Category: News

Twenty million dollars. Say it with me…twenty…million…dollars. Wow. They must have seen this guy coming a mile away.

The hard-to-believe story started started in 2004 when moneyed pianist Roger Davidson asked Mount Kisco computer store owners Vickram Bedi, 36, and his Icelandic girlfriend Helga Invarsdottir, 39, to rid his computer of a virus. On learning of Davidson’s wealth, the pair are alleged to have concocted an elaborate social engineering scam that defrauded him of somewhere between the $6 million the police have been able to confirm with an upper figure of as much as $20 million.

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For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food. The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

Say what you want about Google, this cash bonus + 10% raise is pretty cool. With the economy forcing most companies to cut back during the holidays, it is nice to see Google spreading their mountain of cash.

Google has given all of its employees $1,000 cash “holiday bonuses” and 2011 salary increases of at least 10%, a loyal reader tells us. The 10% company-wide raise will take effect on January 1, 2011.

Yes, according to researchers at the consumer product manufacturer Unilever and the University of Manchester. They say the annoyingly loud background noise from the airplane’s engines disturb our senses and make us enjoy our food that much less.

You can’t rule out the low cost of the food and environmental factors such as air pressure and the dryness of the air, researcher Andy Woods told ABC News. But even so, noise levels still have an impact on our enjoyment or dislike of food.

Whoever invented the ‘laptop’ probably didn’t worry too much about male reproductive health. Turns out, unsurprisingly, that sitting with a computer on your lap will crank up the temperature of your nether regions, which could affect sperm quality.

And there is little you can do about it, according to the authors of a study out today in the journal Fertility and Sterility, short of putting your laptop on a desk. The researchers hooked thermometers to the scrotums of 29 young men who were balancing a laptop on their knees. They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men’s scrotums overheated quickly.