A model displays gold thread made wedding dresses, designed by Japanese designer Yumi Katsura and tiaras, and priced 30 million Japanese Yen in Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 4, 2009.(Xinhua/Ren Zhenglai)
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President Obamas economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net. [The House bill] would have similar long-run effects, CBO said in a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, who was tapped by Mr. Obama on Tuesday to be Commerce Secretary.

U.S. Debt Default, Dollar Collapse Altogether Likely

The prospect of the United States defaulting on its debt is not just likely. Its inevitable, and imminent.

Shutter Speed (TV) = 20 seconds

The early morning light is soft and diffused, so you need a longer shutter speed to let in more light, otherwise your picture will be underexposed.

ISO = 100

With a long shutter speed, you don?t need your sensor to be more sensitive to the light. And with a low ISO, you have a higher dynamic range for stronger intensity of color.

White balance = Shade

Morning light is cooler in color tones. You know that you can correct this with your white balance, so you shoot on shade so the sunrise feels golden and warm.

File type = RAW

You want to go home and post-process your image to produce something really sweet. Shooting in RAW extends your editing capabilities.

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the worlds largest retailer, said Thursday that same-store sales rose 2.1 percent in January as consumers continued to hunt for bargains and bought necessities like groceries.

Sales in stores open at least one year, a key retail metric known as same-stores sales, rose 2.1 percent at the companys U.S. namesake stores and 2.4 percent at its Sams Club warehouses during the four weeks ended Jan. 30.

Including fuel, same-store sales rose 1.5 percent.

The results edged past Wal-Marts own forecast for sales that would be flat to up 2 percent, as well as analyst expectations for a 1.1 percent rise.

The Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer says total sales edged up nearly 2 percent to $27.74 billion from $27.26 billion last year.

On another contentious issue, the Senate upheld a labor-backed provision requiring that only U.S.-made iron or steel used in construction projects paid for in the bill. A move by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to delete the so-called Buy American requirement failed, 31-65.

Eighteen and pregnant, Sycloria Williams went to an abortion clinic outside Miami and paid $1,200 for Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique to terminate her 23-week pregnancy.

Three days later, she sat in a reclining chair, medicated to dilate her cervix and otherwise get her ready for the procedure.

Only Renelique didnt arrive in time. According to Williams and the Florida Department of Health, she went into labor and delivered a live baby girl.

Police recovered the decomposing remains in a cardboard box a week later after getting anonymous tips.

Coffee

One mans roller coaster history with coffee.

Here?s a chart that shows my coffee bias over the years.

Read our related editorial: The credit crunch could be a boon for irrational belief

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

This anomaly was documented in the early 1970s, but only now is science beginning to tell us why. It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.

Holy Haleakala!

That?s NGC 4921, a face-on spiral galaxy in the Coma cluster of galaxies, over 300 million light years away. This Hubble image is a mosaic of 80 separate images, and has stunning clarity and depth. Look at all those background galaxies! You really want to click that and get the bigger version. Trust me here. Wow.

The spiral arms of this galaxy are a bit poorly defined, but that adds to the beauty of this in my opinion. That struck me instantly, and the reason struck me as well: spiral galaxies in clusters are odd ducks. Coma is a rich, dense cluster, with thousands of citizens. That makes collisions common, and spiral disks are relatively fragile. When a spiral collides with another galaxy of comparable mass the disk is disrupted. Whether the two galaxies pass through each other or eventually merge, the disk is usually collaterally damaged or destroyed.

100 Blogs that Will Save You Time & Make You More Productive

Today?s busy lifestyles require that everyone put in extra hours when it comes to careers, family, and even free time. Learn how to better manage your time to get more done in less time. The following blogs will help you find ways to become more productive whether it?s at home or work?and no matter what profession you have. Entrepreneurs, professors, students, creatives, technology buffs, and even those just looking for inspiration for productive lives will all find blogs with plenty of information and suggestions to get things done more efficiently.

Bound by an informal sorority of the outdoors, the Swamp Witches embrace some antiquated ways. At a time when many hunters have grown accustomed to driving or motor boating to their duck blinds, these women prefer to feel the ooze of the muck below their boots, to propel their canoes by their own muscle, to inhale the pungent methane of the marsh, to wade its unknowable waters.

