Secret Santa

An anonymous “Secret Santa” traveled to New Jersey and New York last week to hand out $100 bills to people who’d lost their homes and possessions in Hurricane Sandy.  The Kansas City, Mo., businessman spent a day in Elizabeth, N.J., and Staten Island, N.Y., giving C-notes to the poor and homeless; he plans to give away $100,000 this holiday season.  He was […]

Read more

Bad week for:

Self-awareness, after Donald Trump attacked conservative pundits George Will, Jonah Goldberg, and Stephen Hayes for mocking his Republican presidential candidacy, calling them “boring” and “dumb as a rock” and their publications “dying.”  Said Trump: “The weakness of conservatives is that they destroy each other.”

Read more

Hackers In China

A cybersecurity firm has traced scores of attacks on U.S. corporate and government computers to a single building in Shanghai. The security firm, Mandiant, found that the attacks originated in a 12-story building known as the headquarters of People’s Liberation Army Unit 61398. Intelligence analysts say that the unit has about 2,000 employees and 1,000 servers, and is the most […]

Read more

Shooting His Computer

A Colorado man was given a ticket by police this week for shooting his balky computer eight times and “killing” it.  Police say Lucas Hinch, 37, had become “fed up with fighting his computer for the last several months,” so he took it outside and repeatedly blasted it with a handgun.  Hinch said he didn’t realize he was breaking the […]

Read more

Long Dark Winter at the South Pole

Winter at the South Pole

Few people have traveled to the South Pole since Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott reached the bottom of the world in the austral summer of 1911-12. Fewer still stay for the six months of darkness in the winter at the South Pole. The first crew to winter at the South Pole was in 1957, but only 1,267 people have spent the […]

Read more

Abstinence From Smiling

A British woman has abstained from smiling for the last 40 years in an extreme attempt to ward off wrinkles.  Tess Christian, 50, told the Daily Mail that she adopted a permanent poker face as a child to prevent laughter lines around her mouth, eyes, and forehead. “My dedication has paid off,” she said.  “I don’t have a single line […]

Read more

Why There’s a Skyscraper in the Amazon

The $9 billion, 1,000-ft. (305 m) Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory—now the tallest structure in South America—recently entered the final stages of construction. It will be inaugurated in August and fully operational by 2017. Here’s what Brazil and Germany, which co-funded the project, are hoping it will accomplish: Gather data The tower’s height and state-of-the- art instruments will enable scientists to […]

Read more
1 10 11 12 13 14 34