Italian prosecutors believe pizza in the southern city of Naples may be baked in ovens lit with wood from coffins dug up from the local cemetery.

Thieves in Ohio stole a hearse from a crematorium, with a dead body still inside it - then dumped the corpse and left a note telling the police where to find it.

Guitarist can’t see straight after taking too many Viagra tablets.

Vet says NY dog needs Viagra for heart condition.

The doglers: New York’s dog-less people who can’t help ogling cute pups.

Abu Dhabi’s top hotel has come up with a gold ATM. the ATM monitors the daily price of gold and offers small gold bars that weigh up to 10 grams with customized designs.

Man spent seven years complete a 5,000-part jigsaw, only to find the final piece was missing.

French lawmaker wants to reopen brothels, outlawed in France since 1946, in order to protect prostitutes from predatory pimps and exploitation. But the sex workers say no thanks.

Police said they suspect they’ve captured the “toilet paper bandit.” A man who concealed his face by wrapping his head with toilet paper robbed a Lincoln convenience store last month.

Hair and animal fur donated to fight oil spill.

al Qaeda bomb-factory video for sale in the local bazaar of Wana, South Waziristan, northwest Pakistan. [story + video]

Jean-Claude Trichet, the 67-year-old president of the European Central Bank, discusses the largest financial rescue package in the history of Europe, the role and importance of speculators in the euro crisis and the weakness shown by politicians in the euro zone member states.

Some buildings are designed more to conceal than to celebrate and I think it’s fair to say that this is true of the new Goldman Sachs headquarters at 200 West Street in lower Manhattan, which has just opened.

How Did GM Pay Back Its Bailout So Fast? Well, It Didn’t…

Time’s covers from February 15, 1999 and May 24, 2010.

New York attorney general started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities.

Economic recovery needs psychological recovery. Most people aren’t touched by the recession, but they spend as though they are – they need convincing that things will get better.

A Delaware man has been charged with faking his way into Harvard and duping the Ivy League school out of $45,000 in financial aid, grants and scholarships.

Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street?

Marrying a younger man increases a woman’s mortality rate.

Real-time data mining reveals the power of imitation, kith and charisma.

Scientists devise wound dressings that trick bacteria into suicide.

Allergy relief really is possible.

Physicist Ranjit Pati of Michigan Tech: “We have mimicked how neurons behave in the brain.”

How your brains make memories.

How tools become part of the body.

Having sex to conceive a child will become unnecessary within a decade, as in-vitro fertilization becomes more popular among 30-somethings, scientists predicted.

Discontinuity in undergraduate emerging adults’ definitions of “having sex.”

Few astronomers question the existence of black holes. The Universe appears to be brimming with them. And yet the evidence is decidedly circumstantial, inferred from the behaviour of other objects, such as nearby stars and clouds. That’s hardly surprising, given the nature of black holes: regions of space from which nothing can escape. So astronomers would like to find a way to get a direct measurement of a black hole.

How to build a multiverse.

Five creatures that prove life could exist on other planets (or in space).

In my Findings column, I discuss some potential advantages of Mr. Obama’s plan to encourage private companies like SpaceX to take over some jobs formerly performed by NASA.

First large-scale formal quantitative test confirms Darwin’s theory of universal common ancestry.

Most Tibetans are genetically adapted to life on the “roof of the world,” according to a new study.

Neanderthal genes found in some modern humans. Related: A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution discusses the effect of both brain size and facial size on the basicranium. Neandertals are (obviously) just as bipedal as we are, and have bigger brains.  Yet, their basicranium is a little flatter than ours.

The moral life of babies.

A particular aspect of Jurek’s training that makes him an especially interesting athlete: he is a vegan, consuming no animal products.

An 82-year-old man in India is claiming to have not had anything to eat or drink since 1940 — and doctors from the Indian military are allegedly studying him to learn his secret. [Previously: BBC, 2003]

Ken Myszka and friends traded Las Vegas culinary glamor for central Illinois farm life, all for the dream of opening the best restaurant in the world.

How we wrecked the ocean. [TED video]

Satellite images of air pollution from both natural and man-made causes.

The iPhone is not only dependent upon highly developed systems in its production, but is also now equally dependent in its operation upon a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks.

Which is longer, the United States Constitution or Facebook’s Privacy Policy? [Chart]

The Fundamental Limits of Privacy For Social Networks. Using social networks to make recommendations will always compromise privacy, according to a mathematical proof of the limits of privacy.

Facebook: How to Protect Your Privacy.

What does the Internet look like? Last summer, Popular Science broke important ground in Internet visualization theory—an ongoing effort to describe what happens behind our computer screens, or, more accurately, beyond them, inside Ethernet cables and satellites flying around in the upper atmosphere.

The Next Generation of Sports Games: iPads, Web-Connected TVs, Laptops, and Cell Phones.

Today you can buy a $50 program for your laptop computer that likely can beat Kasparov, at least according to published ratings. Computers play great chess—can they play perfect chess?
Cloud Computing: Exploring the scope.

There is a very important metric that I just made up. I call it the “documentation quotient” or DQ.

Imagine yourself as a major sponsor of the biggest and most successful Formula One racing team. You are in negotiations to financially sponsor this race team for the next five years and are willing to pay about $1 billion to do so. Unfortunately for you, the European Union is set to pass a ban on cigarette advertising.

With sales up, Starbucks rolls out two ad campaigns.

Everyone knows Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life.

Terry Eagleton, a British Marxist intellectual and a religious believer, wonders what “evil” means in the modern world.

Wanna be an art dealer? Start your own gallery?

An art exhibition featuring a brush propped against a wall and pieces of wood strewn across the floor has been branded the worst in Britain.

Gold iPad by British designer Stuart Hughes on sale for £129,995.

What can the Stoics do for us?

What is a philosopher?

Webster’s Third: The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language.

Five Dials, a magazine published by Hamish Hamilton, edited by Craig Taylor.

Hugh Hefner had a delirious idea of how he wanted to live, of how he thought everyone really wanted to live. Playboy was the natural extension of that guiding idea. He funded its publication with doggedness and ingenuity born of desperation, and it debuted in December 1953, featuring nude photos of Marilyn Monroe. The first issue sold 70,000 copies, the next 185,000.

Joaquin Phoenix documentary: Even buyers aren’t sure if it’s a prank.

Hotelier Alex Calderwood, who bills himself as a “cultural engineer” on his business card, is unfazed by the prospect of opening a branch of his hipster Ace Hotel chain on a less-than-fashionable corner of Manhattan: the intersection of West 29th Street and Broadway.

How did David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty vanish? [More from Wikipedia.]

6 weirdest things men do to their penises.

Climate capsules: means of surviving disaster.

3D Medical Animation: Birth of Baby (Vaginal Childbirth).

Stephen Baldwin was the first recipient selected and this honor was entirely unsolicited by him. Donate to our first recipient, Stephen Baldwin. [Thanks GG!]

I am not an artist.

Surprise.

The challenge: produce a one minute video within 48 hours promoting the WaterAid charity.

Party animals.

The latest weapon in the War on Constipation.

Cranial Rectumitis.

Italian artist couple stole more than a few famous art pieces from major museums all over the world in the mid-90s. No one noticed.

every day the same again | May 17th, 2010