News Features

Wednesday March 31, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: It's a simple recipe, said A-list New York City chef Daniel Angerer: a cheese derived from the breast milk of his wife, who is nursing the couple's 3-month-old daughter. As a chef, he said, "you look out for something new and what you can do with it," and what Angerer could do is make about two quarts of "flavorful" cheese out of two gallons of mother's milk. "Tastes just like... | more...

News Features

Wednesday March 24, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: War Is Hell: The day before British army chef Liam Francis, 26, arrived at his forward operating base in Afghanistan, the Taliban shot down the helicopter ferrying in food rations, and Francis realized he had to make do with supplies on hand. In his pantry were only seasonings, plus hundreds of tins of Spam. For six weeks, until resupply, Francis prepared "sweet and sour Spam,"... | more...

News Features

Wednesday March 17, 2010 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Anthropomorphizing Little Muffy: 1) A February St. Petersburg Times report found several local people who regularly cook gourmet meals for their dogs and who revealed their dogs' (or maybe just "their") favorite recipes. A "veggie cookies for dogs" recipe, for example, requires whole-wheat flour, dried basil, dried cilantro, dried oregano, chopped carrot, green beans, tomato paste,... | more...

News Features

Wednesday March 10, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Pastor John Renken's Xtreme Ministries of Memphis is one of a supposedly growing number of churches that use "mixed martial arts" events to recruit wayward young men to the Christian gospel. Typically, after leading his flock in solemn prayer to a loving God, Renken adjourns the session to the back room, where a New York Times reporter found him in February shouting encouragement to... | more...

News Features

Wednesday March 3, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: When Dexter Blanch's dog nearly died from complications during spay surgery, he decided to use the event as inspiration and recently brought to market a chastity belt to give pet owners more control of their animals' animal instincts. The Pet Anti-Breeding System harness is especially valuable to professional breeders who may want to keep a female out of one or more "heat cycles"... | more...

News Features

Wednesday February 24, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: In all likelihood, convicted murderer Paul Powell would have been sentenced to life in prison for his 1999 crime, but he could not resist gratuitously ridiculing the prosecutor. Powell's original sentence of death was overturned because of a technicality in Virginia law: The "aggravated" circumstance in a murder that warrants the death penalty must be committed against the actual... | more...

News Features

Wednesday February 17, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: White People in Turmoil: 1) April Gaede, who four years ago guided her teenage daughters, Lynx and Lamb (performing as "Prussian Blue"), to a brief music career singing neo-Nazi songs, announced a new project recently on the white nationalist website Stormfront.org. She offers a no-fee matchmaking service to fertile Aryans, hoping to encourage marriage and baby-making — to... | more...

News Features

Wednesday February 10, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: In January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers confiscated a live, jeweled beetle that a woman was wearing as an "accessory" on her sweater as she crossed into Brownsville, Texas, from Mexico. Blue jewels were glued onto the beetle's back, which had been painted gold, and the mobile brooch was tethered by a gold chain attached to a safety pin. Even though the woman orally... | more...

News Features

Wednesday February 3, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: What Recession? A December USA Today analysis revealed that during the first 18 months of the recent recession, beginning December 2007, the number of federal employees with six-figure salaries shot up from 14 percent of the federal workforce to 19 percent. Defense Department civilian executives earning more than $150,000 went from 1,868 to more than 10,000, and the Department of... | more...

News Features

Wednesday January 27, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: In December, a prominent online game player, Buzz "Erik" Lightyear, won the auction for ownership of a virtual space station in the Planet Calypso game, paying 3.3 million Project Entropia Dollars, or PEDs, which at various points entered the game's playlike economy at an out-of-pocket cost of 10 actual U.S. cents per PED. Thus, Lightyear "paid" $330,000 for nothing more than... | more...

News Features

Wednesday January 20, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Big-time traffickers who smuggle illegal immigrants into the U.S. from Mexico rely on GPS devices to evade Border Patrol, but starting in June, border-jumpers who travel on their own can have protection, too. Three University of California at San Diego faculty members have designed inexpensive cell phones with special software to locate water, churches and medical facilities in the... | more...

News Features

Wednesday January 13, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Natives of the Erromango section of the Pacific island Vanuatu recently held a formal "conciliation" with the great-great-grandson of the British missionary whom the islanders' ancestors ate when he came ashore in 1839. Charles Milner-Williams' forebear, the Rev. John Williams, was regarded as the most famous Christian missionary of the era. Vanuatan legislator Ralph Regenvanu told... | more...

