clipped from news.bbc.co.uk

Engineers have begun the two-month process of cooling down a "doomsday vault", which will house seeds from all known varieties of key food crops.

Built deep inside a mountain, it aims to safeguard the world's crops from future disasters, such as nuclear wars, asteroids or dangerous climate change.

The site, 1,000km (621 miles) north of mainland Norway, was chosen as the location for the vault because it was very remote and it also offered the level of stability required for the long-term project.

The temperature inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will drop to -18C (0F) in order to preserve the seeds.

"At these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for up to 1,000 years."

The first seeds are scheduled to arrive at the Arctic site in mid-February.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

BERLIN, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Internet users in Egypt, India and Turkey are the world's most frequent searchers for Web sites using the keyword "sex" on Google search engines, according to statistics provided by Google Inc.

clipped from tech.yahoo.com

IBM Patents the Electronic Checkbox

Despite claims that the patent process will be radically reformed, looks like it's business as usual at the good old U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The latest in the battle to see who can register the most absurd, obvious "technology" as a patent goes to IBM, which has won a patent for "mode switching for ad hoc checkbox selection," or, in other words, checking a box.

No attorneys have weighed in on this patent, but it certainly looks frivolous. Though it's not exactly the same as checking a box (but rather dragging your mouse across a series of boxes to select them en masse; imagine drawing a line through a bunch of boxes at once), this is overall not much more original than patenting the Q button on your PC.