Twitter on Nightline

Nightline's tongue-in-cheek piece on the phenomena that is Twitter.

Why the Japanese hate the iPhone

Apple's iPhone is a hit with the majority of the world, but not in Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it's being offered for free.

What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.

Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos -- and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner.

These t-shirts were tested on animals

Always endlessly amused by Top Gear's sense of humor.

4085 square mile natural mirror

The world's largest salt flat, the Salar de Uyuni in Southwestern Bolivia (near the crest of the Andes, 3,650 meters high), is one of the most exotic place sceneries on earth. There is an estimated 10 billion tons of salt in the flats, 25 times the amount in the Bonneville Salt flats in Utah in the United States. The 4085 square mile salt flat looks like a scene from another planet. The endless sea of white salt is paired with small islands, which are small rocky hills of earth cluttered with odd plants such as cacti. The flats were once part of a large lake more than 40,000 years ago.

Continue Reading "4085 square mile natural mirror"

A fish with a transparent head

Macropinna microstoma is the fish with the see-through head.

The common name for the fish is "barreleyes." Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute investigators recently figured out why this species has such an unusual head. Its eyes can actually rotate within its "skull," so the transparency allows the wary swimmer to keep a literal eye on happenings above it, as well as to the sides and directly in front.

Replacing things lost

Amy DePaul writes about the unlikely intersection of breast cancer and breast augmentation.

He pulled out his pen and opened his file and began asking questions, looking over my medical information: Do you smoke? No. Did they find cancer when you had your cervical cone biopsy? No. "Good," he said. And then: "What is your current bra and cup size, and what would you like to move up to?"

Huh?

Stephen Colbert dials up the 1997 internet

Stephen Colbert takes us on a trip down memory lane. Briefly anyways.

I did some pretty embarrassing things in 1997, but it all pales in comparison to what the internet was doing in 1997. Back then, the internet was basically five chat rooms, Hamster Dance and a bulletin board for fake Star Trek nudes. How did we not all kill ourselves?

For everyone's sake, I think we should agree to pretend the internet was invented in 2006. I, for one, won't be able to someday look my grandchildren in the eye and tell them I once was content with sub-1080p furry porn.

Man spends 30 years creating a model of Herod's temple

A retired farmer has spent more than 30 years building an enormous scale model of Herod's temple, and it's still not quite finished.

Broadway closing down car traffic

New York plans to close several blocks of Broadway to vehicle traffic through Times Square and Herald Square, an experiment to reduce traffic congestion in Midtown and turn the streets into pedestrian malls.

Although it seems counterintuitive, officials believe the move will actually improve the overall flow of traffic, because the diagonal path of Broadway tends to disrupt traffic where it intersects with other streets.

The city plans to introduce the changes as early as May and keep them in effect through the end of the year. If the experiment works, they could become permanent.

Andy Richter joining Conan O'Brien

Andy Richter will be joining Conan O'Brien, as the two take over the Tonight Show reins from Jay Leno this summer.

This time around, however, instead of serving as O'Brien's on-air wingman, Richter will take the role of full-service announcer. In addition to serving as Tonight's official voice, he will also regularly appear in comedy bits.

"Andy is one of the funniest people I know, and we've maintained a close friendship since he left Late Night," O'Brien said. "We have a proven chemistry that will be an incredible asset to The Tonight Show."

An email from the FBI

I dunno, this email from the FBI looks pretty legit.

Girl raised by dogs in her home after her alcoholic mother neglected her

A three-year-old girl has been found being cared for by dogs while her alcoholic mother neglected her.

Social workers discovered the girl in her mother's house in Russia, naked and walking on all fours, gnawing bones with the dogs who she clung to for warmth.

The child, called Madina, only knows two words - yes and no - and growls like a dog when people come too close.

Explanation of Gmail's outage

Gmail had a major outage yesterday morning and here's Google's official explanation.

This morning, there was a routine maintenance event in one of our European data centers. This typically causes no disruption because accounts are simply served out of another data center.

Unexpected side effects of some new code that tries to keep data geographically close to its owner caused another data center in Europe to become overloaded, and that caused cascading problems from one data center to another. It took us about an hour to get it all back under control.

Effects shop fulfills amputee's mermaid dream

Good: double amputee gets prosthetic legs so she can walk. Better: double amputee gets realistic-looking mermaid tail so she can swim. Awesome: it's developed and built by Weta, the special-effects company that did all the work for the "Lord of the Rings" movies, as well as "King Kong" and "The Chronicles of Narnia" series.

The Anti-Bono

The New York Times interviews Dambisa Moyo, who believes we should stop giving aid to Africa. Instead, she believes we should invest in microfinance, giving money instead as loans to African entrepreneurs.

Q:You argue in your book that Western aid to Africa has not only perpetuated poverty but also worsened it, and you are perhaps the first African to request in book form that all development aid be halted within five years.

Think about it this way -- China has 1.3 billion people, only 300 million of whom live like us, if you will, with Western living standards. There are a billion Chinese who are living in substandard conditions. Do you know anybody who feels sorry for China? Nobody.

Q: Maybe that's because they have so much money that we here in the U.S. are begging the Chinese for loans.

Forty years ago, China was poorer than many African countries. Yes, they have money today, but where did that money come from? They built that, they worked very hard to create a situation where they are not dependent on aid.

Q: What do you think has held back Africans?

I believe it's largely aid. You get the corruption -- historically, leaders have stolen the money without penalty -- and you get the dependency, which kills entrepreneurship. You also disenfranchise African citizens, because the government is beholden to foreign donors and not accountable to its people.