It's a university where less than 1% of its applicants get accepted; most hopefuls don't even apply and those that attempt it get tons of extra coaching. Girijesh Gupta recently topped those IIT entrace exams, which shocked many considering that he lived in the slums, came from a very poor family and didn't have any professional help. Instead of staying at the college dorms, he's gonna continue ... posted on Sep 19 2003, 1,524 reads

Leaf me alone! When plants get eaten, they send out distress signals to recruit predators to eat their assailants. Plants enlist bodyguards from higher up the food chain to kill the things that eat them. Scientists are now looking at ways to harness these chemical messages and offer fresh routes to crop protection.... posted on Sep 18 2003, 958 reads

Work is Love Made Visible
He owns several successful cloth factories - yet he seldom wears any clothes himself. Lush green, rolling hills surround Mr Fabre's retreat. He is a French citizen of India, a Hindu holy man, who has renounced the material world - yet he is also a business tycoon who employs thousands of people and runs a hermitage. Still, that's only half the story. The other half -- 'I do not keep a single p... posted on Sep 17 2003, 3,024 reads

The Rev. Patrick Collington always knew that God has his number. He just didn't know that he had God's. Calls for God have been flooding in ever since the same number as Collington's Souls for Christ Ministry in Cornelia flashed on the screen in Jim Carrey comedy, "Bruce Almighty."... posted on Sep 16 2003, 520 reads

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The longest lasting symphony, scientists just discovered, has been playing for three billion years. And it's coming from a black hole that's 250 million light years away. Astronomers at Cambridge detected the sound to be B flat, the same pitch as a key near middle C on the piano. But the song of the Perseus Black Hole is 57 octaves below that middle C -- a frequency more than a million billion ... posted on Sep 13 2003, 858 reads

Sprinting slightly more than a mile from Brooklyn to Manhattan does not sound like an extraordinary feat of athleticism until you close your eyes and imagine the desperate conditions under which one brave firefighter did it last Sept. 11. In those impossibly frantic moments, a married father of five -- who was technically off-duty -- abandoned his vehicle at the entrance of the Brooklyn-Battery T... posted on Sep 12 2003, 944 reads

Keegan Rielly turns a crank to propel his arm-powered, 'Scarab' climbing apparatus to take a step forward. He lost the use of his legs in a 1996 car accident. But if you think that's gonna stop him from climbing atop the 12,385-foot Mount Fuji -- Japan's highest peak -- guess again. Last week, this paraplegic had this to say after his climb: "I want to show people what I am able to do. Maybe it... posted on Sep 11 2003, 585 reads

Luxury spending in the United States has been growing four times faster than overall spending. In "Living it Up: Our Love Affair With Luxury", James Twitchell says that this necessary consumption of unnecessary items and services is going on at all but the lowest layers of society: J.C. Penney now offers day spa treatments; Kmart sells cashmere bedspreads. He even finds ways to compare hotels to... posted on Sep 10 2003, 1,105 reads