NEC Electronics Sharpens Image Quality With Super-Resolution ASSP

A Tibetan Buddhist monk blows the longhorn during festivities celebrating Monlam

Monlam, or the Great Prayer Festival, is the greatest religious festival in Tibetan Buddhism

It was established in 1409 by Tsong Khapa, founder of the Geluk (Yellow Hat) tradition

The performances of masked dancers, known as Cham, always attract a crowd

A pilgrim prostrates herself in prayer in front of the five-tiered stupa (a Buddhist religious monument)

Hamas negotiators left Egypt without a long-term ceasefire with Israel on Thursday - but not before some members of the militant groups delegation were stopped at the Gaza border with millions in cash.

An Egyptian security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media, said the group initially refused to be searched by Egyptian authorities at the Rafah border crossing. When the group relented, authorities found $US7 million ($10.9 million) and 2 million euro ($4 million) in cash in their suitcases. Another security official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said $US9 million and 2 million euro were found. The discrepancy could not be immediately explained.

The money was later deposited in an account in Egypt by a Hamas member who stayed behind while the rest of the delegation was allowed to return to Gaza, the second security official said. It was not clear what would happen to the money.

Unfinished business

Charles Darwin?s ideas have spread widely, but his revolution is not yet complete

THE miracles of nature are everywhere: on landing, a beetle folds its wings like an origami master; a lotus leaf sheds muddy water as if it were quicksilver; a spider spins a web to entrap her prey, but somehow evades entrapment herself. Since the beginning of time, people who have thought about such things have seen these marvels as examples of the wisdom of God; even as evidence for his existence. But 200 years ago, on February 12th 1809, a man was born who would challenge all that. The book that issued the challenge, published half a century later, in 1859, offered a radical new view of the living world and, most radical of all, of humanity?s origins. The man was Charles Robert Darwin. The book was ?On the Origin of Species?. And the challenge was the theory of evolution by natural selection.

The origin of the Origin

Uncovering path of world?s most wanted Nazi

Uncle Tarek was born Aribert Ferdinand Heim, member of Adolf Hitler?s elite Waffen-SS, and medical doctor at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps.

It was behind the gray stone walls of Mauthausen, in his native Austria, that Dr Heim committed the atrocities against hundreds of Jews and others that earned him the nickname Dr Death and his status as the most wanted Nazi war criminal still believed to be at large by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.

Heim was accused of performing operations on prisoners without anaesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, then leaving them to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a souvenir.

Draconian sentences for kids need fix

Imagine the life of a prisoner in solitary. Then imagine hes a child.

Twenty-four hours a day in a concrete box. No interaction with other inmates. Food comes via a slot in the door. Prisoners get five hours of exercise a week in what Meg Laughlin of The St. Petersburg Times described as an ``empty concrete cage that resembles a dog run.

In 2006, Laughlin (a former Miami Herald reporter) discovered that an inmate named Ian Michael had served the longest time of any Florida prisoner in solitary confinement. Michael, who was 29, was entering his 15th year in the box. Half his life had been spent in solitary confinement.

Laughlins story reads like a dispatch from a third-world hellhole. But this is Florida, which now has 265 inmates serving life-without-parole sentences for crimes committed when they were 17 or younger. Other states put kids away for life, but only Florida has put away kids for life at 13 for crimes other than murder.

BoB, the Eco Clothes Hanger Made from Cardboard and Reused Water Bottles

Designer Joan Nadal took on the challenge to re-design one of the most common everyday objects: the humble clothes hanger. A small object with a large environmental footprint if we consider that of the 8 billion polystyrene or polycarbonate hangers manufactured per year, only 15% are recycled. That is enough to fill the Empire State Building 4 times! The solution: make recyclable hanger from just one material, and if you can, recycle something along the way. BoB Hanger does exactly that: it?s made from recycled cardboard and needs two reused bottles to function.

More eco-friendly clothes hangers:

Zilka Clothes Hangers by Ryan Frank
Redesign for Sustainability: Recycled and Recyclable Hangers
Merricks Earthsaver Corn Hangers
Free Paper EcoHangers Replace Wire Hangers

Google Chrome Will Have Extensions by May

Bill Gates Unleashes Mosquito Swarm

TED, the annual gathering of the most pretentious people from the fields of technology, entertainment, and design, just got punkd. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates released a swarm of mosquitos into the crowd.

