For six months, 17-year-old Gaby Rodriguez endured stares, gossip and ridicule, all for a school project. As part of a presentation called "Stereotypes, Rumors and Statistics," Gaby pretended to be pregnant for most of her senior year. From the article: "Only a handful of people — her mother, boyfriend and principal among them — knew Gaby was pretending to be pregnant for her senior project, a culminating assignment required for graduation. Her teachers and fellow students, except for her best friend, didn't realize they were part of a social experiment."

An anonymous reader writes "Amazon has officially denied that the recent outage of its EC2 and Elastic Block Storage cloud platforms was the result of an attack from Cyberdyne Systems' Skynet sentient computer system, declaring humanity safe after all. 'From the information I have and to answer your questions,' a spokesperson explained, 'Skynet did not have anything to do with the service event at this time.'"

kkleiner writes "In his continuing obsession with all things Lego, robotic, and awesome, Chris Shepherd recently constructed the Lego Quad Delta Robot System, a full working model of an industrial robotics line in a factory. The Lego Quad Delta Robot System has four flexing arms that can move in three dimensions, each equipped with a pneumatically driven gripper. Those arms pick up blocks moving on two conveyor belts marked with special light sensors that detect the block's position and color. The system can move 48 of these blocks per minute. Oh, and the whole darn thing, including the impressive support frame, is made out of Lego!"

Not understanding that the attack button only works while playing a game, not real life, Cameron Pittman tried to rob a Subway restaurant with a Playstation controller. Pittman was arrested by police who happened to walk in during the robbery, and was forced to start the level over.

Spurred on by Utah's love of the Browning M1911, the Arizona legislature has named the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the state's official gun. The 32-25 vote approving the measure makes Arizona only the second state to officially recognize a state firearm. From the article: "'Anytime you see a Western movie, the revolver in John Wayne's hand is a Colt single action,' Arizona state Sen. Ron Gould (R) told Reuters. 'This is a historic firearm and it fits well with the story of Arizona.'"

With 244 steps The Time Machine, built by by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, took first place and broke a world record at the 24th Annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. From the article: "It starts with the Big Bang, re-creates the extinction of the dinosaurs, holds a jousting competition, flips over an album, and simulates World War II, a shuttle launch, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and even the alleged apocalypse in 2012. In its precisely executed review of history, 'The Time Machine,' a Rube Goldberg contraption built by members of the Purdue Society of Professional Engineers and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, incorporates a record-breaking 244 steps—all to water a single flower."

Bayoudegradeable writes "It seems that Photoshop skills that not-so-cleverly hide the bones of a rack of ribs are not enough to change meat into acceptable vegan dishes. The NYTimes reports that readers of VegNews are horrified to learn that images used to portray vegetarian images are none other than meat and dairy images manipulated to hide their animal origins. One commenter noted, 'vegan food must turn out so unappetizing that even the leading vegan magazine will not show legitimate photos of it.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The latest in bizarre copyright battles, involves a guy named Bobby Kent who is suing ASCAP and plans to sue every single professional sports team in the US (with the exception of the LA Lakers who already wrote him a check for $3,000), because he claims he came up with the famous 'da da da DA da DA... CHARGE!' jingle. Of course, the actual origins of the jingle are disputed, with evidence pointing back many years before Kent wrote his version, including suggestions of a USC drum major coming up with it, as well as evidence from an old German army music playbook."

In celebration of the upcoming royal wedding, a British brewer has crafted Royal Virility Performance beer. Just three of these stiff brews is equal to taking a Viagra pill. From the article: "Just 40 bottles of the £10 tipple will be produced initially, and will go on sale on April 29 at BrewDog.com. All the proceeds go to the charity Centrepoint, which Wills supports. But buyers will be limited to one bottle each due to the powerful effects."

