CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- No way, mate!

Australian Prime Minister John Howard has labeled "absurd" a directive requiring security guards at the country's Parliament House to stop addressing visitors and lawmakers as "mate."

And one of his predecessors has called it "rampant pomposity."

The ban was imposed this week among guards and attendants at the building in Canberra, Australian media reported.

To drink a milk based espresso drink after mid morning is considered gauche, very poor form. To drink a milk based espresso drink with your meal, don’t. It’s just wrong. You’ll see people crossing themselves.

Today, some six billion people are spread across the planet. But there was a time -- not so long ago -- when the human species numbered only a few thousand and the world was a single continent: Africa. Then something happened. A small group left their African homeland on a journey into an unknown, hostile world. Against impossible odds, these extraordinary explorers not only survived but went on to conquer the earth. Their story can finally be told through the science of genetics. Dr. Wells, a 33-year-old geneticist, is part of a team that has been re-writing history. He has been disentangling this epic story from evidence all people carry with them -- in their DNA -- inherited from those ancient travelers.

KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, 'I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.' Of course, he is alluding to a higher power."

FORGET dangers from giant meteors: Earth is facing another threat from outer space. Scientists have come to the conclusion that two mysterious explosions in the 1990s were caused by bizarre cosmic missiles.

The two objects were picked up by earthquake detectors as they tore through Earth at up to 900,000 mph. According to scientists, the most plausible explanation is that they were "strangelets", clumps of matter that have so far defied detection but whose existence was posited 20 years ago.

If you want to build a house, build a house. Don't ask anybody, just build a house.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Ever wonder whether that spouse, friend or co-worker on the other end of the phone is really paying attention? The "Jerk-O-Meter" may hold the answer.

To test the program, Mr. Madan and his MIT colleagues recruited 10 men and 10 women -- all strangers to one another -- and brought them into the lab. The researchers paired off the test subjects, with men talking only to men and women talking only to women, and monitored 200 three-minute conversations about randomly selected topics.
After each conversation, the subjects were asked to rate their level of interest on a scale of one to 10. By measuring the speaking style each person had used in the conversation, Mr. Madan was able to predict what score they would give about 80 percent of the time.
The study indicated that men and women are interested in conversations for different reasons.
The subject of the chat was more important to men than women, Mr. Madan said. "For the women, it was more dependent on who they were talking to and what the mood was like," he added. "It wasn't just about the topic itself."

Doctors fear that the identity of a mysterious mute pianist found wandering on an English beach in April might never be known, a British newspaper reported on Monday.

The so-called "Piano Man", a tall blonde-haired stranger thought to be in his 20s or early 30s, was found on April 7 on the beach at Minster, on the south coast of England, soaking wet but fully dressed in a black suit and tie, with no clue as to his origin.

He has not spoken since and has not responded to written appeals while being kept under observation in the psychiatric hospital.

But he has fascinated social workers, the British media and the general public over his one means of communication: playing classical piano music.

LONDON (AFP) - Men who are accused of never listening by women now have an excuse -- women's voices are more difficult for men to listen to than other men's, a report said.

Men deciphered female voices using the auditory part of the brain that processes music, while male voices engaged a simpler mechanism, it said.

TORONTO (CP) - Some people seem to carry a computer curse, frustrated by a plague of viruses, hard-drive failures, power surges and software conflicts that appear and disappear without rational explanation.

They blame their machines and suffer the scorn of others who accuse them of doing something wrong. But researchers at Princeton University may have an explanation: these computer users, it seems, could be sending out bad vibes.

One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.

During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.

It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.

Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.