kghapa writes "Think you're Avatar's biggest fan? Even if you're hardcore enough to name your firstborn child 'Neytiri' and live the rest of your life in the jungle, you've still been one-upped by China. China has literally renamed a mountain because of the blockbuster hit."

mariushm writes "The Australian Sex Party (ASP) said Wednesday that the Australian Classification Board (ACB) is now banning depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films. It comes just a week after it was found that material with depictions of females ejaculating during orgasm are now Refused Classification and Australian Customs directed to confiscate it. The National Classification Code dictates that anything that describes or depicts a person who is, or appears to be, a child under 18 (whether the person is engaged in sexual activity or not) in a way that is likely to cause offense to a reasonable adult is Refused Classification." First they crack down on cartoon porn, and now this. It must be arbitrary sex law week in Australia.

A US judge has granted political asylum to a family who said they fled Germany to avoid persecution for home schooling their children. Uwe Romeike and his wife, Hannelore, moved to Tennessee after German authorities fined them for keeping their children out of school and sent police to escort them to classes. Mike Connelly, attorney for the Home School Legal Defence Association, argued the case. He says, "Home schoolers in Germany are a particular social group, which is one of the protected grounds under the asylum law. This judge looked at the evidence, he heard their testimony, and he felt that the way Germany is treating home schoolers is wrong. The rights being violated here are basic human rights."

With all the recycled crap in the movies and on TV, I wish someone would reboot Schoolhouse Rock!

MikeChino writes "After two years of work, celebrated super-designer Philippe Starck has just unveiled two 'Revolutionair' wind turbines. Available in a 400W quadrangular turbine and a 1KW helicoidal version, each is designed so that anyone can put them in their yards, gardens or on roofs to generate power for their home. Starck has become a household name for his product designs, which raises the question — are the days of the designer wind turbine before us?"

Ever get the urge to look at pornographic drawings of famous cartoon children? Neither do I, but 28-year-old Kurt James Milner did, and that's what got him registered as a sex offender. Police received a tip about the pornographic material and eventually found images featuring child characters from The Simpsons and The Powerpuff Girls on Milner's computer. Back in 2008, a Supreme Court judge in Australia ruled that cartoons in which child characters engage in sexual acts is child pornography. Milner said he downloaded the images to show them to his friend 'because he believed they were funny.' Guess it's not so funny now.

quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."

It's the tripnaut! writes "The Daily Telegraph has posted an article stating that 'Professor Simon Conway Morris at Cambridge University will tell a conference on alien life that extraterrestrials will most likely have evolved just like earthlings and so resemble us to a degree with heads, limbs and bodies. They also add a cautionary note that 'Unfortunately they will have also evolved our foibles and faults which could make them dangerous if they ever did visit us on Earth."

wdef writes "The world's first film shot entirely by chimpanzees is to be broadcast by the BBC as part of a natural history documentary. The apes created the movie using a specially designed chimp-proof camera given to them by primatologists. The film-making exercise is part of a scientific study into how chimpanzees perceive the world and each other.'"

ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes "Though Microsoft's Project Natal won't be released until later this year, indie studio Arkedo has already revealed a canceled project for the peripheral. Called 2 Finger Heroes, it was to be a beat 'em up where your fingers do the fighting. 'Characters would be controlled by moving your fingers, while special moves could be done by incorporating your whole hand. The environment could even be affected by moving your arms folded at your chest.' On why it was canceled, one of the developers said, 'One of the design flaws of this, apart from the fact that it demanded some very precise pattern recognition from the Natal system, is that it would have been HELL to localize. Yup, what can be understood as the victory sign in France could be a terrible insult in the UK, for instance. And we are not even talking about Italian. Oh, the possibilities...'"

superapecommando writes "Too many hours spent playing videogames indoors is contributing to a rise in rickets, according to a new study by doctors. Professor Simon Pearce and Dr Tim Cheetham of Newcastle University have written a paper in the British Medical Journal which warns of the rickets uptake – a disease which sufferers get when deficient in Vitamin D. The study boils down to the fact that as more people play videogames indoors they don't get enough sunlight and this has meant the hospitals are now having to combat a disease that was last in the papers around the time Queen Victoria was on the throne." At least the kids are eating enough snacks with iodized salt that we don't have to worry about goiters.