News Features

Wednesday January 6, 2010 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: In Somalia, which is without a central government and where little functions beyond an Islamic resistance and individual warlords' fiefdoms, a robust "stock market" has emerged in the city of Haradheere for "investors" in the seagoing pirate "industry," to raise money and supplies for kidnappers in exchange for a share of the bounty once a ransom is paid. According to a December... | more...

News Features

Wednesday December 30, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: But What If the Device Falls Into the Wrong Hands? A 55-year-old British man whose bowel was ruptured in a nearly catastrophic traffic accident has been fitted with a bionic sphincter that opens and closes with a remote controller. Ged Galvin had originally endured 13 surgeries in a 13-week hospital stay and had grown frustrated with using a colostomy bag until surgeon Norman... | more...

News Features

Wednesday December 23, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Spare the Rod: In September, engaging in a 300-year tradition of the Dussera holiday in India's Tamil Nadu state, Hindu priests ritually whipped 2,000 young women and girls over a five-hour period as penance for a range of sins, from insufficient studying to moral impurity. Said one sobbing yet inspired lash recipient, to an NDTV reporter, "When we are whipped, we will get rid of... | more...

News Features

Wednesday December 16, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Commercial test-preparation courses are already popular for applicants to top colleges and graduate schools, and recently also for admission to prestigious private high schools and grade schools. Now, according to a November New York Times report, such courses and private coaching are increasingly important for admission to New York City's high-achiever public kindergartens, even... | more...

News Features

Wednesday December 9, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: In October in Orange County, Calif., Billy Joe Johnson, who had just been convicted of murder as a hit man for a white supremacist gang, begged the judge and jury, in all sincerity, to sentence him to death. Johnson knew that those on California's death row get individual cells and better telephone access, nicer contact-visit arrangements, and more personal-property privileges than... | more...

News Features

Thursday December 3, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Their Health Care Is Just Fine Without “Reform”: 1) In September, the Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, along with four physicians and three surgical nurses, donated their services for delicate brain surgery on a 25-year-old silverback lowland gorilla at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. 2) Among the health-insurance upgrades demanded by Philadelphia-area transit workers... | more...

News Features

Wednesday November 25, 2009 02:00 PM EST
Iraqi police wands, front teeth removal and more | more...

News Features

Wednesday November 25, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: The first line of "defense" at the 400 Iraqi police checkpoints in Baghdad are small wands with antennas that supposedly detect explosives, but which U.S. officials say are about as useful as Ouija boards. The Iraqi official in charge, Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, is so enamored of the devices, according to a November New York Times dispatch, that when American experts repeatedly... | more...

News Features

Wednesday November 18, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: For some consumers, good environmental citizenship is important even when choosing sex accessories. No longer will they tolerate plastic personal vibrators made with softeners called phthalates; or body lubricants that contain toxic chemicals typically found in, say, antifreeze; or leather restraints from slaughtered cattle. In an October issue, Time magazine described a market of... | more...

News Features

Wednesday November 11, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Procter & Gamble announced in October that it will once again create and host a public restroom for the holiday season in New York City's Times Square as a promotion for Charmin tissue. Last year's installation was merely specially outfitted toilet facilities, but this year P&G will upgrade by hiring five bloggers ("Charmin Ambassadors") to "interact" with the expected "hundreds of... | more...

News Features

Wednesday November 4, 2009 04:00 AM EST
LEAD STORY: Recent Precision-Tuning of the Fruit Fly Brain: 1) Scientists at England's University of Oxford know how to make fruit flies scared of things they weren't scared of previously — by implanting artificial memories in their brains after somehow locating and managing the precise 12 neurons that enable the flies to learn things. The implanted "danger" (the smell of sweat-soaked athletic... | more...

News Features

Wednesday October 28, 2009 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: The human brain's 100 billion neurons may have such specific functions that a few electrically charge only upon recognition of a single celebrity, such as Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton. UCLA researchers, studying the healthy cells of pre-op epilepsy patients, inadvertently discovered this unusual property, which apparently varies with individuals but remains internally consistent,... | more...

News Features

Wednesday October 21, 2009 04:00 AM EDT
LEAD STORY: Love Can Mess You Up: Before Arthur David Horn met his future bride Lynette (a "metaphysical healer") in 1988, he was a tenured professor at Colorado State, with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale, teaching a mainstream course in human evolution. With Lynette's guidance (after a revelatory week with her in California's Trinity Mountains, searching for Bigfoot), Horn "evolved,"... | more...
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