From the monthly archives: August 2007
Remember watching Back to the Future Part II, where they travel to 2015 (less than 8 years away) and the highways are in the sky? Back in 1989, this future seemed light years away and totally probable. Gotta love the movies! Now, Moller International is creating ‘flying saucer’ like cars that have eight [...]
Kevin Federline’s lawyer wants pop singer Britney Spears to pay some of her ex-husband’s legal expenses in their divorce case, US court documents show.
Attorney Mark Vincent Kaplan said in an August 26 declaration that Federline has “no net income” after various expenses, and that his financial support from Spears of 20,000 dollars [...]
Director Brian De Palma has stunned the Venice Film Festival with his harrowing new film about the horrors of the Iraq war.
Redacted is billed as a “fictional story inspired by true events”, following a group of US soldiers stationed in Iraq who rape a teenage girl and slaughter her family.
It is based on [...]
BEIJING (AP) – Hungry visitors to next summer’s Beijing Olympics won’t have to choose between “steamed crap” and “virgin chicken” if Chinese authorities succeed in ridding restaurant menus of mangled English translations.
The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list with 2,753 proposed names for dishes and drinks, designed to replace bizarre and [...]
KYOTO, Japan (Reuters) – German Chancellor Angela Merkel wants to offer developing countries a compromise pact on climate change and carbon dioxide emissions based on population size, but said on Friday that negotiations will be tough.
Merkel, who helped draw up the Kyoto Protocol on climate change as Germany’s environment minister in 1997, made [...]
VIENNA (Reuters) – Industrial nations were shying away from fixing stiff 2020 guidelines for greenhouse gases cuts at U.N. talks on Friday in what environmentalists said would be a vote for “dangerous” climate change.
A draft text at the U.N. talks dropped a demand that developed nations should be “guided” by a need for steep [...]
Few people have heard of the mite harvestman, and fewer still would recognize it at close range. The animal is a relative of the far more familiar daddy longlegs. But its legs are stubby rather than long, and its body is only as big as a sesame seed.
To find mite harvestmen, scientists go to [...]
WILLS POINT, Tex., Aug. 29 — Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.
Sheets of web [...]
The facts point out that your juicy sirloin steak is worse for the environment than your SUV. But does that mean we really need to put our forks down? Why can’t we still fight global warming while eating a cheeseburger — it’s better to be a meat-eating environmentalist than nothing at all. Amen. [...]
The New York Times ran an interesting article this week about a blogger who challenged NASA’s statistics on global warming and found an error. And then he started calling the head of the project names, like Jor-El?
Never underestimate the power of the blogosphere and a quarter of a degree to inflame [...]
GENEVA – The global airlines body IATA said on Monday it had placed its last order for paper tickets, clearing the way for air travel to be based entirely on electronic ticketing from June 1 next year.
“In just 278 more days, the paper ticket will become a collector’s item,” said Giovanni Bisignani, director general [...]
WASHINGTON — Scientists looking at a fledgling solar system have observed for the first time how water, considered a necessary ingredient for life, begins to make its way to newly forming planets.
They peered at an embryonic star called IRAS 4B located in our Milky Way galaxy about 1,000 light years from Earth in the [...]
Australian Conservation Foundation’s Consumption Atlas, a new interactive online tool developed in collaboration with the Centre for Integrated Sustainability Analysis at Sydney University, reveals that people living in Australia’s wealthiest metropolitan areas are responsible for the country’s highest household greenhouse pollution.
People living in Australia’s wealthiest inner-city suburbs are responsible for more than double the [...]
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Real estate billionaire Leona Helmsley left $12 million in her will for her dog Trouble but cut out two of her four grandchildren entirely.
Helmsley, the “Queen of Mean” who was famously quoted as saying “only the little people pay taxes” before going to jail for tax evasion, died August 20 [...]
BERLIN (Reuters) – A thief stole a briefcase and threw it away without noticing it contained 10,000 euros ($13,660) in cash, German authorities said Thursday.
“I think they’ll be annoyed when they find out,” said a spokesman for police in the western city of Duesseldorf.
The case’s owner, a 57-year-old Iranian businessman, had reported it [...]
LONDON (Reuters) – A diamond-encrusted platinum skull by artist Damien Hirst has been sold to an investment group for the asking price of $100 million, a spokeswoman for Hirst’s London gallery White Cube said on Thursday.
The skull, cast from a 35-year-old 18th century European man but retaining the original teeth, is coated [...]
