Wealthy Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car.
Kidnapping jumped almost 40 percent between 2004 and 2007 in Mexico according to official statistics. Mexico ranks [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

Did you just grope me? Shall we head to the police? That’s the message women are flashing on their cell phones with a popular program designed to ward off wandering hands in Japan’s congested commuter trains.
“Anti-Groping Appli” by games developer Takahashi was released in late 2005, but has only recently climbed up popularity rankings, reaching [...]

Popularity: 7% [?]

A computer program that learns to decode sounds from different languages in the same way that a baby does helps to shed new light on how people learn to talk, researchers said on Tuesday.
They said the finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the [...]

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A Polish bus driver has been fired for sending 38,000 text messages on his company cell phone in a losing effort to win contest jackpot, a spokesman said Thursday.
Leszek Wojcik, a bus driver in the northwestern Polish city of Slupsk, ran up a tab of some 94,000 zlotys ($34,000) with his text messages while trying [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, announced plans on Tuesday for a lottery which would send its winner into space in a bid to spread the dream of extraterrestrial travel beyond the super-wealthy.
Aldrin, who followed U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong onto the moon in July 1969, said the lottery would be run [...]

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An American astronaut became the first person to run the Boston Marathon in space on Monday, completing the 26.2 miles (42.16 km) on a treadmill in the orbiting International Space Station.
Suni Williams, who was an official entrant in the race, took four hours 23 minutes 46 seconds, said John Yembrick, a spokesman for the National [...]

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Mobile service providers in Pakistan have been inundated by calls from subscribers worried by a prank message that they could die of a deadly virus being transmitted via their phones.
The rumor was so effective that some mosques in the country’s biggest city, Karachi, made announcements that people were being killed by a mobile virus and [...]

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Think global warming will raise the oceans enough to submerge Cape Hatteras? Want to bet on it?
An online gambling service has started taking bets on global warming, including whether it can submerge some of the East Coast’s top vacation spots.
The odds that Virginia’s Cape Henry will be under water by 2015 — 200-to-1 at BetUs.com. [...]

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The same rules that make Earth plants green may make non-Earth plants yellow, red or green — but likely not blue, NASA scientists said on Wednesday.
They said their findings — which look at how plants absorb and reflect different types of light — may help narrow the search for life on planets beyond our solar [...]

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An eccentric 78-year-old inventor who was thwarted in his fourth attempt to become governor of Tokyo was undaunted, saying he plans to run 16 more times and will win by outliving his opponents, local media said on Monday.
“I’m going to live to 144, so I’m still only middle-aged. I can run for Tokyo governor 16 [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]