X-Men illustrator dies in Superman pajamas
X-Men illustrator dies in Superman pajamas
The 63-year-old overhauled the X-Men comic and helped popularize the relatively obscure Marvel Comics in the 1970s. He helped turn the title into a publishing sensation and major film franchise.
Cockrum died in his favorite chair at his home in Belton, South Carolina, after a long battle with diabetes and related complications, his wife Paty Cockrum said Tuesday.
Meth said Cockrum will be remembered as “a comic incarnate.”
“He had a genuine love for comics and for science fiction and for fantasy, and he lived in it,” Meth said. “He loved his work.”
PlayStation 3 ROMs Leak onto Internet
PlayStation 3 ROMs Leak onto Internet
According to posts from both hacker and Linux homebrew communities, the PlayStation 3’s Blu-Ray disc format has been cracked, with disc dumps appearing on all major peer-to-peer and torrent sites over the weekend. Although the files cannot be booted by any PlayStation 3 unit as they stand today, this is the first worrying step towards cracking the platform which is barely a week old in the US.
Apparently, the dumps of the game discs were achieved by first installing the Linux operating system on the PlayStation 3.
Upside Down Ceiling Tree
Kids will love this tree as it leaves even more room for presents! The tree hangs from the ceiling and is a not only a great conversation piece, but very practical as well, taking up virtually no floor space. This specialty foliage tree has 550 Clear bulbs and 2050 tips.
Name gaffe on spelling DVD
Name gaffe on spelling DVD
Eamonn Holmes is fuming after makers of his new spelling game DVD spelt his name wrong on the cover.
Makers DDS Media had to scrap 10,000 games after they called him ‘Eamon’ - with one ‘n’.
According to The Sun, an insider said: “There are a lot of red faces with everyone blaming each other.”
The blunder was spotted by the star when he was sent one of the first DVDs to be pressed.
The insider added: “He said, ‘How can you expect people to buy this game when you’ve misspelt my name on the front!’ We had to destroy the whole first run of 10,000 games and delay the launch.”
The game, Eamonn Holmes’ Spell, with its correct cover is due to go on sale later this week.
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From Ananova
The Flintstone Effect
The Flintstone Effect
Tracing wealth back to the Stone Age.
Economic historians divide the history of living standards into two eras, which could be named for the Flintstones and the Jetsons. The Flintstones era runs from the beginning of time through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages and up to about 1800. The Jetsons era begins with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and culminates in a utopian future in which—Jane, stop this crazy thing!—machines do everything.
The Jetsons era trounces the Flintstones era in terms of leaps forward in global quality of life. According to some rough estimates, world living standards grew less than 50 percent over the last two Flintstones millennia (from A.D. 1 until the Industrial Revolution). By contrast, they grew a whopping 1,000 to 2,000 percent in the 19th and 20th centuries of the Jetsons era. In light of the importance of this relatively recent past, it would be pretty surprising if the living standards of our prehistoric forbears exerted a lasting influence. But according to a new study, they do.
The 100-Teen-vs.-100-Parent Promiscuity Poll
Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Your Kid’s Sex Life
The 100-teen-vs.-100-parent promiscuity poll.
To figure out what teens are up to when their parents aren’t watching, we gave 53 boys and 47 girls from four Manhattan high schools (Dalton, La Guardia, Beacon, and MLK) a “purity test,” a series of 37 questions designed to tease out exactly how far they go. Then we went after 100 parents—not the parents of the kids we polled, but parents with kids in the same teen demographic. (We would have liked to administer a take-home purity test, but alas.) We found them—54 moms and 46 dads—in midtown, and put them to the test, with one difference: We asked them to guess their own teens’ answers. As you’ll see, the high schoolers and the parents live on fairly different planets.
Lottery couple leave McDonald’s
Lottery couple leave McDonald’s
A couple who vowed to continue working in McDonald’s after winning £1.3m on the Lottery have changed their minds.
Luke Pittard and fiancee Emma Cox, from Cardiff, returned to work after winning the money in July.
Mr Pittard said: “We said we would keep our jobs but there’s no point earning £6 an hour when you have more than £1m sitting in the bank.”
Instead, the couple, from the Pontprennau area, say they are spending “quality time” with their two-year-old daughter Chloe.
Ms Cox was earning £16,000-a-year as an area manager for the burger train with Mr Pittard picking up £12,000-a-year as a staff trainer.
Before the win the couple could not afford to live together and stayed three miles apart with their respective parents.
They now rent a luxury £300,000 home and are planning their wedding next year, reports the BBC.
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From Ananova
Ant jaws break speed record
Ant jaws break speed record, propel insects into air, biologists find
A species of ant native to Central and South America is entering the annals of extreme animal movement, boasting jaws arguably more impressive than such noteworthy contenders as the great white shark and the spotted hyena.
Biologists clocked the speed at which the trap-jaw ant, Odontomachus bauri, closes its mandibles at 35 to 64 meters per second, or 78 to 145 miles per hour - an action they say is the fastest self-powered predatory strike in the animal kingdom. The average duration of a strike was a mere 0.13 milliseconds, or 2,300 times faster than the blink of an eye.
Watch videos of trap-jaw ants, Odontomachus bauri, using their powerful mandibles to fling themselves into the air. (Videos courtesy of Sheila Patek and collaborators, UC Berkeley)
Three Things You Don’t Know About Aids In Africa
Three Things You Don’t Know About Aids In Africa
At just twenty-six, economist Emily Oster may have the highest controversies-generated-to-years-in-academia ratio of anyone in her field. That’s because, as a Ph.D. student at Harvard, she chose to hop the fence and explore a topic already claimed by doctors, social scientists, and policy wonks: the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Her studies suggest some uncomfortable possibilities—not least that the so-called experts have gotten their approach to the crisis dead wrong.
That’s an important distinction. These disciplines believe that cultural differences—differences in how entire groups of people think and act—account for broader social and regional trends. AIDS became a disaster in Africa, the thinking goes, because Africans didn’t know how to deal with it.
Economists like me don’t trust that argument. We assume everyone is fundamentally alike; we believe circumstances, not culture, drive people’s decisions, including decisions about sex and disease.
Evolution of North America
The images presented here show the paleogeography of North America over the last 550 million years of geologic history.
The 40 images shown here are selected from a suite of approximately 100 maps that are in time slices mostly 5-10 million years apart. By using such tightly spaced time slices, individual paleogeographic and tectonic elements can be followed and intuitively related from time slice to adjacent time slice. Because of space limitations only 40 of the 100 images are presented here but but most shifts of tectonic elements and depositional systems can still be followed. The maps were prepared with the core of North America (Laurentia) fixed. All other tectonic elements are shown moving against or splitting away from Laurentia, thus showing clearly accretionary and rifting events in North America’s geologic history.