It seems like every month something else happens that shows us how deeply divided the U.S. is as a nation. This month, we've seen the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the subsequent debate over whether it was all the Tea Party's fault or if the fact that the shooter had "The Communist Manifesto" on his MySpace "favorite books" list meant that he was a big liberal. Meanwhile, every ...

When humanity inevitably finds itself at war with our robot nemeses, we know one thing for sure: They'll have their own theme music. Who's to blame? A music collective called Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, who have used the well-intentioned-but-ultimately-damning-to-humanity fund-raising website Kickstarter to raise over $8,000 to build the mechanized musicians that will spur our ...

Austin, Texas, apparently everyone's favorite city in America, is famous for its array of street-legal art cars. But Austin musician David Weaver has done them all one better -- he has an art school bus. It's also a viable house, complete with a fireplace, a functioning kitchen, a piano, a second-floor porch, classy interior woodworking, three stories and a picket fence. We talked to ...

Despite Vegas's best efforts, determining who's going to win any given week's football game is not an exact science. Some choose to look at who the oddsmakers favor or follow the talking heads on the pre-game shows. Some people stick to the Balki System, and for a good two-week stretch during the middle of the season, we made it through our pick-'em league by writing both teams' names on sheets of ...

Monsters are going to be hot in 2011. Everyone from Kanye West to J.J. Abrams agrees, and so does Derek Tonks, a 17-year-old from Pomona, Calif., who's using the fund-raising website Kickstarter to finance the creation of a new, full-size, Predator-like wearable monster suit. The outfit isn't exactly your average Halloween costume -- the suit includes 12-inch "digitigrade" stilts, which allow ...

For most of us, the closest we've been able to come to realizing the shared dream of all global culture enthusiasts -- actually inhabiting a "Super Mario Bros." world -- has been to don a hat, overalls and a mustache, then go looking for turtles to kick in a park somewhere. For Beth Olson and the other members of her Art and Social Practices project at Portland State University, that just wasn't ...

Here's what we knew about the nature of life as of yesterday: All life is carbon-based -- from an amoeba to a blue whale to a houseplant -- and has the same basic building blocks in its DNA. Those building blocks are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur; non-carbon-based life is impossible. Here's what we know as of NASA's announcement this afternoon: There's also a ...

We live in an uncertain world, but there's an order to the universe that we can nonetheless derive comfort from: Two and two is always four, the Cubs will never go to the World Series and your left ball is always on the left side of your -- wait, what? "Testicular torsion"? Oh no, this is going to hurt to read about. Writer and comedian Evan Jacobs found out the hard way that, while a man's ...

For most men contemplating a career that will bring them into a fascinating world full of interesting conflicts and populated by colorful characters, being a librarian ranks somewhere between "dental assistant" and "wedding videographer." Unless you're Avi Steinberg, author of the new memoir "Running the Books," whose job as a prison librarian led him to work with people who carried ...

Hey, you know how you love watching television, drinking beer and maintaining a sloth-like avoidance of even the most gentle of physical activities? Well, check it out, Homer Simpson -- the Clicker universal remote was invented just so you could sit on the couch changing channels on your television while opening your beer at the exact same time. The device's website features unattributed ...