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 [...]

Popularity: 4% [?]

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% [?]

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 [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]

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% [?]

When John Cornwell graduated from Duke University last year, he landed a job as software engineer in Atlanta but soon found himself longing for his college lifestyle. So the engineering graduate built himself a reminder of life on campus: a refrigerator that can toss a can of beer to his couch with the click of [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

A good butler knows just how to rouse one after a boozy night and now anyone can wake feeling pampered to the indulgent tones of the consummate valet.
The Voco clock boasts an alarm of several morning greetings in the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry reprising his role as Jeeves from the 1990s television comedy series [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

At a laboratory in Germany, volunteers slide into a donut-shaped MRI machine and perform simple tasks, such as deciding whether to add or subtract two numbers, or choosing which of two buttons to press.

They have no inkling that scientists in the next room are trying to read their minds — using a brain scan to [...]

Popularity: 2% [?]

A South African sentenced to a month in jail for allowing his cellphone to ring noisily in a courtroom had the sentence overturned on appeal on Friday.
Keri Gwyn Lewis was convicted after his cellphone rang while he was sitting in the public gallery of the Johannesburg High Court and he answered it while leaving the [...]

Popularity: 3% [?]