Warner Bros Wants Seven Batman Movies

While the sequel to The Dark Knight is just in the beginning stages of development, Warner Bros is already looking much further down the line. During today?s Time Warner earnings call, CEO Jeff Bewkes compared the Batman series to the Harry Potter film franchise, saying that they hope to release a long line of sequels.

I kinda get the impression that if Christopher Nolan does a third Batman film, it will probably be his last. He seems like a filmmaker that wants to move on to his own passion projects, and while Warner Bros has been very patient with him in regards to a Dark Knight sequel, the studio/company is clearly looking much further down the line. Warner Bros wants to make a lot more Batman movies? I know, this is a pretty obvious story, but it?s the first time that Time Warner/Warner Bros has said publicly that they are looking beyond the next film.

Army official: Suicides in January terrifying

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- One week after the U.S. Army announced record suicide rates among its soldiers last year, the service is worried about a spike in possible suicides in the new year.

If reports of suicides are confirmed, more soldiers will have taken their lives in January than died in combat.

The Army said 24 soldiers are believed to have committed suicide in January alone -- six times as many as killed themselves in January 2008, according to statistics released Thursday.

"This is terrifying," an Army official said. "We do not know what is going on."

Israel-Palestine: A Land in Fragments

WASHINGTON ? The Army is investigating a stunning number of suicides in January ? a count that could surpass all combat deaths on Americas two warfronts last month.

According to figures obtained by The Associated Press, there were 24 suspected suicides in January, compared to only four in January of 2008, six in January of 2007 and 10 in January of 2006.

Yearly suicides have been rising steadily since 2004 amid increasing stress on the force from long and repeated tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An alarmed Army leadership also took the unusual step of briefing congressional leaders on the information Thursday morning.

"The trend and trajectory seen in January further heightens the seriousness and urgency that all of us must have in preventing suicides," Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, said of the new monthly number Thursday.

With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation?s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.

The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.

Should the male-dominated layoffs of the current recession continue ? and Friday?s jobs report for January may offer more insight ? the debate will be moot. A deep and prolonged recession, therefore, may change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge longstanding gender roles.

When passion takes a grip, a kiss locks two humans together in an exchange of scents, tastes, textures, secrets and emotions. We kiss furtively, lasciviously, gently, shyly, hungrily and exuberantly. We kiss in broad daylight and in the dead of night. We give ceremonial kisses, affectionate kisses, Hollywood air kisses, kisses of death and, at least in fairytales, pecks that revive princesses.

"This recession might linger for years. Our economy will lose 5 million more jobs. Unemployment will approach double digits. Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse," Obama wrote in the newspaper piece titled, "The Action Americans Need."

He rejected the argument that more tax cuts are needed in the plan and that piecemeal measures would be sufficient, arguing that Americans made their intentions clear in the election.

LONDON (Reuters) - Two senior British judges accused the United States on Wednesday of threatening to end intelligence cooperation if Britain released evidence about the alleged torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

The judges quoted lawyers for British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as saying the U.S. government, by reviewing intelligence cooperation, "could inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."

According to the ruling from High Court judges Lord Justice Thomas and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones, Milibands lawyers said the threat had existed for some time and was still in place under President Barack Obamas administration.

There has been a great deal of talk lately about cloaks and coatings that can make things invisible:

Scientific American: Light Bent the Wrong Way

Scientific American: Object Invisible to Microwaves

Techon: Invisibility Cloak

We haven?t reported on invisibility here at the Hub because we feel most of these innovations have been too theoretical and too far from commercialization to focus on.  A new video from new scientist, however, plus a few others we found are just too cool to overlook.  See the videos below:

The record for the smallest planet orbiting a sun-like star has once again been broken. The newest planet to hold the record in its tiny hand is COROT-Exo-7b, which has only twice the diameter of the Earth!

COROT is a European satellite that stares at stars and looks for tiny drops in their brightness. There are many causes of such events, but one is from a planet passing in front of the star, making a mini-eclipse. This has a distinctive signature in the way the light of the star dims, so a planetary transit can be distinguished from other sources.

