A new crime trend: stealing bull semen.

Chicken costumes banned at Nevada polling places.

Wildlife documentaries infringe animals’ privacy, says report.

Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia.

Druids use rock and magnets to stop road accidents. Austrian authorities say druids have been so successful in dealing with motorway accident blackspots in one area that they plan to extend the project nationwide.

Instead of being embalmed and placed in a casket for viewing, 22-year-old David Morales Colon was posed on a motorcycle during his wake. The bike was a gift from his uncle. The funeral home owner said it takes special skill to make the body rigid enough to pose, yet not too stiff to put back in a coffin for burial.

Man allegedly sets blaze because of late dinner.

Church repents as Copernicus reburied.

Wielding swords in Samurai Camp is the new aerobics for Japanese women.

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit.

American Apparel reports $18m first quarter loss. Fashion group faces delisting of its shares in New York.

Can Bloomberg Topple the Ratings Agencies?

Overseas Madoff Investors Settle With Banks.

The Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal: 5,113. That is exactly 4,802 more than we need.

A new survey of drug addiction in Afghanistan is expected to show a major rise in drug consumption in the country.

The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. So what did they find? The general conclusion is that family life is extremely stressful, a relentless barrage of problems, mishaps and negotiations.

Time gets faster the older you are. Or does it?

Believe it or not, there’s an article in the new journal Frontiers in Cognition entitled “Sexual orientation biases attentional control: a possible gaydar mechanism.”

Koro is the unfounded fear that the genitals are retracting into the body or have disappeared.

The wisdom of herds: How social mood moves the world.

Decreased food intake during hospital stays is an independent risk factor for hospital mortality.

Craig Venter and team have created the first fully functioning, reproducing cell controlled by synthetic DNA. [TED video]

Behavioral therapy can help kids with Tourette disorder.

Seen something pale and round floating in the midst of a thunderstorm? It may be a hallucination.

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

The strike on Jupiter last year raises the likelihood of future impacts by an order of magnitude, says a new study. But what does it mean for the Earth?

Einstein’s Other Gravity and the Acceleration of the Universe.

On the motifs distribution in random hierarchical networks.

How a polluted environment can lead to illness.

Home security goes super high-tech. Advancements in technologies could allow individuals to watch their homes.

Interacting with your computer by waving your hands may require just a pair of $1 multicolored gloves and a webcam, say two researchers at MIT who have made a breakthrough in gesture-based computing that’s inexpensive and easy to use.

The real problem at Microsoft is one that every other public company would love to have – they make too much profit. So unlike every other public company, Microsoft traditionally manages its earnings not by cutting expenses but by increasing spending. [from the archives]

It sounds like a kamikaze mission: an upstart with a meager number of users and no capital squaring off against Facebook, a social networking juggernaut with more than 400 million members and a $15 billion valuation.

University of Calgary computer scientists predict a new form of adware may become a threat to computer security through wireless networks.

Martin Gardner, who teased brains with math puzzles in Scientific American for a quarter-century and who indulged his own restless curiosity by writing more than 70 books on topics as diverse as magic, philosophy and the nuances of Alice in Wonderland, died Saturday in Norman, Okla. He was 95.

What Can We Really Know About Authors’ Personalities From Their Works?

Notes on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary.

Short interview with Marcel Duchamps [video 1, video 2]

Meaner than fiction: Reality TV high on aggression, study shows.

CNN enjoyed its most profitable year ever in 2009. And almost midway through 2010, company executives say that the cable network is on track to improve on that performance.

The final episode of “Lost” was extra-long and attempted to sew up myriad loose plot strands with an emotionally complex denouement. But it still didn’t come close to snaring an audience on par with a regular episode of “NCIS.”

Interview: Lady Gaga discusses fame, the paparazzi – and those health rumors.

I opened Au Bonheur du Jour on 13 April 1999, exactly fifty-three years after the law was passed that meant the destruction of the national register of prostitutes and the closure of some 1,400 brothels, 180 of which were in Paris.

The state of boobies in America.

Umbrella vending machine.

Caviar ATM. [via copyranter | link haze]

updateA new breed of vending machine is proliferating around the world.

Original Creator of Matrix & Terminator Wins $2.5 Billion In Lawsuit. [Thanks Douglas, Dana and Patrixio]

Distribution wanted for freshly funny family film.

Chimp In Cocaine Study Starts Lying To Friends.

every day the same again | May 24th, 2010