An anonymous reader writes "Students at Grace Academy in Chelmsley Wood, UK, have returned from half-term break to find staff had installed cameras in bathrooms without notifying them or their parents. Some parents are furious at what they say is a 'total invasion of privacy' and claim some pupils are so anxious about being watched they are refusing to use the facilities."

hargrand writes "The US Department of Education (ED) intends to purchase twenty-seven shotguns with very specific criteria. According to the article they want: '(27) Remington brand model 870 police 12/14P mod GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 gauge: 12 barrel: 14" - Parkerized choke: modified sights: ghost ring rear Wilson combat; front - XS Contour bead sight stock: Knoxx reduce recoil adjustable stock fore-end: speedfeed sport-solid - 14" LOP'. Place of delivery: US Department of Education Office of Inspector General, Chicago, IL.'" I'm surprised they didn't ask for them to be sent to Knoxx first to be fitted with Sidewinder Tactical 10-round drums.

Lanxon writes "It's true: 'Effects of cocaine on honeybee dance behavior,' 'Fellatio by fruit bats prolongs copulation time,' and 'Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?' are all genuine scientific research papers, and all were genuinely published in journals or similar publications. Wired's presentation of a collection of the most bizarrely-named research papers contains seven other gems, including one about naval fluff and another published in The Journal of Sex Research."

Jim Kennedy lost his six-figure corporate development job 19 months ago, his house went into foreclosure, and his bankruptcy will be finalized in January. A story that is not uncommon these days. What is unusual about Kennedy is how he has been living since his financial meltdown. He has been supplementing his cost of living with reward points from hotel and airline loyalty programs. From the article: "This week, Kennedy is at the Holiday Inn Express in San Clemente, where he converted his United Airlines miles. He brought down the 7,000-points a night cost to 5,000 by adding $100 for his four-night stay, so it costs him $25 a night. But there’s an added benefit because he can expand his food budget with the free breakfast. It’s also convenient, as he can drive up the 5 Freeway to get his mail at the Mailboxes Plus in Irvine – he has a post office box because he has no address. It’s here he gets his unemployment checks, which he and 147,000 other jobless people in Orange County are using for survival."

Have you ever wanted to secretively spike an entire community's food supply with psychoactive drugs and see what happens? If so, then you should have joined the CIA in 1951. H .P. Albarelli Jr., an investigative journalist, claims that a sudden outbreak of mass insanity and hallucinations in the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit 50 years ago was part of a CIA experiment with LSD, and not caused by flour contaminated with ergot as had been theorized. The brown bread that is circulating around us is not, specifically, too good. It's suggested that you do stay away from that.

52-year-old Anthony Digati was arrested for trying to extort $200,000 from an insurance firm by threatening to spam them with six million emails unless they paid up. Digati said he would use a spam service and his amazing talents as a "huge social networker" to drag the company "through the muddiest waters imaginable" and presumably unfriend everyone. He added that the price would increase to $3 million if they failed to pay up by Monday, according to federal authorities.

What giggles when you shake a rattle, cries when you tickle it too much, and stares directly into your soul with a pair of luminous blue eyes? It's Yotaro, a Japanese robot programmed to be just as cranky as a real baby. Yotaro's creators hope the robot will teach young people the joys of parenthood and that the gigantic head made of soft translucent silicon and backlit by a projector won't be too terrifying to look at late at night. "Yotaro is a robot with which you can experience physical contact just like with a real baby and reproduce the same feelings," said Hiroki Kunimura of Tsukuba University's robotics and behavioral sciences lab north of Tokyo.

Officials in Odessa, Mo. have proposed giving $90 million in revenue bonds to a Utah company who have created a generator that, "produces electricity using magnetic energy in a way never done before." But Bob Park, a physicist at the University of Maryland, and perpetual realist known for debunking perpetual-motion machines, says Odessa should be cautious. He says the enhanced efficiency claimed for the generator sounds like a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. From the article: "Park, the Maryland professor, said the generator’s patent at one point described generating electricity and energy from permanent magnets, but he said those contained only a small amount of energy. Overall, the patent is obtuse and poorly written, perhaps on purpose, he said. Adding, 'It is my personal opinion, based on years of experience in debunking perpetual-motion machines, that the language in this patent is deliberately obfuscating.'"

