"Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko's," the funeral director tells me. "They can do a memorial folder thing down there." Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? "We don't really help with that." * * * The old woman looks up from her brush pile. "My husband has to redo…

One way or another, the fate of health care reform is going to be decided in the next few days. If House Democratic leaders find 216 votes, reform will almost immediately become the law of the land. If they don’t, reform may well be put off for many years — possibly a decade or more. So this seems…

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T ime is the strangest substance known to man. You can't see, touch, hear, smell, taste or avoid it. Time makes you stronger-minded but weaker-bodied, gradually transforming you from blushing grape to ornery, grouching raisin. Time is the most precious thing you have, yet you're happiest when you're…

Buy To Sea and Back: The Heroic Life of the Atlantic Salmon by Richard Shelton Atlantic, 213 pp, £18.99, October 2009, ISBN 978 1 84354 784 6 Some of the oldest laws in Britain were drafted in defence of the Atlantic salmon; one of the lesser-known clauses of the first Magna Carta in 1215 ordered…

Dave Eggers. Photograph: Nick Cunard / Rex Features I 'm a little nervous of meeting Dave Eggers. On the way to San Francisco, where he lives and runs his groovy and influential publishing empire, McSweeney's, I consider his reputation. When Eggers published his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of…

Jon Venables, 10 years of age in 1993 Photo: GETTY IMAGES 6:45AM GMT 04 Mar 2010 A 27-year-old man who used to be known as Jon Venables has been taken into custody for an undisclosed reason at an unknown location. That is all there is to say, or it should be. But this simple news item has been…

12:01AM GMT 09 Jan 2003 A decade ago, I set out to investigate luck. I wanted to examine the impact on people's lives of chance opportunities, lucky breaks and being in the right place at the right time. After many experiments, I believe that I now understand why some people are luckier than others…

Home Features Health Feature 29 July 2009 By Andrew Watson Get involved: Tell us your food allergies WE WERE just settling down for our flight when the captain’s voice came over the PA system. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to disturb you, but we have a passenger on board who has a severe nut…

The fissure was induced in order present an image which shows the characteristics of the coating. The image shows the SiO2 coating on a filament of a microfibre. (PhysOrg.com) -- Spray-on liquid glass is transparent, non-toxic, and can protect virtually any surface against almost any damage from…

John Berry Having served as a war artist during the second world war, John Berry, who has died aged 89, came to be best known for his work as one of the chief illustrators for Ladybird books. His pictures for the 20 books of the Ladybird People at Work series form a complete visual record of British…

In computing, the vision always precedes the reality by a decade or more. The pattern has held true from the personal computer to the Internet, as it takes time, brainpower and investment to conquer the scientific and economic obstacles to nudging a game-changing technology toward the mainstream.…

us-election-minute opinion Opinion The US just bombed Yemen, and no one's talking about it Moustafa Bayoumi We need answers from the candidates on how they would deal with a deadly conflict in one of the Middle East’s poorest countries. We’re not getting them The US just bombed Yemen, and no one's…

The “push-button” approach to fighting Al Qaeda represents a radically new use of state-sanctioned lethal force. Credit Illustration by Guy Billout On August 5th, officials at the Central Intelligence Agency, in Langley, Virginia, watched a live video feed relaying closeup footage of one of the most…

LONDON — With an election months away, the governing Labour Party’s prospects against David Cameron’s Conservatives look near hopeless. But I found Foreign Secretary David Miliband in a combative mood, fired up by more Tory lunacy on Europe, an issue that has also piqued the interest of Secretary of…

NASA Metal has no DNA; machines have no genes. But that doesn't mean they don't have pedigrees — ancestral lines every bit as elaborate as our own. That's surely the case with the Ares 1 rocket. The best and smartest and coolest thing built in 2009 — a machine that can launch human beings to cosmic…

On Friday, my latest tweet was automatically posted to my Facebook news feed, as always. But this time, Tom Scoville noticed a difference : the link in the posting was no longer active. It turns out that a lot of other people had noticed this too. Mashable wrote about the problem on Saturday…

N ow we know what happens when Cobra meets nanny state over swine flu. The public realm goes potty and people die. Ministers meddle, medical officials abuse language, and drug companies make huge profits. And all this is over a condition correctly diagnosed by a Dulwich 12-year-old during the…

Scientists have suggested creating areas of oceanic algae to absorb carbon dioxide. Photograph: Associated Press It will be physically impossible for the UK to meet its renewable energy targets in both the short and long term, according to a group of engineering experts. In a new study, they called…

The brain of an adult bottlenose dolphin is about 25% heavier than the average human adult's brain. Photograph: Stephen Frink/Getty Images At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to…

A folding bike under construction at Brompton Bicycle. Buyers must wait 10 weeks for delivery. Photograph: Sean Smith The Brompton bicycle company is having a fashion moment – well, at least it was until last month when Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, was snapped whooshing around London on…

Three generations of tobacco growers in Vinales, 2008 Photograph by Andrew Moore, courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery All we really wanted was a smoke. Yet here we were in Havana, the traditional capital of cigars, not puffing on habaneros but marching through the Museum of the Revolution. The…

HOME BASE The chef Thomas Keller in his kitchen in Yountville, Calif. Jim Wilson/The New York Times THOMAS KELLER cooked his father’s last meal. He had only recently come to know Ed Keller, a towering former Marine drill sergeant who left his family when Thomas Keller, the youngest of five boys, was…

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed. Within the past hour Trafigura's legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence . Labour MP Paul…

I like LA. There I said it. When Europeans come to America they are supposed to be divided into New York or Los Angeles types. When the English writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood crossed the Atlantic in the late 30s Auden stayed in Manhattan and Isherwood went to LA where he remained for…