What are little boys made of? What are little boys made of? Frogs and snails And puppy dogs' tails, That's what little boys are made of. What are little girls made of? What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice And all that's nice, That's what little girls are made of. -- Anonymous Many scientists rely on elaborately complex and costly equipment to probe the mysteries confronting humankind. Not Melissa Hines. The UCLA behavioral scientist is hoping to solve ...

As the sky grew darker and the winds reached furious levels, my family and I huddled in our small laundry room, watching on my laptop a local television station broadcast images of the tornado bearing down on us. By way of a camera on top of the county courthouse, we saw the massive twister cut a path of destruction through the middle of Tuscaloosa, Ala. As I held our dog, Bama, and my wife, Amy, grabbed our ...

By the time the trumpets sound, the candles have been lit and the salmon platters garnished. Harald V, King of Norway, enters the room, and 200 guests stand to greet him. Then a chorus of 30 men and women, each wearing a blue police uniform, launches into a spirited rendition of "We Are the World." This isn't cabaret night at Oslo's Royal Palace. It's a gala to inaugurate Halden Fengsel, Norway's newest prison. Ten years and 1.5 billion Norwegian kroner ...

By the time Kate Middleton begins her journey to Westminster Abbey on the morning of April 29, snipers from London's Metropolitan Police will have taken their positions on rooftops throughout the city. If a bomb explodes along the parade route, police will siphon crowds into areas that have been blocked to traffic, and ambulances will follow predetermined routes to get victims to various hospitals. Should terrorists launch a Mumbai-style gun attack on the streets, armed commandos, waiting ...

For a woman dying of cancer, Terry Sanborn didn't seem to suffer. She and her unemployed husband Stephen lived on Medicaid and $512 a month in Social Security in a quiet blue-collar cul-de-sac in tiny Bangor, Maine. But they managed to pay $78,000 in cash for that roomy house at the bottom of Hershey Avenue, with a swing set in the backyard. They forked over an additional $17,000 for a Ford Econoline van. Not until drug agents raided the place ...

In a shaded, peaceful residential district near Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., nine Negro children quietly laid out their best clothes for the next morning. It was the eve of school integration in Little Rock. City police, who had checked carefully and found no hint of trouble, followed routine patrols through the quiet streets. Then, at 9 p.m.. Little Rock came awake with a shock: a National Guard unit, 150 strong, with MIS, carbines and billies, churned up ...

The last weeks of Kurt Cobain's life were filled with turmoil and anguish -- and gossip. Rumors floated through the music industry that the singer- songwriter's band, Nirvana, was breaking up; that Cobain, who had survived a tranquilizer-induced coma just six weeks earlier, had suffered another overdose. The stories seemed to be justified when the group unexpectedly backed out of headlining the Lollapalooza tour this summer. The truth, it turns out, was that Cobain, who claimed to have overcome an ...

Here's an experiment: try thinking of a song not as a song but as a collection of distinct musical attributes. Maybe the song has political lyrics. That would be an attribute. Maybe it has a police siren in it, or a prominent banjo part, or paired vocal harmony, or punk roots. Any one of those would be an attribute. A song can have as many as 400 attributes — those are just a few of the ones filed under p. ...

In his 17 years on the Cambodian police force, Keo Thea has seen a lot. But nothing quite prepared the deputy chief of Phnom Penh's anti-human trafficking police for the raid on the home of German national Karl Heinz Henning in August. At Henning's apartment, tucked away in a leafy neighborhood favored by foreign aid workers in the Cambodian capital, Keo Thea sifted through the country's largest-ever haul of hardcore child pornography. Amongst the bondage gear, handcuffs, whips and battery-operated sex aids, Keo Thea's ...

Mahmood Al Yousif is so influential in Bahrain that he's widely known as the "Blogfather." Neither publicly pro- or anti-government, the moderator of the popular blog "Mahmood's Den" is the rare public figure who actively discourages the Sunni-Shia tension that has plagued the tiny Gulf Kingdom for decades. But on Tuesday morning, Al Yousif apparently was dealt the same fate meted out to many prominent activist. In a pre-dawn raid, police seized the popular moderator of the ...