Pet training and paper mache will never be the same.

Want to end your relationship, but just don't have the decency to do it in person? Bradley Laborman's company IDUMP4U.com will do it for you and he only charges $10. Best of all, Bradley records the break up calls and posts them on YouTube.

eldavojohn writes "While the jocks who beat you up in high school succumb to March Madness, Suvudu decided to have a tournament worthy of nerd attention. Enter your 32 favorite fantasy characters bracketed up with entertaining paragraphs estimating how the fight will go. From Aragorn to Rand Al'Thor to Cthulhu, vote and comment on your favorite powerhouse fantasy character to win 2010's Suvudu Cage Match!"

captn ecks writes "A biodegradable and self-sterilizing bag for people of the toilet-disenfranchised world (40% of humankind) to dispose of their bodily waste and turn it into safe fertilizer has been created by a Swedish entrepreneur. It's a dead simple and brilliant solution to a vexing problem. From the article: 'Once used, the bag can be knotted and buried, and a layer of urea crystals breaks down the waste into fertilizer, killing off disease-producing pathogens found in feces. The bag, called the Peepoo, is the brainchild of Anders Wilhelmson, an architect and professor in Stockholm. “Not only is it sanitary,” said Mr. Wilhelmson, who has patented the bag, “they can reuse this to grow crops.”'"

Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

NeutronCowboy writes "According to CNN, a South Korean couple was arrested for allowing their baby to starve to death while they were out at an internet cafe. One of their activities there: raising a virtual child in the online game Prius Online. While a South Korean professor calls it a case of Internet Addiction, it's probably more a case of bad coping mechanisms. They were jobless and had apparently little to look forward to."

timothy writes "Anyone skeevy and devious enough can buy online an ATM skimmer from some underhanded maker of same, but why not cut out the middleman, and just take the cash directly? (Also, if you're going to attempt to stop him, can I have your watch when you are dead?)"

JoshuaInNippon writes "A 42-year old man was arrested outside of Osaka, Japan in connection with a YouTube video of him going more than 130km/h (80mph) over the speed limit on his 1300cc motorcycle. The man reportedly borrowed his friend's camera and videotaped himself speeding at well over 180km/h in a 50km/h zone, illegally passing cars multiple times in the process. The man's friend then distributed the video online. Local police say they received an anonymous tip about the YouTube video and investigated. It then took them nearly half a year before making the arrest, but the motorcyclist, who apparently admitted guilt, is now likely facing both multiple fines and jail time. Japanese police say it is the first time they've used evidence from the internet to pursue such traffic violations. With a multitude of similar speed enthusiast home videos on YouTube and other sites, might more careless braggers start facing legal problems?"

wintersynth writes "We hacked a toy brainwave reader to electrocute people if their brainwave frequency got too high (by concentrating). We took outputs off of the 5 level LED indicator, put the outputs through a transistor/resistor/relay circuit to give 2 levels of high voltage through an electric shock circuit right into the user's arm."

If you're in the market for a couple of ghosts trapped in vials of holy water, online auction site TradeMe has a listing for you. The seller claims the vials contain spirits that were exorcised from his home. Bidding has reached $NZ410 ($284), and has generated quite a list of comments ranging from how to get rid of the ghosts, to the ethics of selling a captured immortal essence. From the article: "The seller claims that one spirit belongs to a man who died in the house in the 1920s. 'We have had no (paranormal) activity since they were bottled on July 15, 2009,' the seller said. 'So I believe they are in the bottles.'"

timothy writes "As places to study what happens to corpses, the Atlantic Ocean is both much larger and much more specialized than the famous 'body farm' in Knoxville, TN. But for all kinds of good reasons, sending human bodies into Davy Jones' locker just to see where they float and how they bloat is unpopular. Pigs don't pay taxes, and more importantly, they don't vote. So Canadian scientists have taken to using them as human-body proxies, to study what happens when creatures of similar size and hairlessness (aka, us) end up 86ed and in the drink."

An anonymous reader writes "More than 100 people, many of them dressed in black, are expected to gather around a coffin Thursday to say goodbye to an old friend. The deceased? Internet Explorer 6. The aging Web browser, survived by its descendants Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8, is being eulogized at a tongue-in-cheek 'funeral' hosted by Aten Design Group, a design firm in Denver, Colorado."