The restaurants are one quick way W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, figures out the severity of a natural disaster. Using what's come to be known as the "Waffle House index," he checks to see if the restaurant is open in any given area.

The rental car turned onto the sidewalk behind the registrar's office and rolled slowly down the brick path between a dining hall and the English department, a few steps from my office. "Beyond Time," an upbeat German dance song, played on the car's stereo. The driver, Mohammed Taheri-Azar, had just graduated from the University of North Carolina three months earlier, so he knew the campus well. Beyond the dining hall was a plaza known as the Pit, where students were hanging out at lunchtime on a warm winter day in early 2006. Taheri-Azar planned to kill as many of them as possible.

A forensics expert in the article explained that semen stains are smeared "all over the place" in many other hotels, the traces visible from their telltale glow under UV lamps. Wait, does semen really glow in the dark?

The Earth is warming, with profound consequences for the roof of the world. Below, explore the Arctic's shrinking ice caps (shown in September of each year, when the ice reaches its annual low) and how shipping routes and extraction of natural resources might be affected.

New York City officials issued what they called an unprecedented order on Friday for the evacuation of about 370,000 residents of low-lying areas at the city’s edges — from the expensive apartments in Battery Park City to the roller coaster in Coney Island to the dilapidated boardwalk in the Rockaways — warning that Hurricane Irene was such a threat that people living there simply had to get out.

There are three evacuation zones in New York City that are based on the strength of the hurricane making landfall. Mayor Bloomberg has issued a mandatory evacuation of Zone A, plus areas of the Rockaways that are in Zone B, by 5 p.m. on Saturday.

James Pennebaker suggests in The Secret Life of Pronouns that lots of data remain hidden from even the most astute human observers. "Nice" and "weird" are both content words; he's concerned with function words such as pronouns (I, you, they), articles (a, an, the), prepositions (to, for, of), and auxiliary verbs (is, am, have). We hardly notice these bolts of speech because we encounter them so frequently. With the help of computer programs to count and scrutinize them, however, patterns emerge.

It’s time for the Perseid Meteor Shower and you want to bag some meteors (shooting stars), but how? Maybe you just want to know where and what time to look, or perhaps you are having a Perseid party and you want everyone to have a great time.

Chef Forfeng's list of some B&Bs making notable use of Facebook.

What are colleges for? Research, economic advancement, or making students more interesting?

Noma = fine restaurant. The rest of the article is asinine.

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally.