Reading and Writing Emails
Percentage of the average “knowledge worker’s” time that is spent reading and writing emails: 28
Read moreTag: trends
Deck Chairs Thwart Pirates
Somali pirates who tried to storm a luxury cruise ship were sent packing by a group of retired British and German tourists wielding deck chairs. When the armed pirates pulled up to the ship off the coast of Somalia, the elderly passengers picked up whatever deck furniture they could find to repel the invaders. The pirates peppered the boat with […]
Read moreNaked Surprise
An Australian man hid naked inside a top-loading washing machine to surprise his girlfriend, and had to be freed by police, who used olive oil as a lubricant.
Read moreBad week for:
Special deliveries, after a Florida postal worker exposed potentially lethal security flaws in Washington by flying his gyrocopter over the city and landing on the Capitol lawn. “At no point did I feel it was not a good idea,” said Doug Hughes, 61.
Read morePOLLUTION
The European Union’s environmental agency said targets to curb pollution and climate change by 2050 would he missed without “profound changes” in technology, lifestyle and policy. The agency said poor air quality in Europe causes hundreds of thousands of early deaths a year.
Read moreSEAFLOOR SCRAPING
Bottom-trawling nets, which scrape up anything in their path in pursuit of fish, have left their mark on 20 million sq. mi. (52 million sq km) of seafloor.
Read moreMilitary Bases
The Department of Defense has 562,000 military bases and facilities located around the world, which collectively cover 24.7 million acres—nearly the size of Virginia. Much of that space is now unused, but Congress has barred the Pentagon from conducting a detailed assessment out of fear that bases in home districts would be closed.
Read moreToo Much Brawn, Not Enough Brains
A gang of German bank robbers trying to blow open an ATM machine used too much explosive and destroyed the entire bank. The blast reduced the bank building in the village of Malliss to rubble and damaged cars more than 100 yards away, yet the targeted ATM machine was left completely intact. “Something evidently didn’t work the way the robbers […]
Read moreHello, I’m Johnny Cash
A 60-year-old Dutch man received a brain implant to cure his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suddenly became a fanatical Johnny Cash fan. The patient said his doctors, “kept listening simply and solely to Johnny Cash.”
Read moreTime travel
Sorry, science-fiction fans: Time travel is impossible. That is the sobering conclusion, anyway, of a Hong Kong-based team of physicists. They found that the maximum speed of a single photon, the basic unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe,” Agence France-Presse reports. The photon cannot go faster than the speed of light—186,282 miles per second—and thus provides […]
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