Security Service MI5 once planned to recruit a team of specially-trained gerbils as a secret weapon to sniff out spies, it has been revealed. The animals were to help interrogate suspects because they could use their acute sense of smell to detect a rise in adrenaline — the chemical released in sweat when people feel under stress
Glacial deposits in the tropics 600 million years ago are proof that the Earth at one stage was a giant snowball, with the oceans entirely covered by ice.The cause: carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was reduced by weathering of silicate rocks
The G8 Group of the world’s leading industrial nations are making progress — albeit slowly — on plans to combat cybercrime. At a meeting in Tokyo, the G8 Government/Private Sector High Level Meeting on High-tech Crime workshsopped five themes — data retention, data preservation, threat assessment and prevention, protection of e-commerce, and user authentication
If the retarded monkey boy‘s first budget is any indication, the business of America today is big business. Small companies, it seems, are somebody else’s business
Against the background of the recent ‘deaths’ of Nowheremom and Kaycee, beloved but fictional members of online communities Anandtech and MetaFilter, respectively, FEED itself got to play a walk-on role in a case of a fictional identity with global reach
Thousands of faithful Web fans were duped into believing the tragic tale of Kaycee Nicole, a young, beautiful Kansas teen dying of leukaemia. Until the truth emerged: Kaycee Nicole was a fabrication, a figment of Debbie Swenson’s imagination, and the star player in an intricate, detailed, and extended hoax
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers needs to move quickly to broaden public participation in its decision-making process, according to a report released today by public-interest groups. If it doesn’t, its legitimacy is at stake
Nothing will change until corporations realise that they don’t have a communications problem. They have a reality problem
The rare red wolf population is on the rise in Florida. Seven rare wolf pups have recently been born at the Brevard Zoo. There are no viable red wolf colonies in the wild, but zookeepers are hoping to change that. The two latest pups are among only 250 red wolves alive today, most of them in zoos
As the nearly all-white counties of the Great Plains empty out, American Indians are coming home. In publicly owned prairie land, the native grasses and wild flowers have returned, and species like prairie dogs, black-footed ferrets, burrowing owls and bison have made comebacks
The fast food chain McDonald’s is at the centre of a food-labelling storm today as it admitted that its ‘vegetarian’ chips in America were not completely free of meat products
Physical assaults on more than 50 nurses so far this year have prompted the NSW government to run self-defence courses for them. The courses will include instructions on how to knock out violent patients with chemicals
Branding the Girl Guides may well be about overhauling the image of that bastion of girlie goodness, but the headline instead prompted my thoughts in the direction of uniformed girls in cattle runs be prodded with branding irons
A woman whose wrist was broken when she was beaten to the ground and battered by a swan in the Phoenix Park has failed in a £30,000 personal injuries action against the State — people just never seem to learn that swans are contrary beasts who are not to be messed with
Enslave your girls and women, harbour anti US terrorists and destroy every vestige of civilisation in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that the United States still takes seriously
Telstra is assessing the implementation of a backup system that could have prevented yesterday’s full day nation-wide BigPond outage — nothing like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted
China has agreed to let the United States take apart its stranded spy plane and take it home — in pieces
Weighing 142gm and closely resembling the ubiquitous black pocket pager, it might be overlooked on the overstuffed gun belts of police officers on foot patrol. But the device, a $3500 minicomputer, will let the officers check whether a car has been stolen or someone they stop on the street is trying to conceal an arrest record
Some serious tweaking of code has resulted in XHTML changes for parts of my site. I ripped out the table formatting and used DIVs and CSS positioning instead, surprisingly enough, the damn thing is actually valid code too. I’ve even added a printer friendly format. Unless you’re a geek you probably won’t care, but the change will affect readers with older, non-compliant browsers — you’ll still see the updated pages, but not in all their XHTML and CSS glory
With his unauthorised exorcisms and faith healings, Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has long rankled the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church. But his action yesterday at a New York hotel may represent his final break with the Vatican: he was married in a group wedding presided over by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon
Matt Wolf, a 32 year old former game producer in Los Angeles, hopes to claw back market share, with video games for cats. CyberPounce is a collection of online toys and games intended to amuse felines and their owners
A congressional committee has yanked the teeth out of The Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001, a bill designed to curb spam, leaving it with few consumer protection provisions. Instead of allowing consumers and ISPs sue spammers and apply fines, it only requires that spammers use a legitimate return e-mail address — easy to see the big money pushing those changes through
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