News & Features

At this time of year many folks are looking for Christmas presents for their kids, and many people want to get something that is more centered around creative play instead of the pre-packed products that are most popular now. They look to the older toys, to Erector Sets, Lincoln Logs, LEGO sets, and so on. At the same time, as someone who writes some offbeat articles for Gear Diary I end up with all kinds of emails, from consumer safety information to import oddities to … well, badly named kids toy sets! At a time when there are seemingly weekly…

(image courtesy Marketing.fm) NASA rocked the scientific world today with a HUGE announcement: Possible aliens! That’s the gist of it, at least. The less exciting part is that they found a bacteria that eats arsenic. But if there is a bacteria that can survive on arsenic, it proves something that’s simply been a theory so far, that life can exist on non-traditional elements. According to CNN: The bacterium — strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria — was scooped from sediment in California’s Mono Lake, an area rife with high levels of naturally occurring arsenic, it said. Scientists were…

When you think of Leslie Nielson, it is hard to imagine that at one point he was looked at as a serious actor in leading roles and a ladies man. Yet in the late 1950’s he was tall, handsome and charismatic, and got lead roles in films such as 1956’s Forbidden Planet pictured at the top. But through the years he never blossomed into the mega-star that some expected, as his serious on-screen personas couldn’t compete with other actors, and no one got a look at his comedic side until 1980. His image now is the one cemented by his…