15 minutes of web fame

The Mysterious iPhone Girl

Andy Warhol famous quote that everyone would be famous for at least 15 minutes seems to apply here - but as a kind of a weird simulacrum of a web fame. What may have happened is that, as a routine test, the girl and other co-workers were probably checking if everything was OK with the new iPhone they had just put together, so they took some pictures as a test. The protocol says, however, that they would have to have deleted the pictures right after having taken them. But they forgot... full story


By GABRIELA ZAGO
from Pelotas, BRAZIL

Evolution

Friendly Invaders

It sounds like the makings of an ecological disaster: an epidemic of invasive species that wipes out the delicate native species in its path. But in a paper published in August in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dov Sax, an ecologist at Brown University, and Steven D. Gaines, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, point out that the invasion has not led to a mass extinction of native plants. The number of documented extinctions of native New Zealand plant species is a grand total of three... full story


By CARL ZIMMER
Story from The New York Times
Published: September 8, 2008