News highlights at one of the most popular sites on the web

• The ‘Drudge Report’ highlights some of the top stories from around the world in a basic & quick to read format
• Its got a HUGE readership: over 15 million hits in the past 24 hours!!! and over 4.5 BILLION hits in the past year

BBC’s ‘ten things we didn’t know last week’

• The BBC do a weekly magazine item listing ‘10 things we didn’t know last week - you can see the archive here
• Some examples… ‘Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell is the fourth bestselling book of the 20th Century, after the Bible, the Koran and Mao’s Little Red Book’
• ‘We each get a completely new skeleton every 10 years, because of cell renewal’
• ‘Spiralling obesity rates are forcing councils to upgrade their crematoria, to take wider coffins.’
• ‘It is cheaper to ship waste from London to Shenzen in China than it is to send it by road from London to Manchester.’

New Tolkien novel goes on sale - The Children of Hurin

• Tolkien’s son has completed a book from some of his dad(JRR Tolkien)’s manuscripts - see more at the BBC
• The book is on sale now

Take visitors to a random post on your WordPress blog

• All you need to do is add ‘?random’ to the end of your URL and the link will go to a random page on your blog e.g. click here for a random post from my blog
• See the article on this function here

Artificial people… the way forward???

ScienceAhead have a list of the ‘Top 10 Artificial Technologies Ready to Create a Real Human Being‘.

House price crash in Spain?

The BBC have an article on this.

Uk’s richest get 20% richer in a year!

Click here for a BBC article on this.

Planet Earth 2?… habitable planet found! (article + video)

*New planet earth article here & video here*
A team of scientits have found the first potentially habitable planet outside our solar system! The BBC have an article and video clip with lots of info.

Multiple Intelligences… BBC article/program

*Click here for multiple intelligences article*
I like the way people are starting to think of intelligence in different ways. Instead of just the traditional IQ style intelligence, people are now talking about emotional & bodily intelligence etc.

Do you Digg?… Digg this post at Digg.com

Digg is a GREAT place to go to find out what cool/interesting/fun sites people have come across. Its a major (ranked 88th most popular site in the world! at Alexa.com) ’social bookmarking’ site, where members submit ‘content’ (weblog posts, news articles, etc.) Other users then check out the content themselves and if they like it they ‘Digg’ it.

**To Digg this article, click here **

Mortgage refinancing. Get the best mortgage rate!

Mortgage refinancing can “substantially slash mortgage repayments” - this article details five easy to follow steps to help you get the best mortgage rate you can, and to pay your mortgage off early.

Robots in our future

Scientists are predicting that in the very near future (within 5 years) we’ll have robots for things like child-minding, care-home work, and prison monitoring! This is according to an article in the Daily Mail, a large UK national daily paper… “Are we safe from robots that can think for themselves?“

The BBC also have some interseting articles on this subject. An article written yesterday talks about future robots being autonomous, decision making machines. It also talks about ‘robot rights’! amongst other things. There are some other good robot articles in the right hand column as well.

Kryptonite is REAL!

The BBC have reported on the discovery of a new mineral which was described in the film Superman Returns as Kryptonite! See for yourself here. Does this mean the real Superman is out there as well?!?!? lol

Car Insurance

Car Insurance is a big area these days with loads of companies to choose from. There’s a site called reviewcentre.com that lets users rate companies on different criteria, then shows them all in a list. If you’re looking for car insurance it may be worth having a look here. The AA look to be one of the best rated - if you scroll down the list, they’re the first company with more than 10 reviews and they manage a decent rating of 7.7 (at the time of writing this.)

The site also has reviews for a ton of other stuff

Reiki healing for free

Free Reiki healing is available at The Reiki Experiment. All you need to do is leave a comment on the ‘Request a healing’ Page and someone will ’send’ you a healing. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Reiki if you want more info about this type of healing.

Crazy gadget pics (slippers with headlights etc)

The Daily Mail has pics of some very unusual gadgets. After the slippers with headlights, my favourite is probably the ’shuffling shoes’, which might actually be quite useful?…

Have you caught the latest bug?

‘Who is sick?’ is a site where users record their illnesses. The data gets plotted on a Google map so, for example, you can see if you’re the victim of the latest bug going around. There’s a bar chart showing whether reports of different types of sickness are growing or falling, various search functions and a discussion forum. The site’s still in its infancy but this could well be an interesting site to come back to once its been going for a while. Remember to ‘Digg’ it up if you like it

Satellite launch rocket exploding

Awesome video footage of a satellite launch rocket that blew up just after take off. The debris was so hot, it melted the wheel rims on a car!

Online ‘Peer to peer’ style loans

There are at least 2 websites on the go at the moment that facilitate a ‘peer to peer’ style lending & borrowing system. The UK site is called Zopa, and the US site, Propser. ‘Prosper’ has had a whole host of positive press coverage, and Zopa also looks to have been highly rated, e.g. ‘What Investment’ magazine rated it product of the month in Aug ‘06.

Does anyone have any experience of these sites?.. This seems like a great idea to me.

What makes us happy in the long-term?

The BBC has an interesting acticle on this subject, which follows on from a recent European survey. The summarised answer is “To be well off, have a better work-life balance and good public services, and, possibly, to lower our expectations” The comments are quite interesting as well.

Funny comic strip - Bush and Nixon comparison

Check out this little funny… (not a full comic, just a little one pager)

Great consumerism pics/art

**60,000 plastic bags**, the number used in the US every **five seconds**
106,000 aluminum cans, the number used in the US every thirty seconds
These and more pics here

Must have bookmark for movie fans - IMDB

If you like movies and you don’t know about IMDB, WHY NOT!! - IMDB stands for Internet Movie DataBase and has HUGE amounts of info, reviews etc about almost a million titles. Stats from their website are:

372,912 movies released theatrically.
440,186 TV episodes.
59,360 made for TV movies.
43,375 TV series.
55,254 direct to video movies.
5,491 mini series.
5,396 live action video games.

UK pound goes through $2 barrier

Looks like UK interest rates are going up again. Check out the full article here.

Freeware recommendations from those in the know

Majorgeeks.com have a list of ‘must have’ freeware for a whole bunch of uses. They highlight their picks based on whether they’re suitable novices, intermediates, or ‘Majorgeeks’ - very helpful