People who sleep fewer than six hours a night -- or more than nine -- are more likely to be obese, according to a new government study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies.     The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr. Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.     "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said.

The goal of our Glasnost project is to make access networks, such as residential cable, DSL, and cellular broadband networks, more transparent to their customers.     ISPs are increasingly deploying a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls, traffic shapers, censors, and redirectors) to monitor and to manipulate the performance of user applications. Most ISPs do not reveal the details of their network deployments to their customers. We believe that this knowledge is important to help users make a more informed choice of their ISP. Further, such knowledge is also useful for researchers designing protocols and systems that run on top of these networks.     To improve network transparency, we are building online tools that are easy to use and publishing them on this web page. Currently, there are two tools you could use to test your ISP. We will release more tools as we develop them in the future.     -- Test for BitTorrent traffic manipulationThis tool tries to detect whether your ISP blocks or rate-limits BitTorrent traffic.-- Test your broadband link characteristicsThis tool measures certain characteristics of your broadband link, e.g., link bandwidths and potential router queueing delays in both upstream and downstream directions.From the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems.

Since they first walked the planet, humans have either buried or burned their dead. Now a new option is generating interest — dissolving bodies in lye and flushing the brownish, syrupy residue down the drain

"The market is starting to send a signal: You got to get your alternative in line," said Robert Kaufmann, director of Boston University s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies. Societies that ignore this kind of signal do so at their own peril.     Kaufmann isn't promoting the so-called "peak oil" theory - he doesn't think the world is quickly running out of oil.     The problem, he says, is new discoveries of crude in non-OPEC areas like the United States, the North Sea, and Russia have not kept pace with the oil being removed from those places. OPEC, which holds two thirds of the world s crude oil reserves, has seen no drop in global demand despite $120 oil and has little incentive to increase output.     It s this supply problem that prompted analysts at Goldman Sachs to reaffirm their prediction of a so-called super spike in oil prices - which could usher in $200-a-barrel crude in the next 6 to 24 months.

By the time authorities finally cornered the offender under a porch, it was too late.     He had done enough damage that Vicki and Mark Royal and their four kids were forced to flee their house and move to a neighboring suburb as men in protective suits stripped the building to its studs and threw out most of their belongings.     When the family saw the skunk that started this ruinous chain of events, they were struck by one thing: "It was actually very cute," Vicki Royal said.

Why live in a cramped, rat-infested junior one-bedroom when you can reign high in your very own castle?     article covers:   France v. Los Angeles – $500,000   Ukraine v. New York – $1,800,000   Dominican Republic v. Boston – $1,150,000   Italy v. New York – Just Under $1 Million   Mexico v. San Francisco – $1.5 Million   Sweden v. Orange County – $830,000  

Bernie Ward, the most prominent liberal voice on Bay Area talk radio for more than two decades, admitted Thursday to distributing child pornography by e-mail in a plea deal that will send him to federal prison for at least five years.  

The pendulum, it seems, has swung. Way back in the late 90s if you so much as logged into the internet, you'd get The Phantom Menace completely spoiled for you. Not long ago I was being excoriated for holding back info on movies, especially the new Indiana Jones. The people wanted their info, and they wanted it now. Who was I, they argued, to have this information, this knowledge, and not share it? Such has been the way of the internet movie site from the beginning - people want more info, they want more spoilers, they want more pictures. Lately I've been seeing regular civilians passing around scripts for upcoming blockbusters.

Billionaire Mukesh Ambani of Mumbai made news this week as Forbes Magazine revealed building costs of his new “home” approaches 2 billion dollars.

The Kingwood teenager's story of decapitating a corpse and using the head to smoke marijuana was so outlandish that at first Houston Police Department senior officer Jim Adkins did not believe it.(this may top anything ever done in Wisconsin.....well,maybe)