Community ClicksEntrepreneurial spirit in action
The dating website BeautifulPeople.com, supposedly limiting its reach only to the attractive (though claiming 600,000 members worldwide), announced recently that it would sponsor a companion egg and sperm bank for its members to sell their essences for a fee.
However, as managing director Greg Hodge told Newsweek in June, homely customers were welcome.
“Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people,” he said
“But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good-looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish . . .”
>>> The video company EA Sports sells sports games based on real-life professional leagues, with its biggest moneymaker “Madden NFL 11,” which allows joystick-using “coaches” to compete with each other based on actual pro football players’ abilities.
In June, EA Sports announced a new touch of realism: Just as football teams “scout” opposing players, EA Sports will sell joystickers complex “scouting reports” on the talents and tendencies of their fellow joystickers.
Not quite ready for crime
Austin, Texas, police issued an arrest warrant in June for Jose Romero, who they say robbed a Speedy Stop clerk after demanding money and menacingly pointing to his waistband, which held a caulking gun.
>>> Steven Kyle took about $75,000 worth of merchandise from Cline Custom Jewelers in Edmonds, Wash., in June, but as he left the store, employees shouted to passers-by, several of whom began to chase Kyle.
Almost immediately, Kyle dropped his gun and the jewelry and fell to the ground exhausted.
Kyle later revealed that he had only one lung.
Weird science
Michelle Philpotts of Spalding, England, and her husband, Ian, and their two children have adjusted, since a car crash 20 years ago, to her anterograde amnesia, which, every day, robs her of short-term memory, forcing her to constantly re-learn her life.
According to a June profile in London’s Daily Mail, that includes Ian’s convincing her that the stranger in her bed every morning is her husband, which he does by showing her their wedding photographs.
>>> An April National Geographic TV special tracked “Silvano,” an Italian man for whom sleep is almost impossible.
He has “fatal familial insomnia,” making him constantly exhausted, and doctors believe he will eventually fall into a fatal dementia.
Only 40 families in the world are believed to carry the FFI gene.
>>> Wild elephants recently rampaged through some parts of Bangladesh, and according to the head of the country’s Wildlife Trust, those super-intelligent animals “are quick to learn human strategies.”
For example, he pointed to reports that elephants (protecting their migration corridors) routinely swipe torches from hunters and hurl them not randomly but directly at the hunters’ homes.
>>> Recent research on the “cat virus” (toxoplasma gondii) acknowledges that, to be viable, the virus must be passed in rodent feces but can only be hosted in a cat’s stomach.
The research report suggests that the toxoplasma gondii somehow tricks the rodents to overcome their natural fear of cats and instead, amazingly, to entice cats to eat them.
Scientists are now studying whether, when human dopamine goes haywire, such as with schizophrenia, a toxoplasma-gondii-type phenomenon is at work.
