Marie Ripley's neighbors have a simple request. Please stop feeding the vultures. Over 60 of them have taken up roost in the neighborhood since Mrs. Ripley starting providing them chicken and ground beef. Requests from the Montpelier Community Association to stop feeding the birds have so far fallen on deaf ears.

"And Tiger waves off the ball washer."

Aspiritech, a Chicago based non-profit company, has launched a program to train high-functioning autistic people as testers for software development companies. The company says autistics have a talent for spotting imperfections, and thrive on predictable, monotonous work. Aspiritech is not the first company to explore the idea of treating this handicap as a resource. Specialisterne, a Danish company founded in 2004, also trains autistics. They hire their workforce out as hourly consultants to do data entry, assembly line jobs and work that many would find tedious and repetitive.

coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

A 25-year-old Ukrainian student, who had a habit of dipping his chewing gum in citric acid, died when the gum he was chewing exploded. An examination of the gum showed that it was covered in an explosive substance. Officers found citric acid packets and a substance which looked similar, believed to be some kind of explosive material, on a table near the young man. It is suspected that the student forgot which packet was which.

An anonymous reader writes "CNET reports on the world's most geeky Christmas card, and also the most expensive. The card is made out of a 1st gen iPhone, hacked into a Christmas card using cardboard, paper and glue. The card includes a virtual 'bauble' which uses the iPhone's accelerometer to recreate Christmas decorations that bounce and move with the card. The makers of the card say that because of the iPhone's battery life 'you probably don't want to post it anywhere it will take more than 3 days to arrive.'"

Jbabe writes "Two men have been charged after cooking a rat and serving it with rice as a meal for fellow contestants on a reality TV show. D'Acampo, 33, and Manning, 30, were confronted by RSPCA and were both charged with animal cruelty offenses and ordered to appear in court on February 3. If found guilty, the pair face up to three years in jail. Broadcasters of the program in Britain could also face charges. RSPCA NSW chief inspector David O'Shannessy said it was unacceptable for the rat to have been killed for a TV show. The concern is this was done purely for the cameras. The show's producers were ordered by the RSPCA to hand over footage showing how the rat, which was believed to be tame, was killed."

Someone in Guadalajara, Mexico is about to get the best present in gift exchange history. A remote-controlled dinosaur robot worth £60,000 has been stolen from a Walking with Dinosaurs show that opened on Friday. "Only in Mexico! How it happened, we don't know. We don't even know if whoever stole it knows its value," said Karla Arroyo, a spokesman for the show.

People traveling down State Highway 2, between Woodville and Dannevirke, in New Zealand this morning were in for an offal surprise. 15km of the highway was covered in blood, discarded pieces of butchered animals, and fat, 30 cm deep in spots, after the tailgate of a truck carrying the mess opened. A spokesman for the New Zealand Transport Agency said, "It's not really a good day for my boys. Offal spills have a huge amount of fat in them and that poses a risk to the public so we closed the road," adding that the scene was, "pretty bloody awful."

New Zealand Police working in Waitarere Beach are trying a new tactic in the war against bad driving. They are rewarding good drivers with candy. "This year we decided rather than going out with a big stick and punishing people being bad, we would also reward people for good behavior," Constable Ian Hamblyn said. If the program is a success, New Zealanders who manage not to steal will be rewarded with a peanut butter cup.

ColdWetDog writes "Wired is running a story on DARPA's effort to stave off battlefield casualties by turning injured soldiers into zombies by injecting them with a cocktail of one chemical or another (details to be announced). From the article, 'Dr. Fossum predicts that each soldier will carry a syringe into combat zones or remote areas, and medic teams will be equipped with several. A single injection will minimize metabolic needs, de-animating injured troops by shutting down brain and heart function. Once treatment can be carried out, they'll be "re-animated" and — hopefully — as good as new.' If it doesn't pan out we can at least get zombie bacon and spam."

theodp writes "After a copy of Get a Grip on Physics appeared in police photos of Tiger Wood's golf club/hydrant-damaged SUV, the book's Amazon sales rank jumped from 396,224 to 2,268. 'I'm delighted,' said author John Gribbin upon hearing that Tiger was in possession of his layman's guide to physics. 'I write books about science for people who aren't scientists so he's exactly my target audience.'"