So heres the question: With the world producing ever increasing quantities of food, why does the number of people going hungry just keep rising?

Frances Moore Lappe gave the world a wake-up call on that very question 40 years ago when she wrote her seminal book, Diet for a Small Planet.

The problem is how the world uses food, who controls the supply and the growing concentration of corporate power in global agribusiness, she argues.

The number of hungry rose again last year. In December, the UN reported 963 million undernourished people, about 40 million more than in 2007. Thats a huge jump, due mostly to rising food prices in the last two years and partly to food crops like corn diverted to ethanol production.

bitRipper is a Dead Simple Solution for DVD Ripping

Windows only: If all you want is computer-playable video off your DVDs, bitRipper is the most simple, click-one-button-and-youre-rolling solution weve seen. You can change your rips audio and video parameters, but you dont have to.

The screenshot above might be the only thing you ever see from bitRipper, if youre not the type to fiddle with video codecs, aspect ratios, normalizing, and bitrates. After installing bitRipper and starting it, you can change the output file name if you want, but loading a disc and hitting "Start" starts the ripping process and puts an .avi file in your My Documents->My DVD Backups folder. Even our own one-click DVD Rip requires a tiny bit more configuration on the front end, though its equally capable and simple in a general sense.

Corporate donors turned off by story of octuplets mother

The birth of a live set of octuplets, which has held the world in thrall, has proved a turn-off for corporate sponsors.

At the time, jubilant reports claimed that Miss Suleman, 33, would soon receive offers of free cars, a lifetimes supply of nappies and baby food, and possibly even a house large enough to accommodate her 14 children.

Warning over surveillance state

Controversial government plans for a database to store details of peoples phone calls and e-mails were put on hold late last year after they were branded "Orwellian".

The public were often unaware of the scale of personal information held and exchanged by public bodies, it said.

"There can be no justification for this gradual but incessant creep towards every detail about us being recorded and pored over by the state," committee chairman and Tory peer Lord Goodlad said.

Swedish Visby-Class Corvette Is First Operational Stealth Ship in the World

According to the experts, the corvettes are "electronically undetectable at more than 8 miles in rough seas and at more than 13.5 miles in calm seas". Their creation was an answer to the incursion of foreign submarines in Swedish waters in the mid-eighties.

Holy Haleakala!

That?s NGC 4921, a face-on spiral galaxy in the Coma cluster of galaxies, over 300 million light years away. This Hubble image is a mosaic of 80 separate images, and has stunning clarity and depth. Look at all those background galaxies! You really want to click that and get the bigger version. Trust me here. Wow.

The spiral arms of this galaxy are a bit poorly defined, but that adds to the beauty of this in my opinion. That struck me instantly, and the reason struck me as well: spiral galaxies in clusters are odd ducks. Coma is a rich, dense cluster, with thousands of citizens. That makes collisions common, and spiral disks are relatively fragile. When a spiral collides with another galaxy of comparable mass the disk is disrupted. Whether the two galaxies pass through each other or eventually merge, the disk is usually collaterally damaged or destroyed.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) ? Israels ambassador to Sweden has become the latest public figure to be targeted by a shoe-throwing protester.

Police said Ambassador Benny Dagan was hit on the leg by the shoe, one of several projectiles thrown when he turned up to address a student gathering at Stockholm University this week.

"During this seminar, someone threw a shoe at the ambassador," university spokeswoman Maria Sandqvist said.

"It was a student organisation that had an event and they had invited the ambassador to talk about the upcoming election in Israel."

Police spokeswoman Petra Sjolander said two people, one male and one female, had been detained and then released following the incident. A public prosecutor was considering whether to charge them.

Sjolander said the ambassador had been interviewed by police and that he had been struck by the shoe. "Yes, on the leg," she said, adding that books had been thrown as well.

Ray Comfort?s You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence Virtual Book Tour ?09

But voters are shifting away from the idea promoted by Gore and others that human activity is the cause of global warming and are viewing it instead more as the result of long-term planetary trends.

A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.

It?s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we?re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

Worst of all is the possibility that the economy will, as it did in the ?30s, end up stuck in a prolonged deflationary trap.

