The first line of "defense" at the 400 Iraqi police checkpoints in Baghdad are small wands with antennas that supposedly detect explosives, but which US officials say are about as useful as Ouija boards. The Iraqi official in charge, Maj. Gen. Jehad al-Jabiri, is so enamored of the devices, according to a November New York Times.

For some consumers, good environmental citizenship is important even when choosing among sex accessories. No longer will they tolerate plastic personal vibrators made with the softeners called phthalates;

Procter & Gamble announced in October that it will once again create and host a public restroom for the holiday season in New York City's Times Square as a promotion for Charmin tissue.

Recent precision-tuning of the fruitfly brain: (1) Scientists at England's University of Oxford know how to make fruitflies scared of things they weren't scared of previously - by implanting artificial memories in their brains after somehow locating and managing the precise 12 neurons that enable the flies to learn things.

The human brain's 100 billion neurons may have such specific functions that a few electrically charge only upon recognition of a single celebrity, such as Oprah Winfrey or Bill Clinton.

Health insurance follies: (1) Blue Shield California twice refused to pay $2,700 emergency room claims by Rosalinda Miran-Ramirez, concluding that it was not a reasonable decision for her to go to the ER that morning when she awoke to a shirt saturated with blood from what turned out to be a breast tumor.

David Cerullo came to prominence after purchasing the television studios abandoned by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and established what is perhaps the boldest of all Christian "prosperity gospel" ministries (that pays him an annual base salary of $1.52 million).

What is believed to be the world's only commercial lounge openly serving cocaine operates in La Paz, Bolivia, though the owners of "Route 36" have to change locations from time to time, depending on the moods of the bribed authorities. An August dispatch in London's The Guardian.

A male Swedish college student, Ragnar Bengtsson, 26, has begun pumping his breasts at three-hour intervals in a 90-day experiment to see if he can produce milk. If he succeeds, he said, it could prove "very important for men's ability to get much closer to their children at an early stage."

If society were ever attacked by zombies, we would probably be doomed, and quickly. That was the conclusion of two university researchers in Ottawa, Ontario who set up mathematical models hypothesizing zombie attacks as infectious diseases with the wellknown characteristics of zombie biology from popular fiction.