If you’ve recently gone for a couple of 88mph spins in a souped-up DeLorean outfitted with a flux capacitor running at 1.21 jigawatts and have somehow ended up in an alternate universe in which internet memes don’t exist, then you may not yet have read about the 12-year old McDonald’s Hamburger that still looks just like a McDonald’s Hamburger. For the rest of you who are already with me, you’ll have to indulge me for a moment while I fill-in the time travelers as to what’s been going on.
Apple is trying to prevent teen sexting by replacing inappropriate text messages with pictures of a shirtless Steve Jobs. Part of this story is true, I made the other part up.
Seems pretty basic–it’s a patent for censoring text messages. It’s kind of like those personal television censors that bleep out “objectionable” words and replace them with safe alternatives (they usually use the closed-caption text in order to figure out which words are objectionable, so this is very similar). Perfect for parents who like to control every inch of their children’s lives.
The bad news…all these damn touch-screen devices we use harbor flu germs that will most certainly kill you. The good news…iPad owners will be the first to be thinned from the herd.
Personal touch-screen devices – iPads, BlackBerrys and Droids – are now seemingly everywhere, potentially harboring the germs and viruses that turn voices raspy and send noses running.
Cancer is a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet, a study by University of Manchester scientists has strongly suggested. The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods – carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature – includes the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy.
Finding only one case of the disease in the investigation of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, with few references to cancer in literary evidence, proves that cancer was extremely rare in antiquity. The disease rate has risen massively since the Industrial Revolution, in particular childhood cancer – proving that the rise is not simply due to people living longer.
Professor Rosalie David, at the Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”
I know the police in this article are trying to make a point about how busy they are (to avoid budget cuts) but sitting around tweeting every call you go out on just proves that you have plenty of spare time to be on Twitter all day. Am I right?
One of Britain’s largest police forces is putting every incident it deals with for 24 hours on the twitter website on Thursday to highlight the amount of work officers deal with in the face of imminent spending cuts.
