A 19-year-old girl who wishes to remain anonymous has constructed a picture essay?with captions?that says a lot about life in the United States. Don?t miss it!
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Cannibalism may seem like a thing of the past, but it’s still going on. In Germany, an apparently respectable middle class software designer ate a microchip engineer. The police caught him after he tried to find a new victim on the internet.
The victim was a 42-year-old microchip designer who lived in a penthouse with thousands of dollars worth of computer equipment. He disappeared in the spring of 2000, after selling his car and other valuables. Police now know he answered this internet ad: “Wanted: young, well-built 18-30-year-old for slaughter.”
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Since most of us are doing our Christmas shopping this week, we should know that stores are subtly influencing our purchases.
In a store called Once Famous, researchers study customers from behind one-way mirrors?but they?re not looking for shoplifters. While the store works like a regular retail outlet and makes a small profit, it?s really a laboratory for the company FAME, which uses social science techniques to study consumers’ shopping habits for major retailers, including Target and Marshall Fields. A blinking light at the store entrance warns customers they’re being monitored for research purposes.
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Astronomers around the world have searched the skies for ET using data from radio telescopes, looking for signals from another civilization. Now Nobel laureate Charles Townes thinks we should return to the old-fashioned method of looking through telescopes because bright bursts of laser light would indicate intelligent life is out there.
He says, “A civilization out there could be a thousand years ahead of us. It seems possible that some being on a planet orbiting a nearby star could send a bright enough beam that we could see it blinking.” Townes believes skeptics who don?t believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life are a vanishing species.
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