1. Oxford English Dictionary Adds ♥
It is a decision likely to break the hearts of traditionalists.Once the sole preserve of tacky tourist T-shirts, the heart symbol – as in I ‘heart’ New York – has become the first graphical entry in the Oxford English Dictionary in its 127-year history.
2. 5 Myths About Nuclear Energy
3. Journey to the Mantle of the Earth by 2020
A half-century after the first attempt to drill through the ocean crust into the Earth’s mantle, a new campaign armed with improved technology is underway that could reach the mantle by the end of the decade, researchers say.By extracting samples of the mantle, which is nearly 3,000 km thick and contains roughly 68% of the planet’s mass, researchers hope to unearth valuable information about its composition that could yield clues about the evolution of the planet. It could also contribute to our understanding of how the ocean crust is formed, the nature of the crust-mantle boundary and the limits of microbial life under the Earth’s surface.
4. Top 10 Unlikely Top 10 Hits
5. How Carrots Became the New Junk Food
“People will say, ‘You open the bag, it’s just baby carrots.’ Well, it’s just Lay’s potato chips, it’s just Doritos, there’s nothing special about them,” he says. “They’re just cool and part of your life. If Doritos can sell cheeseburger-flavored Doritos, we can sell baby carrots.”
6. 10 Movies That Were Better Than The Book
7. Weird News of the Week: Worker rescued after sliding three quarters of a mile along raw sewage pipe
Firefighters rescued a worker who was sucked into a sewer pipe on Monday morning. The man went into an 85-foot-deep shaft to do some work on the sewer line and went for a ride he’d much rather forget. “You can imagine what’s down there, everything that’s in a sewer. Everything’s is gooey, slimy, smells terrible,” said Bob Atkinson with Pierce County Public Utilities.The 37-year-old worker with Coluccio Construction was inside the sewer pipe inspecting it when, for some reason, he disconnected from his safety harness and then slipped into the sludge. “He would tumble every now and then in the water. It’s sewage water, it’s kinds nasty but he would take hold of himself and say nope I’ve got to get upright and he would get right,” said Ray Clouatre of Coluccio Construction.
8. 15 Totally Surreal Vintage Ads
9. Elizabeth Taylor Outlived Her Obituary Writer By Almost 6 Years
The news of Elizabeth Taylor’s passing has put an added sadness to this already gloomy day, but not everyone was shocked. The New York Times’ principal writer for the Taylor obituary died almost six full years ago. Mel Gussow, a Times theater critic, died after a battle with cancer in 2005. He was 71. Gussow had written over 4,000 pieces for the New York Times, one of them, apparently, was the Elizabeth Taylor obit they had ready to run for over half a decade.
10. 10 Food Facts That Should Surprise You
11. Feeling Angry? Say a Prayer and the Wrath Fades Away, Study Suggests
Saying a prayer may help many people feel less angry and behave less aggressively after someone has left them fuming, new research suggests.A series of studies showed that people who were provoked by insulting comments from a stranger showed less anger and aggression soon afterwards if they prayed for another person in the meantime
12. Image of the Week: Every Way To Spell Muammar Gaddafi’s Name
13. The World’s 18 Strangest Dams
14. World’s First Synthetic Microbe Accused of Copyright Infringement by James Joyce’s Estate
When Craig Venter created a synthetic microbe, he inserted a passage from James Joyce. Guess who’s upset? Joyce’s estate, claiming copyright infringement
15. Infographic of the Week: How Much Has the Price of Data Storage Fallen This Decade?
16. World Record of the Week: Heaviest Person to Complete a Marathon
Kelly Gneiting, a 400-pound sumo wrestler, set a Guinness World Record as the heaviest man to complete a marathon, after finishing on Sunday in 9 hours 48 minutes 52 seconds.Gneiting weighed 396.2 pounds after the marathon, smashing the past world record of 275 pounds and beating his 2008 marathon time of 11:52:11.
“I’d like to see the Kenyan improve his marathon time by two hours,” he joked.
