Riesel, Texas: A group of young Texas boys helped to keep an elderly woman out of jail by mowing her unkempt lawn which had grown way above what city code allows. Suttle says she never received the notice to appear in court regarding her lawn. As a result, Riesel police issued a warrant for the arrest of the 75-year-old property […]
Read more
To the surprise of doctors, new research on acupuncture has found that the ancient Chinese healing technique provides real pain relief. Acupuncture involves sticking needles into specific points in the body that Chinese healers believe contain unseen energy pathways; the needles supposedly stimulate the flow of “qi,” or energy. Western medicine has viewed these claims with deep skepticism, contending that […]
Read more
Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]
Read more
Public urination is a problem in most major cities of the world, but now another town is using technology to “pee back” the perpetrators, so to speak. Authorities in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, had the walls in this well-known red light district sprayed with a super-hydrophobic nano-coating which is so water repellent that, as tech website gizmag.com […]
Read more
Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
Read more
■ Brazilian taxi driver Adilson Luiz da Cruz often finds lost phones and forgotten umbrellas in his cab, but last week he hit the jackpot: 40 tickets to the World Cup. Despite his lifelong dream of going to the tournament, plus the thousands of dollars he could have earned by scalping the tickets, the cabbie didn’t hesitate to do the […]
Read more
Meet “Pepper,” said Richard Lawler in Engadget.com. Japanese telecom firm SoftBank unveiled a new, robot last week that it claims “can recognize human emotion” thanks to technology that allows it to “communicate through emotion, speech, or body language.” Pepper is also equipped with microphones and proximity sensors, and will feature upgradable software, allowing users to install apps and updates to […]
Read more
Feeling itchy from a sunburn, a bug bite or some other skin irritation is miserable, but the pleasure you get from scratching it isn’t just the absence of pain. It feels legitimately good to scratch, and the reason is fascinating. A 2008 study at Wake Forest University hooked people up to a MRI scanner and monitored brain activity when they […]
Read more
Meditation doesn’t just improve mental and physical health in the present. It also slows the aging process, and can help meditators stay mentally sharp into old age, a new study has found. Once people reach their mid- to late 20s, their brains begin to lose volume and weight, which can eventually result in the loss of some functional ability. But […]
Read more
The Antikythera Mechanism: The original mechanism apparently came out of the Mediterranean as a single encrusted piece. Soon afterward it fractured into three major pieces. Other small pieces have broken off in the interim from cleaning and handling, and still others were found on the sea floor by the Cousteau expedition. Other fragments may still be in storage, undiscovered […]
Read more