Liz Str8 writes "When Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke at a Nashville Technology Council event held at Trevecca Nazarene University, he participated in a 'meet and greet' session with students from local colleges and universities. At that event, a Trevecca student asked Ballmer to sign his Mac laptop. In an action that Tech Flash blogger Todd Bishop described as 'a scene that will make Mac fans feel like they're watching Thomas Kinkade scribble on a Van Gogh,' Ballmer graciously agreed to do so — right across the Mac logo."

An anonymous reader writes "As a 22-year-old female student at the University of Michigan went through security at Philadelphia International Airport, a TSA worker was staring at her. He motioned her toward him. Then he pulled a small, clear plastic bag from her carry-on — the sort of baggie that a pair of earrings might come in. Inside the bag was fine, white powder. Answer truthfully, the TSA worker informed her, and everything will be OK. After 20 seconds of crying, the TSA agent waved the baggie. It was his, and it was all a joke. Ann Davis, a TSA spokeswoman, said this afternoon that the worker is no longer employed by the agency as of today. She said privacy laws prevented her from saying if he was fired or left on his own."

head_dunce writes "A new nanodragster has been built that measures about 50,000 times thinner than a human hair and going at speeds of up to .0005 inches per hour while doing a wheelie! Maybe the NHRA should stand for Nano-Hot Rod Association?"

Lanxon writes "A collaborative electro-opera based on Charles Darwin and his evolutionary treatise, On The Origin of Species, is about to be released to the world, after a number of highly artistic live performances in Copenhagen and Athens, reports Wired. Called Tomorrow, In A Year, the two-hour production is the work of a whole range of artists, masterminded by Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma. They grabbed reclusive electro-pop duo The Knife to write the music, who in turn asked electronic artist Mt. Sims and multi-instrumentalist Planningtorock to lend a hand along with several other musicians, singers and artists. The result is an unusual fusion of science, experimental music, and art that treads some new creative ground."

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A Facebook employee has given a tell-all interview with some very interesting things about Facebook's internals. Especially interesting are all the things relating to Facebook privacy. Basically, you don't have any. Nearly everything you've ever done on the site is recorded into a database. While they fire employees for snooping, more than a few have done it. There's an internal system to let them log into anyone's profile, though they have to be able to defend their reason for doing so. And they used to have a master password that could log into any Facebook profile: 'Chuck Norris.' Bruce Schneier might be jealous of that one."

An anonymous reader writes "The LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shinyness solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Featuring the LACK side table from Ikea, the LackRack is an easy-to-implement, exact-fit datacenter building block. It provides superior mounting for up to 8 U of 19" hardware, such as switches and other professional gear. Multi-shiny LackRack can also be painted to your specific preferences and the airflow is unprecedented."

jairob writes "A paper just posted in the arXiv reviews the maxims used by three early modern fictional detectives (PDF): Monsieur Lecoq, C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. It finds similarities between these maxims and Bayesian thought. Poe's Dupin uses ideas very similar to Bayesian game theory. Sherlock Holmes' statements also show thought patterns justifiable in Bayesian terms. The author is an emeritus professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University."

The winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award, Jose Luis Rodriguez, has been stripped of his award for hiring a ringer. Officials allege that the wolf in the picture is none other than Ossian, a tame wolf that lives at a zoological park. Using a tame animal is a violation of the contest rules. Wildlife photographer and competition judge, Mark Carwardine, said, "You can see several very distinctive markings and the experts all agreed that, yes, it's the same wolf. We disqualified [Mr Rodriguez] and banned him for life from entering the competition again, so I think that sends a strong message." I'm surprise I haven't found a "three wolves jumping the fence" meme yet.

Have you ever wanted a stranger dressed in a special all-in-one sleeper suit to warm up your hotel bed before you go to sleep? If you answered yes, Holiday Inns in London and Manchester have the perfect program for you. For a limited time, guests can receive a free, five-minute bed warming session from the hotel's human bed warmers. Holiday Inn spokeswoman Jane Bednall says it's ''like having a giant hot water bottle in your bed." Best job ever.