SKIRMISHER

Bad Astronomy has taken the trouble to list its Top 10 Astronomy Images for 2006, which also includes our own favorites like the face and water on Mars, and that Saturnian perspective of Earth. What you’re seeing here is not an egg yolk on a big black fat plate of nothing, but the Sun, and [...]

Male experts have conducted this very vigorous study whose findings basically indicate that women who do more housework can reduce breast cancer risk.
The research on more than 200,000 women from nine European countries found doing household chores was far more cancer protective than playing sport.
Dusting, mopping and vacuuming was also better than having a physical [...]

Some hours ago, at dawn in Iraq, Saddam Hussein solemnly climbed the gallows and met his end. But our “Iraqi spy” (who happens to email in flawless, unaccented English) has just zapped us a note saying that as the former Iraqi bad-ass was just about to get it, he quipped this soon-to-be-famous parting shot in [...]

Vegetable-loving thieves pulled off a grand heist involving a trailer full of £25,000 worth of broccoli.
The 48ft container disappeared from its parking space in a suburb of Chicago prompting questions over whether this is the largest ever single heist of vegetable matter.
Local detective Ed Zorich was left bemused, saying: ‘What is someone going to do [...]

Cracked has just settled one of the most important, thought-provoking questions of our time: “Which make better household companions, toddlers or monkeys?”
The experiment was cleanly scientific, quadruple-blinded, placebo-controlled, and completely objective from an American consumer’s viewpoint. It isn’t surprising that monkeys emerge as runaway winners. Because toddlers are just so…like…me.
via CRACKED

Some Russians’ clever way to sell vodka to geeks is packaging it in sleek, serious-looking silver boxes that say “triple-core revolutionary performance processor kit.” The idea is when you drink it, everything in the world will seem three times faster, especially the way your life spirals down the existential drain.

Filipino Manuel Viterbo tried to stop a bunch of robbers from fleeing a noodle factory, and so he probably thought his penis was “hard” enough to deflect bullets. But robber Cesar de Torres showed him his dick was probably hard enough for those P200-peso sluts on Doroteo Jose, but not “harder than the speeding bullet” [...]

This 400-mm Leica camera is designed to give you a hell of a time with the police convincing them that when you say you’re going to “shoot celebrities,” you don’t actually mean killing them. But it has its uses; in a world crawling with paparazzis, this camera will surely earn you some respect; just hope [...]

There’s something fascinating about mankind’s impending death, especially when you see it in bullet-time, Matrix fashion. You see a 3,000-year-old ice shelf the size of 11,000 football fields (these numbers are fantastic!) snap off Canada, and you can’t help but stare at it for hours. It would also have been great for a Friday or [...]

I thought the Japanese are workaholics. This man just proved me wrong.
A senior official at the Kurashiki Municipal Government, who worked only 26 days in about five years, will be dismissed at the end of this year, officials have said.
The 48-year-old public servant, whose name is being withheld, was absent from work for almost the [...]

The upside with having to eat what we’ve cloned is that we’ll probably feel weird about it only in the beginning. Another is, maybe if they could produce and clone gazillions of those cows — inexpensively and efficiently — then there would be enough to feed Africa and the rest of the world’s beautiful-but-starving-to-death people.
But [...]

Isn’t it nice to have green pigs, especially if they glow in the dark?
Some Chinese scientists led by Liu Zhonghua at the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin had the same thing in mind, but they didn’t just sit down and laugh about it; they actually bred green flourescent pigs, three of them.
Reports Xinghua: Genetic material [...]

Well, what do you know. We’ve done it. People have been bribed, sated to surfeit, pampered to numbness. Not to mention we’ve made heartfelt promises to gods of three major religions that involved hackneyed lines like, “we’ll never do it again” and “it’s not you, it’s me” and “I have never and ever will have [...]

My father and maternal grandmother are from the fishing town of Unisan, Quezon. But that doesn’t mean it’s my place of origin. Most Filipinos today say that they’re from this and that province but the truth is, they never grew up there; they just spent summer and Christmas vacations in their folks’ place of origin.
Thus, Friendster is [...]

Because of that earthquake, so many of us here in Asia have been left with laughable online connection at best, and none at all in some other God-forsaken parts.
Incidentally, we’re right in the eye of “some other God-forsaken parts.”
In one smooth, divine flourish, state-of-the-art fiber optic cables snapped, maybe inspiring some drunk physicist somewhere to [...]

The biting Russian winter and the drab, gray buildings are a great combination to inspire people to sit in a corner, make one last swig at the vodka, and slit their throats. So to clamp on this very inspiring mood, well-meaning Russians made this experiment in urban art, where buildings now remind you of a [...]

This free online Flash-based game is so “ingenious” that 2 seconds into the game, you’re ready to blame the rest of humanity for your inability to use more than 8% of your brain.
Try it. See if you can last at least 20 seconds. But first, keep bottles or any other potential projectiles far away from [...]