ET: waiting for your call?
If you had the chance to send a message into space, what would it say? “Greetings, fellow sentient beings”? “We come in peace”? “Hi… we’ve kind of messed up our planet, and we wondered if by chance anyone out there had a spare one?”
 

 
One important factor that can explain Avatar’s success at the box office is certainly the 3D experience viewers can have when they walk into the right movie theater. But what about watching Avatar in “4D”? In Korea, you can.

A swordfish attack punctured an oil loading pipe in Angola recently, causing a three-day delay in tanker shipments of Girassol crude. Total, the French oil company which operates the pipeline, declared force majeure on shipments. Total later said that swordfish had damaged a flexible loading pipe. Declaring force majeure frees an operator from supply obligations [...]

How many ways can you spell YUMMY!

The day when restaurants will serve garlic grasshoppers or beetle larva skewers is getting closer in Costa Rica, where scientists are “growing” insects for human consumption.
Entomologist Manuel Zumbado’s research into this alternative food source is inspired by practices in Africa, where insects have long been part of people’s diet.
With [...]

If you’re stealing a car these days, there’s a good chance you’re not bothering to actually pick the locks, but if you are, your job is about to get a little easier. A device called the Electronic Key Impressioner is inserted into a car door and scans the position of the tumblers inside. ..

 
The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world’s oldest cultures.
Boa Sr, who lived through the 2004 tsunami, the Japanese occupation and diseases brought by British settlers, was the last native of the island chain who was fluent in Bo.

My entire life, the ketchup packet has remained a constant. Its saw-tooth edge and slightly bulbous form, enclosing not nearly enough ketchup, is something that, like a grand oak of food package design, you expected never to change. Well, my friends, Heinz has taken the extraordinary step of replacing a product everyone has been satisfied [...]

Zero Rupee banknote
Special zero rupee banknotes have been issued by an anti-corruption campaign to challenge India’s bribe culture.  Campaigners from the Fifth Pillar charity, which confronts corrupt officials using freedom of information legislation, have issued notes bearing the image of Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of its freedom struggle.
 

 In PART 1 of this series, we saw the first round of what seems to be turning into a dastardly trend. Now, Brian Krebs continues to scare the pants off of us with his ongoing series on sophisticated ATM skimmers (devices that capture your card number, working with a hidden camera to catch your PIN). [...]

When you strap on a typical running shoe, you may be fighting evolution.

Modern-day running shoes have changed the way people run, altering our gait from that of barefoot running — the manner by which people ran for thousands of years before the arrival of the cushioned shoes found on store shelves today — a new [...]

Leonardo DaVinci’s resume
Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an artificer, an armorer, a maker of things that go “boom”.
 

Most experts believe that the Himalayan glaciers will take centuries to melt
The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit.  Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but [...]

Apollo moon landing
A plan to return US astronauts to the moon “is dead,” a White House advisor on space issues said Friday, confirming reports that NASA will instead focus on developing commercial space transport.
 

A ceramic head found in a newly discovered Mayan tomb.
Mexican archaeologists have found an 1,100-year-old tomb from the twilight of the Maya civilization that they hope may shed light on what happened to the once-glorious culture.

UK citizens can claim a cash reward by attempting to peacefully arrest former prime minister The Reverend Tony for crimes of aggression.
Newspaper columnist and author George Monbiot has launched a website offering guidelines for people seeking to undertake a citizen’s arrest of Blair, as well as accepting donations to reward those who try.

Punxsutawney Phil
The animal rights group PETA says Punxsutawney Phil is being badly treated by the crowds and noise at the annual Groundhog Day festival on Feb. 2 and should be replaced with a robotic groundhog .
 

Did HAARP cause the damage? Hugo says so.

Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez Wednesday accused the United States of causing the destruction in Haiti by testing a ‘tectonic weapon’ to induce the catastrophic earthquake that hit the country last week.
President Chavez said the US was “playing God” by testing devices capable of creating eco-type catastrophes, the Spanish [...]

The month of January offered those who track the ups and downs of the U.S. economy 92 significant data releases and announcements to digest. That’s according to a calendar compiled by the investment bank UBS. The number doesn’t include corporate earnings, data from abroad or informal indicators like, say, cardboard prices (a favorite of Alan [...]

Is there life after death?
Is there life after death? Theologians can debate all they want, but radiation oncologist Dr. Jeffrey Long says if you look at the scientific evidence, the answer is unequivocally yes. Drawing on a decade’s worth of research on near-death experiences — work that includes cataloguing the stories of some 1,600 people [...]

‘Avatar ‘ will surpass ‘Titanic’ as top film of all time
Leave it to James Cameron to sink the Titanic.  His sci-fi opus Avatar sailed past The Dark Knight to become the second highest-grossing film of all time and is bearing down on his 1997 epic Titanic, which holds the title with $601 million.
 

Joseph Stiglitz
In an exclusive extract from his new book, Freefall, the former World Bank chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, reveals why banks should be split up and why the West must cut consumption. 
In the Great Recession that began in 2008, millions of people in America and all over the world lost their homes and jobs. Many [...]

Is the Mona Lisa a disguised self-portrait?

Scientists seeking permission to exhume the remains of Leonardo da Vinci plan to reconstruct his face to discover whether his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, is a disguised self-portrait.
A team from Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, has asked to open the [...]

Scott Allen over at Mental Floss posted a very timely piece about the warm climate countries that participate in Winter Olypics.

The Winter Olympics are traditionally dominated by athletes from countries where winter brings freezing temperatures and snow, but that hasn’t stopped a number of athletes from more tropical climates from infiltrating the ranks of the [...]

A mushroom is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. The word “mushroom” can also be used for a wide variety of gilled fungi, with or without stems, and the term is used even more generally, to describe both the fleshy fruiting bodies [...]

Felix Baumgartner to jump from the edge of space
This man—looking as badass as Ed Harris in The Right Stuff—is Felix Baumgartner. He actually has The Right Stuff: The cojones to reach the edge of space in a weather balloon. Up to 120,000 feet—and then jump. Video and pic)