After what must have been an epic marketing meeting, a Florida unemployment agency decided to give 6,000 red capes to the jobless as part of its "Cape-A-Bility Challenge" public relations campaign. The capes cost $14,000 (not a bad price for 6k capes actually) and featured a cartoon character named "Dr. Evil Unemployment." As one might imagine, officials are calling for an investigation to be launched. It's a good thing there are an abundance of caped do-gooders without jobs in the area who should be able to help.

polyp2000 writes with an Engadget excerpt to inspire instant toy envy: "A pair of Spanish engineers have recently unveiled the dAlH2Orean (see what they did there?), a R/C car that runs on aluminum. Dropping a few soda can tabs into a tank of sodium hydroxide produces enough hydrogen to power the little speedster for 40 minutes — at almost 20mph."

The good news is not all air traffic controllers are sleeping on the job. The bad news is that some of them are watching movies instead. From the article: "In the latest incident, the controller was watching a movie on a DVD player early Sunday morning while on duty at a regional radar center near Cleveland, Ohio that handles high-altitude air traffic, the FAA said in a statement Monday. The controller's microphone was inadvertently activated, transmitting the soundtrack of the movie — the 2007 crime thriller Cleaner, starring Samuel L. Jackson — for more than three minutes to all the planes in the airspace that the controller was supposed to be monitoring, the agency said."

Taking a cue from A Clockwork Orange, San Francisco neuromarketing firm EmSense has launched what it says is "the first ever scalable, non-invasive psychological and brainwave measurement technology — made specifically for market research." The EmBand measures your brain activity, your emotional responses, and your level of engagement in what you are watching on TV. The collected data is then sold to marketers who can come up with more interesting ads to be skipped over with your DVR.

Fluent in English, French, Spanish, Mandarin and working on German, 10-year-old Alexia Sloane has become the youngest interpreter to work at the European Parliament. An amazing feat not only for her age, but also because she is blind. From the article: "'There is usually a minimum age requirement of 14 just to enter the European Parliament so for Alexia to interpret there at the age of 10 was amazing,' said mum Isabelle. Alexia has been tri-lingual since birth as her mum is half French and half Spanish and her dad Richard is English." I Guess I should stop bragging to my nephew about having a paper route when I was his age.

WrongSizeGlass writes "PCWorld has an article on Kohler's new hi-tech toilet. The Numi comes complete with a detachable touch screen remote; motion-activated lid and seat; integrated air dryer; a heated seat; feet warmers; ambient lighting; built-in speakers with FM radio and an MP3 player input jack. If you have $6,300 to flush down the drain on a toilet this is for you."

erfnet writes "The Technical University of Munich, along with a German beer-maker, have kindly published a 'Comprehensive Sensomics Analysis of Hop-Derived Bitter Compounds During Storage of Beer' They determined 56 hop-derived sensometabolites which contribute to bitter taste during storage, increasing with time and temperature. If we had only had this information during our College days, we could have been even geekier! 'Duuuuude, it's not skunked, it's suffering from proton-catalyzed cyclization of trans-iso-a-acids.'"

nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"

A good old-fashioned Iliad diorama just wasn't big enough for a group of Chicago area students. They decided to build a life-sized Trojan Horse for their class project instead. From the article: "As Newsradio 780s Mike Krauser reports, their teacher couldn’t believe it. 'It was a surprise and it was a big surprise,' said teacher Bob Pomykala. The students wouldn’t tell Pomykala what they were up to. 'They said they had a great idea, but they wouldn’t tell me what it was,' he said. What they did was build a giant Trojan Horse, which, according to Greek mythology was used to sneak soldiers into the city of Troy for a triumphant battle. They built it in senior Sergio Aguilar’s yard, and then moved it right in front of Marengo Community High School.

PolygamousRanchKid writes "Miss your tax deadline in the United States this weekend, and you might get a nasty letter at your door. In Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, you might get Riffee and the gang. They are transgender tax collectors — whose weapons include flamboyancy, surprise — and a little lipstick."

kfogel writes "Karen Sandler (a lawyer at the Software Freedom Law Center) and Mike Tarantino (a professional musician) are getting married in May. They've sent out the coolest wedding invitation ever: a beautifully packaged flexidisc record where the invitation itself is the record player. The song was written by Mike, is performed by Karen and Mike together, and FTW is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The person who designed the invitations — a friend of the couple's — has blogged about it."