Young hero died protecting sister from rapist

The current recession will soon become the longest since the Great Depression. The U.S. is losing over 500,000 jobs each month, and a new president, elected overwhelmingly, is pleading for unity and urgent action on a scale not seen since the New Deal.

The basic economic facts from the 1930s?according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources?are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

Dear Friend,

The pupae of the European butterfly Maculina rebeli exude a scent that mimics the ants and make themselves at home inside the ant nest. Once they become a caterpillar they even beg for food like ant larvae, researchers report in Fridays edition of the journal Science.

But, not content just to be fed, the butterflies even manage to demand special treatment, Jeremy A. Thomas of Britains University of Oxford and colleagues report.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldnt understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

Once a kid realizes that pot doesnt make him insane ? or likely to become a burrito taster, as the ad further asserts ? he might figure other drug information is equally false. Thats how marijuana becomes a gateway drug.

Cinderella Pumpkin Carriage Bed.  what?s $47,000 if you can bring sweet dreams and a little smile to your daughter?s face?

WHILE many institutions collapsed during the Great Depression that began in 1929, one kind did rather well. During this leanest of times, the strictest, most authoritarian churches saw a surge in attendance.

An Irish long-distance runner has completed a gruelling seven marathons on seven continents in less than six days, a charity chief said Thursday. Skip related content

Richard Donovan, 42, from Galway in the west of Ireland, began his challenge in numbing sub-zero temperatures in Antarctica on January 31 and finished in Sydney just five days, nine hours and eight minutes later.

"What he did was staggering, quite remarkable," John OShea, founder and chief executive of third world charity GOAL, told AFP, adding that the money raised would help the charitys work in Sudans Darfur region.

"It is extraordinary given the conditions and the time scale involved. I cant believe he managed it. I am in awe of what he achieved to bring attention to the tragedy of Dafur and to alleviate the suffering there.

After starting in the Antarctic, Donovan got on a plane to South Africa and completed a marathon in Cape Town. He then flew to Dubai and did another one, completing three marathons in two days.

Wrongful Manhattan Arrest Reopening Old Wounds

A great deal of anger is building against the NYPD due to an increased number of gay men being arrested for prostitution at various Manhattan adult video stores. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is working with the mayor?s office, the police department and gay community groups ?to get to the bottom of this.?

Police allegedly have been using good looking, young undercover cops to try to pick up middle-aged gay men,  The undercover cops offer to go home with them for consensual sex. As the officers leave the store with the men, they offer to pay the men for the sex, which often confuses the victims who don?t understand why a younger man wouldoffer to pay them for sex.  Then, as the officer escorts the unknowing male out of the store, they find themselves surrounded by undercover cops, handcuffed and charged with prostitution, even though they never agreed to taking money for sex.

Homophobia, even in Manhattan is alive and well.

Facing Foreclosure? Dont Leave. Squat.

Marcy Kaptur of Ohio is the longest-serving Democratic congresswoman in U.S. history. Her district, stretching along the shore of Lake Erie from west of Cleveland to Toledo, faces an epidemic of home foreclosures and 11.5 percent unemployment. That heartland region, the Rust Belt, had its heart torn out by the North American Free Trade Agreement, with shuttered factories and struggling family farms. Kaptur led the fight in Congress against NAFTA. Now, she is recommending a radical foreclosure solution from the floor of the U.S. Congress: "So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Dont you leave."

Kaptur recommends calling the local Legal Aid Society, Bar Association or 888-995-4673 for legal assistance.

Al Gore is creating another Hitler Youth, Glenn Beck feverishly warns

Sometimes I think Glenn Beck is saying the crazy things he does just to get attention from liberals for being so crazy. Its the Ann Coulter model of right-wing punditry: the more outrageous the better for your ratings.

What inspired this analysis? It was a snippet of a quote from Al Gore, given to a crowd of schoolkids:

Al Gore: There are some things about our world that you know that older people dont know.

What, exactly, is wrong with this innocuous and fairly common-sense observation about the nature of generational change? Its an attack, apparently, on the sovereignty of parenthood:

Now youve got the former vice-president of the United States and a Nobel Prize winner looking your kid in the eye and telling them, You know what? You know things that your mom and dad dont.

