Top 10 world's worst sound

A Salford University (in UK) acoustic engineer set up an internet survey where participants rated the unpleasantness of 34 sounds. With over one million votes from around the world, the sound of vomiting (not safe for stomach) made most voters want to hurl. Microphone feedback came in second, and crying babies and scrapes and squeaks of a train were tied for third. My vote - the popularly derided "fingernails on a chalkboard" sound, only came in at low 16th. Below is the top 10 list of world's worst sound:
1. Vomiting
2. Microphone feedback
3. Wailing babies
4. Train scraping on tracks
5. Squeaky seesaw
6. Poorly played violin
7. Whoopee cushion
8. Argument in a soap opera
9. Mains hum
10. Tasmanian devil

Why the Harvest Moon looks bigger ?

Today's (Oct. 6th, 2006) Harvest Moon will be looks like 12% bigger than some of the full moons this year. The reason? today moon is near perigee, the point on its slightly out-of-round orbit that is closest to Earth.

Source: heard from local radio

IQ determine wealth and of nations

According to the recent book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, among many factors explaining why some countries are rich while others are poor, it is the people's IQ that does the heavy lifting -- for the 81 countries, the mean national IQ correlates powerfully - 0.73 - with per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP). (In the social sciences, correlations of 0.2 are said to be "low," 0.4 are "moderate," and 0.6 are "high"; so 0.73 is most impressive).

Do human use only 10 percent of their brains ?

There are several variations on this statement- humans use only 10% of their brains. This folkloric statement has been around for at least a century. Fortunately, it's just not true. A recent MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) imaging clearly demonstrates that humans put most of their cerebral cortex to good use, even while dozing.

Humans are 98% chimp

In Sept. 2005, the 1st analytical comparisons of the chimpanzee and human genomes were published in Nature. The results were unsettling: man is 98.77% chimpanzee. Since chimps and humans parted ways on the evolutionary chart about 6 millions years ago, most Homo sapiens proteins have accumulated a grand total of 1 unique change.

Of course, humans are not merely chimps. This Nature's publication revealed that natural selection didn't go about redesigning us base pair by base pair; rather, by changing how our genes are expressed (when, where, how much). By so doing natural selection achieved profound effects with minimal rewriting.

Scientist, engineers and GDP

50% of United States' GDP are created by scientist and engineers, but scientist and engineers make up less than 5% of US population.

Source: Reader's Digest (Dec, 2005)