Do you remember the Y2k panic in the months before January 1, 2000? People were stockpiling everything from toilet paper to beans. Uneasiness was everywhere because nobody knew exactly what might happen. Fast forward to the mortgage-failing, bank-closing , stock market-plummeting scenario today. Homes are being lost, jobs are in jeopardy, and no one is sure how bad it will get. But some people are not panicking; in fact, they are laughing at the whole mess. How can they do that? Most of have our preferences when it comes to getting our news stories. Some of us read blogs while others read online newspapers or prefer watching their local news on television. Do you ever wonder what makes a story newsworthy enough to be brought to the public? Is there a criteria? These days, the most shocking stories almost always make the front page until something more shocking comes along. While tattoos and piercing are breaking into an increasingly open society, new and surprising forms of aesthetics are arising: the scarification and branding tattoos, the subcutaneous implants and the mutilation. Some of these techniques have thousands of years, such as the scarification, who have been practiced in cultures like the Maya since ancient times. Today, in capitals like Berlin, you can see more and more people with these new forms of extreme beauty. Looking at the balance in which the world finds itself at the moment, it is hard to say what the effect would be if someone managed to produce a way of effectively providing greater fuel efficiency in the average automobile. Certainly for the consumer it would create a situation where gas bills would fall dramatically, but how would it affect the oil producing economies of the world?