'Woman Takes On 6000 new Housemates' *24 year old Malaysian woman Nur Malena Hassan has moved into a glass box containing 6000 live scorpions in an attempt to enter the Guinness Book of World Records. Although current record holder Kanchana Ketkaew of Thailand was stung nine times during her record-setting 32 day incarceration with 3000 live scorpions in 2002, Nur Malena reportedly showed no fear as the creatures began to climb over her face and body. Nur Malena may leave the box for ...

Through the NASA ‘Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunities Program’, four juniors from Duke University were given the chance to perform a study aboard NASA’s ‘KC-135A’ (aka the "Vomit Comet"). The four students designed and carried out experiments on the effects of microgravity on a subject of their choosing whilst living on board the craft. They opened a blog entitled "Duke's Vomit Comet" to follow their adventures to and provide information about their experiments. It’s hardly ...

Snail sex. No, this is not about some weird sexual slow-breathing palaver for humans. It’s about sex, snail style. Snails, as in molluscs. Slimy, icky little molluscs ... ew ... but I digress. The common garden snail, Helia aspersa (native to Europe and also found in California and South America), is a hermaphrodite, meaning that it can assume either a male or female role in reproduction as required. (Yes, of course this story gets better). Garden snails court from between 15 minutes ...

Dr. Doug Davis, Professor of Social Sciences at Haverford College in Philadelphia, has introduced a course reviewing “self-expression on the internet”, with special attention being paid to blogging. Hopeful of encouraging his students to produce self-expressive, motivated papers, Dr. Davis plans to divide classes into groups to form manually-linked individual weblogs to share personal experiences, as well as to review and discuss course related texts. Included in the subjects are an intr...

One-in-a-million miracles happen, on average, 295 times per day in America alone , says Michael Shermer in this months’ Scientific American “Skeptic” column. “ I cannot always explain such specific incidents ” Shermer writes, “but a principle of probability called 'the Law of Large Numbers' shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials ”. Shermer explains how, in their book ‘Deb...

Artificial Life, Inc. is a software company pioneering in artificial intelligence. Formed in Boston in 1993, the companies' Hong Kong based global headquarters has recently announced perhaps it's most ambitious 'invention' yet - the virtual girlfriend. Following success with interactive mobile games and internet-based 'e-learning', Artificial Life formally introduced the long-joked-about 'virtual partner' as a way of allowing those who were happily single to enjoy the 'emotional advantag...

i have a rather burning question for the big fake boob loving males of the world ... what exactly is it about big fake boobs that you like ?. is it the fact that a woman can exist regardless of this modern society who can still be made to feel shitty enough about herself to allow her body to be mutilated to please a man ? is it the fact that a woman dumb enough to do that will also be likely to be dumb enough to let you screw her in every way ? maybe it's the way those melon...

excerpt from etaiwan.news - link below a man convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl was hanged at dawn wednesday in india's first execution in nine years. dhananjay chatterjee, 39, was executed after spending the last 13 years in solitary confinement. "the execution of dhananjay chatterjee alias dhana has duly been carried out at the scheduled time at 4.30 a.m.," the prison said in a statement. chatterjee's shrouded body was later cremated in an electric furnace, poli...

by david dale at the age.com.au every year around 370 tourists die in australia. the majority of tourists drown, are involved in car accidents or suffer heart attacks. ( lovely !). and whilst crocodile attacks and ‘outback disappearances’ get the most publicity, in july and august suicide becomes a significant cause of tourist death. more british people die here than any other nationality, but as a proportion of arrivals, male visitors from the philippines and females from italy ...

i’d heard the controversy about the site ‘virtual confessional’, so i thought i’d keep an open mind about the possibility of ‘absolution online’ and see for myself. now, i’m not even entirely convinced that the site itself is not a hoax, although people do claim it’s genuine, i really have my doubts. anyway, ladies and gentlemen, at 'absolution online' you can click ‘virtual confessional’ and then ‘select your sin’ from an online list conveniently categorised into sin sub-headings, such ...

i had to go outside today. i know. awful !. i didn't want to, but i had to drop my car off to the mechanic. i forgot until a half hour before and had to haul ass in my pajama top and trackie bottoms. my car didn't want to go either. (iris the vw kombi has instincts like a faithful old dog. she just knows ). matters were complicated by the bone-dry fuel tank courtesy of the friend who dropped it back the night before. ah, well. it was only a right turn into oncoming traffic on the pac...

i see a lot of men wasting a lot of time and money trying to unlock the secret as to what attracts the opposite sex. i hear men bemoaning the lack of 'good women', i hear women complaining that men don't want 'good women' anymore. it seems that people are so hell-bent on finding the right person that they forget to work on being the right person. love is meant to represent a state of mutual respect, understanding and affection between parties. so, there should be much less findi...

*by nick farrell at the enquirer.com microsoft has revealed how many fixes and updates are under the bonnet of its windows xp service pack 2. according to its site, more than 150 fixes and updates are included in the upgrade. if you want a detailed look, the page is here: Link most of the fixes and updates are to networking aspects of xp with 138 focused on the base operating system. nearly a hundred are listed as security fixes. sp2 corrects problems in internet explorer, t...

The 'Uncanny Valley' is not a physical place, but a confusing emotional state entered by people who see on-screen overly-humanlike computer generated or animated characters in life-threatening situations. When creatures possessed of ‘human features’, (such as the taking fish ‘Nemo’ or the computer-generated figures in 'The Polar Express') become disturbingly real, audiences over-identify with their plight during action scenes. The term was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, ...

after recently ruining a teenage girls mini-golf game by dropping his trousers and masturbating, 41 year old dana ross stegall was arrested on his 15th indecent exposure violation in the last dozen years. serial flasher stegall was considered such a problem case that local city prosecutor frank hollon was moved to offer him an unusual plea-bargain -chemical castration. stegall turned the bargain down, went to trial and was found guilty of indecent exposure. again. the exasperated judg...