17. 12 Things You Should Definitely Buy Organic
18. Even Japan’s Infamous Mafia Groups Are Helping With The Relief Effort
Even Japan’s infamous mafia groups are helping out with the relief efforts and showing a strain of civic duty. Jake Adelstein reports on why the police don’t want you to know about it. For more coverage of Japan’s crisis.The worst of times sometimes brings out the best in people, even in Japan’s “losers” a.k.a. the Japanese mafia, the yakuza.
19. 10 Famous Authors Who Went Hollywood
20. What happens in our brain when we see banknotes being ripped up?
Martin Gardiner - Improbable Research — Or, put another way, “Is our attitude to money like that to any other tool even though its use is symbolic and is not implemented in its physical structure?”To find out, the researchers from the Center of Functionally Integrative Neurosciences at Aarhus, Denmark, and the Center for Cognitive Science, Turin, Italy, asked experimental subjects to watch banknotes being destroyed whist undergoing a brain scan.
21. The Secret Messages in 12 Logos
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. Superstitions as weapons, 1950
The paper discusses PSYOPS missions that successfully exploited local superstitions; for example in the 1920s on Afghanistan’s Northwest Frontier, the British planted loudspeakers in planes warning tribal peoples that God was angry with them for breaking the peace with India, while in World War II the Germans projected imagery (though it doesn’t say what) onto ‘drifting clouds’. Hungerford goes into some detail on the use of chain letters to clog up enemy communications networks . . . and the use of bogus fortune-tellers and false astrological data to dampen morale amongst both civilians and their leaders, a technique used extensively by both Allied and Axis powers during WWII.
24. 10 Modes of Transportation that Never Got Into Gear
25. World’s most expensive dog sells for almost £1 million
Tibetan Mastiffs are known to be the world’s most expensive dogs, and now, a Red Tibetan Mastiff puppy has grabbed the title of the world’s most expensive dog after being sold for about £1 million ($1.6 million). The Tibetan Mastiff, also known as Do-khyi, is an ancient breed and type of domestic dog originating with nomadic cultures of Central Asia. According to the puppy’s breeder Lu Liang, Big Splash (or “Hong Dong” in Chinese) is 11 months old, stands nearly 3 ft. high and weighs over 180lbs. The Mastiff was given a diet of chicken and beef, done with exotic Chinese delicacies like sea cucumber and abalone. Lu runs the Tibetan Mastiff Garden in Laoshan, near the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao.
26. 15 places kids should see by age 15
27. Better Book Titles of the Week - Aeschylus: the Oresteia
28. How-To of the Week: Create a Scientifically Plausible Alien Life Form
[M]y favorite thing about Tom is he never got he never got a high school degree. High school students today optimize their grades and SATs and after school activities. They speak French and Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art. They dance around and play hockey and act like they help homeless people.Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter - all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges.
Stanford, Berkeley and everyone else summarily dismissed his application on technical grounds - he didn’t have a high school diploma.
MIT looked at his code and said, “we like it” - we accept you.
For his Masters the best four CS schools - Stanford, Berkeley, Carniegie Mellon, and MIT — all recruited Tom He stayed at MIT, the school that gave him a chance without a high school degree.
(Via: Geekosystem )
30. 10 Weirdest McDonalds Menu Items
31. The Longest Film of All-Time ‘Modern Times Forever’ Screening In Helsinki
Sure, we have Hamlet (242 mins.), Gods and Generals (231 mins.), Once Upon a Time in America (229 mins.), Lawrence of Arabia (227 mins.), Gone With the Wind (226 mins.), Heaven’s Gate (220 mins.), Ben-Hur (212 mins.), War and Peace (208 mins.), Apocalypse Now Redux (202 mins.), The Alamo (202 mins.), Malcolm X (202 mins.), and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (201 mins.), but don’t you want to see a 240-hour/10-day film? No? Me neither.Superflex, a group of Danish artists, have created a 240-hour film titled Modern Times Forever (Stora Enso Building, Helsinki) and will screen it in Helsinki for the festival IHME Project 2011. The film shows “ravages of time marking a box-like office block, Helsinki’s Stora Enso building,” and they are in fact projecting the film on that same building. In the film, “centuries of decay are apparently compressed into the span” of the 10-day runtime
32. The 2010 NFL Season in Six Minutes
33. Russian Soldiers Induce Avalanche with Artillery Fire
(Via: Neatorama )