A woman accused of helping recruit dozens of female suicide bombers looked into the camera and described the process: trolling society for likely candidates and then patiently converting the women from troubled souls into deadly attackers.

The accounts, in a video released yesterday by the Iraqi police, offer a rare glimpse into the networks used to find and train the women bombers who have become one of the insurgents most effective weapons as they struggle under increasing crackdowns.

In a separate prison interview with the Associated Press, with interrogators nearby, the woman said she was part of a plot in which young women were raped and then sent to her for matronly advice. She said she would try to persuade the victims to become suicide bombers as their only escape from the shame and to reclaim their honor.

COLUMBUS ? The Ohio Parole Board has voted unanimously in favor of clemency for a Cincinnati death row inmate who killed his mother, The Associated Press has learned.

The board voted 8-0 to recommend mercy for Jeffrey Hill, who killed his mother in 1991 and faces execution March 3 even though his entire family opposes the punishment.

A dogged South Korean grandmother has failed her driving test 771 times, police said Thursday, but a local newspaper reported she will keep trying. Skip related content

The 68-year-old, identified only by her last name Cha, has taken the test almost every working day since 2005 in the southwestern city of Jeonju. She failed again Monday for the 771st time.

"It was a record-breaking number here," Choi Yong-Cheol, a police sergeant supervising the test in the citys Deokjingu district, told AFP.

"I wonder if she will try it again for a 772nd time."

The Korea Times said Cha will in fact be back for another attempt.

Choi said that Cha cannot pass the preliminary written section of the test, averaging scores of 30-50 whereas the pass mark is 60 out of 100.

Local media said that Cha sells food and household items door to door at apartment complexes, carrying the items in a handcart, but wants to get a car for her business.

Exciting release of Air Force UFO archives

Electric Motorcycle Promises 150 MPH

A San Francisco startup led by a former Tesla Motors engineer is developing an electric motorcycle capable of 150 mph, a claim that, if true, would make it the fastest production electric vehicle in the world.

Mission Motors unveiled the bike, dubbed Mission One, at the TED conference and said it will begin selling them next year for $69,000 apiece. Although several electric motorcycles have been announced in recent weeks, Mission Motors sticks out because its 12 employees have worked for Tesla, Ducati North America and Intel, and the bike theyre building could set a new benchmark for EVs of all kinds.

"As a motorcycle enthusiast and engineer, I knew I could combine my passion for motorcycles with my passion for innovation and create a motorcycle that truly sets a new standard in the perception of electric vehicles," company founder and CEO Forrest North said at the Mission Ones launch.

Ben & Jerrys ice cream created "Yes Pecan!" ice cream flavor for Obama.

They then asked people to come up with a George W. Bush memorial flavor.

Some of the best responses:

Keep in mind that koalas, no matter how theyre cuddly theyre depicted, are wild animals who dont like to come down out of the trees and avoid human contact. Thats what makes these photos (sent by my gorgeous mum) so amazing~as well as a reminder of the water crisis the continent faces:

Things I do when my internet connection is being slow

What I Know About Science

How Happy I Am With My Job

The chances of a procrastinator getting a chart done

Why I failed that Maths Test

During Obama?s Inaugural Speech

Whiteboard Use

Lokate Emergency Alarm GPS Watch - get out of trouble and don?t pass go

The Lokate Emergency GPS Watch comes with an in-built mobile phone and a panic button. So, for example, if you suddenly find yourself trapped in a ladies changing room with Paris Hilton, you can summon help instantly. The integrated GPS tracker will then send a Gucci clad Ninja rescue force to your location using the pinpoint directions afforded by Microsoft?s Virtual Earth maps. Nice to know there are people watching over you, eh? £295.00 (plus VAT) and £14.95 a month subscription for the Ninjas.

• 377 cities already committed, and double the number of countries that participated in 2008
  
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu leads call for action on climate change
  
• Christ The Redeemer statue to turn off its lights
  
• Iconic Obama artist Shepard Fairey joins campaign
  

Six Ways to Boost Brainpower

The adult human brain is surprisingly malleable: it can rewire itself and even grow new cells. Here are some habits that can fine-tune your mind

Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy

Accelerated thoughts may trigger the brains novelty-loving reward system