Freshly Exhumed writes "Broadcasting illegally on the FM Radio band from atop his father's strip club in Canada's capital city of Ottawa, young Jayhaed Saadé was handed a cease-and-desist order by Industry Canada inspectors on December 2 to shut down his MIX FM operation, then simply waited a few hours, pumped up the volume once again the next afternoon, and still remains defiantly on the air. His choice of programming has been described as a blatant rip-off of Lebanon's popular MIX FM music station. The story gets weirder as it seems Saadé's father is a former Ottawa mayoralty candidate, and apparently sees no harm in his son's illegal activities despite looming $20,000-per-day fines that Industry Canada may impose under Canada's Broadcasting Act, let alone the shark feeding frenzy that is sure to occur when the Mounties, the taxman, music industry copyright/plagiarism watchdogs, and other aggrieved parties descend on his second floor playhouse."

What do you do if the horses in your county start turning up with braided manes? If you're the police force in West Dorset, England you consult a warlock to make sure it isn't a sign of something malign. From the article: "PC Tim Poole, who has investigated the incidents, said: 'We can't completely rule out the possibility of theft. We did have intelligence from Avon and Somerset police that it is a gypsy trick, which it may or may not have been. But we have some very good information from a warlock that this is part of a white magic ritual and is to do with "knot magick." It would appear that for people of this belief, knot magick is used when they want to cast a spell.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Back in 2008, Lucas Ordonez lived what seemed like an ordinary existence. The 22-year-old Spanish student was an avid motorsports fan, but he lacked the suitable investment necessary to become a professional race driver and had virtually given up on racing. Besides, he was already knee-deep in trying to complete a Master of Business Administration (MBA). But it was Ordonez' passion for virtual racing, particularly his love of Gran Turismo, that made him stand out from his peers — both off the track and eventually on it. In just a few months, Ordonez' life was transformed from console dreamer to racing the real thing at a real race track in Europe. And Ordonez managed to do the unthinkable: go from the couch car to the race car, and win."

A course at the University of Michigan ends with a live concert featuring students using iPhones as instruments. “Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble“ teaches students to code musical instruments for the iPhone, using the Apple-provided software-development kit. Georg Essl, assistant professor of computer science and music, says, "What’s interesting is we blend the whole process. We start from nothing. We teach the programming of iPhones for multimedia stuff, and then we teach students to build their own instruments.”

An anonymous reader writes "6 SWAT, 2 uniformed officers, 2 undercover, a chopper in the air, surrounding streets blocked off with five cop cars, two ambulances and a dozen cops. That's what it takes to stop a man packing LEGOs. Jeremy bought himself one of these, someone saw him playing with it in the office and the rest is history."

Copenhagen's Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard thought sending postcards to hotels warning summit guests to stay away from Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference was a good idea. What he didn't know is that hell hath no marketing scheme like a prostitute scorned. The Sex Workers Interest Group has now offered free sex to anyone producing one of the postcards. "This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don't understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way," SIO Spokeswoman Susanne Møller said.

Scientists at the National Physical Laboratory in West London thought about all the problems facing the world today: global warming, pollution, disease, and diminishing natural resources. They thought about them all, and then built the world's smallest 'snowman.' The art project, which is 0.01mm across, is made from tiny tin beads, normally used to calibrate electron microscopes. A focused ion beam carved the snowman's face with a tiny bit of platinum as a nose. I bet these guys were Play-Doh phenoms when they were kids.

The small Brazilian town of Candido Godol is noteworthy for its large German population and remarkable for its twin birth rate. The town has approximately 80 families and 44 sets of twins, a rate that is 1000% higher than normal. Many theories have sprung up over the years to account for the anomaly. National Geographic explores one of the latest and perhaps the most disturbing, the possibility that the twins are a result of an experiment conducted by Nazi scientist Joseph Mengele.