Four small sport utility vehicles received top scores in crash tests. Most small SUVs were rated as marginal or poor in terms of safety five years ago.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - No wonder Bigfoot failed a DNA test. Researchers said on Tuesday the hairy heap claimed by two men to be the corpse of the mythical half-ape, half-human creature was actually a full-body rubber gorilla costume.

'I'm not ashamed,' says Robert Ouellet, who is keen to introduce more competition into Canada's health-care system

The proportion of working-age Americans who have medical bill problems or who are paying off medical debt climbed from 34 percent to 41 percent between 2005 and 2007, bringing the total to 72 million, according to recent survey findings from The Commonwealth Fund. In addition, 7 million adults age 65 and over also had problems paying medical bills, for a total of 79 million adults with medical bill problems or medical debt.

Nutrients transported from catchments are one of the most important sources for lake eutrophication. The Honghu Lake Basin, located at the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, was chosen as the study area, the numerical simulations were used to assess the relative roles of natural, climate-induced changes versus human-related activities in changes of the nutrient transportation. The simulation results showed that the effect from human activities increased rapidly, and had become a dominant factor.

Aggressive invaders wipe out any organisms that get in their way as they spread through a coral reef in Hawaii

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.] [More]

The width-height proportions of a man's face could reveal how aggressive he is

A few years ago I bought a latte at Starbucks on the way to the airport, parked my car and got on a flight for the U.K. Eight hours later I got off at Heathrow, bought a prepay chip for my cell phone and went to buy a ticket for the train into London, when my credit card gave up the ghost and refused to work anymore. Not until I got back to the U.S. did I find out what had happened. Apparently, the small purchase at Starbucks, followed by the overseas purchase of the cell phone card, had tripped some kind of antifraud data-mining algorithm in my credit-card company’s computer. It tried to call me, got my voice mail and proceeded to blacklist my credit card.What I found so exasperating about the entire experience was that the computer should have known that the person using my card in England was me. After all, I had bought my plane ticket with that same card and had flown with a major U.S. carrier. Aren’t all those databases supposed to be tied together? [More]

A tangle of tubes and polyurethane pouches binds a naked man and woman--he, paunchy and unperturbed, she, slim and similarly unself-conscious. This setup is not some esoteric sex game; it’s “Smell Blind Date,” an installation created by artist James Auger on display this past spring in New York City as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. The PVC tubes--which run between the subjects’ chests, with outlets extending to pouches attached to their noses, armpits and genitals--allow the man and woman to inhale each other’s body odor through a wall that divides them. In theory, they are on a truly blind date, each undistracted by the other’s looks, assessing the other’s potential as a mating partner by his or her smell alone.The human sense of smell is often seen as insignificant, dismissed as a distant also-ran to our keen eyesight or sensitive hearing. But this sense is keener and more influential on our