction also curbs the urge to gamble, according to a study.
Seventy seven people participated in the double-blind, placebo controlled study. Fifty eight men and women took 50, 100 or 150 milligrams of naltrexone every day for 18 […]