Redneck Geek: Edward Teller, the famous theoretical physicist known as the "father of the hydrogen bomb" for his work on the World War II-era Manhattan Project, died in 2003, but his daughter Rene tol... more

A Swedish TV show, "Biss och Kajs," found itself in the spotlight in November -- in Russia, where government-run television apparently used it to send a political message to Ukraine by highlighting th... more

Is the signature smell of Texas A&M University more "Italian lemon, bergamot and iced pineapple" (that open into "a body of vivid florals, raw nutmeg and cinnamon") or more "bat feces" and "chilifest ... more

The Marvels of Science: The notorious white separatist Craig Cobb is currently soliciting like-skinned people to move to his tiny town of Leith, N.D. (pop. 16), to create a deluxe Caucasian enclave, b... more

After its launch was delayed for a month by the Madison, Wis., city attorney, the Snuggle House was cleared and scheduled to open on Nov. 15 to provide in-bed, pajama-clad "intimate, non-sexual touch(... more

Downtown London residences are known to be staggeringly expensive, but media blogger Sam Cookney calculated in October just how much. Cookney said he can live in an upscale apartment in Barcelona, Spa... more

"Fantasy sports" are hugely popular, but when fans "draft" players for their teams, they "own" only the players' statistics. Recently, Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs created Fantex Holdi... more

"Fantasy sports" are hugely popular, but when fans "draft" players for their teams, they "own" only the players' statistics. Recently, Wall Street and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs created Fantex Holdi... more

Norwegian public television (NRK), which introduced the now-legendary continuous, live log-burning show (12 hours long, with "color commentary" on the historical and cultural importance of fire), sche... more

Norwegian public television (NRK), which introduced the now-legendary continuous, live log-burning show (12 hours long, with "color commentary" on the historical and cultural importance of fire), sche... more

Land developers for the iconic Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colo. (famous as the inspiration for the hotel in Stephen King's "The Shining") announced recently that they need more space and thus will d... more

A 61-year-old Texas man admitted to a hospital not long ago appearing to be falling-down-drunk, even though denying having had even a single drink, was discovered to be unintentionally manufacturing b... more

A few still-primitive cultures inexplicably celebrate such female adornments as the stacking of metal neck rings and the inserting of saucer-size disks into pierced earlobes. For "civilized" society, ... more

LEAD STORY -- More Bang... more

"With its neatly cut lawns and luscious tropical vegetation," wrote a BBC News reporter in July, Miracle Village, Fla., is an "idyllic rural community" of 200 residents -- about half of whom are regis... more

In the public libraries of Seattle (as in most public libraries), patrons are not allowed to eat or sleep (or even appear to be sleeping) or be shirtless or barefoot or have bad body odor or talk too ... more

Beginning in 2011, about three dozen people in Tokyo have been meeting every Sunday morning at 6 a.m. on a mission to scrub down, one by one, the city's grungiest public rest rooms. "By 7:30," accordi... more

Loco Parentis: First-time mother Amy Webb proudly notates dozens of data points about her child each day and obsessively tracks their detailed progression by computer on spreadsheets, according to the... more

The conflicted double life of Israeli Orthodox Jew Shadar Hadar, 34, might be as formidable to manage as that of an international spy. Though deeply and defiantly religious, he typically around midnig... more

-- The upscale restaurant at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced in August that it would soon add a 20-item selection of waters from around the world, priced from $8 to $16 a bottle (except... more

-- At age 20, Kyle Kandilian of Dearborn, Mich., has created a start-up business to fund his college expenses, but it involves a roomful (in the family home) of nearly 200,000 cockroaches. The environ... more

The National Security Agency is a "supercomputing powerhouse," wrote ProPublica.org in July, with "machines so powerful their speed is measured in thousands of trillions of operations per second" -- b... more

Pro-nationalism English Defence League activists seemed to be itching for a street brawl to break up a scheduled anti-nationalist demonstration in downtown Birmingham, England, on July 18, causing the... more

Although Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged 9/11 mastermind) was waterboarded 183 times among several extreme interrogation techniques, he and his CIA captors eventually reached a moderated state. In... more

At a June hearing, a Philadelphia judge became so exasperated at defendant Robert Williams' seeming cluelessness about his need to keep his probation appointments that she ordered him to take "etiquet... more

Despite Chicago's recent crisis of gang-related street murders, the Roseland Community Hospital in a tough south-side neighborhood is on the verge of closing because of finances, and community groups ... more

-- As many as 50 exam monitors were forced to take cover at a high school in Zhongxiang, China, in June, fending off outraged students (and some parents) who hurled insults and stones at them after th... more

-- The executive in charge of the electronic infrastructure of Facebook confirmed to London's information-technology website The Register in June that when the company inaugurated its first "cloud" da... more