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The man who tried to blow up an American airplane has been identified as Richard Reid, age 28, a small-time British criminal. He was identified by British police from fingerprints sent by the FBI. He was born in southeast London in 1973. His mother Lesley is English and his father Colvin is Jamaican.

He belonged to a mosque in a poor area of London that was also attended by one of the suspected terrorists behind the September 11 attacks. His mother came to the mosque looking for her son several months ago after he went to Pakistan and stopped communicating with his family
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After years of ridicule and denial, scientists and doctors are finally beginning to take near death experiences (NDEs) seriously, as shown by a report in the December 15 issue of the respected English medical journal The Lancet.

In a recent study conducted in the Netherlands, Dr. Pim van Lommel and colleagues studied 62 patients who said they had a near-death experience after going into cardiac arrest. They found that factors such as medication and the duration of unconsciousness did not explain the phenomenon. ?Our results show that medical factors cannot account for occurrence of near-death experiences,? says van Lommel.
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Fed up with trying to get the lights on?and off?the Christmas tree every year? Scientists say that genetic modification will make it possible to grow Christmas trees that light themselves up. They also believe that trees could be grown that would provide power for homes and run appliances.

Professor Bernard Witholt, chairman of the Institute of Biotechnology at Zurich?s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, says trees could be bred to mimic electric eels. Inspired by this, a group of postgraduate students at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K. entered a government-sponsored competition with a proposal to create a Christmas tree that lights up on its own.
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Richard Wiseman, an English psychologist, has been investigating which jokes people find the funniest. He?s asked for jokes over the internet at Laughlab.co.uk, and has received 10,000 jokes from more than 70 countries.

One of his findings was that men and women think different things are funny. This is the type of joke that was rated highly by women: A man had a dog called Minton. One day Minton ate two shuttlecocks. When the owner found out, he said, ?Bad Minton.?

This kind of joke was rated highly by men: A guy walked in to a psychiatrist?s office wearing underpants made of transparent cling wrap. The psychiatrist said, ?Well, I can clearly see you?re nuts.?
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