On a hot summer the ice cream vendor is the modern Pied Piper of Hamelin and various states are not about to let sex offenders use the trade as their way to lure children. Several states are now working on bans against allowing sex offenders. The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors in California, as one example, is planning to draft an ordinance that would prohibit convicted sex predators from driving ice cream trucks after one was found last summer in Perris.

Researchers find the Internet abounds with tips on suicide compared to a fewer number of sites offering suicide prevention, according to the British Medical Journal. The university study found almost half of Web sites listed by Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask revealed sites providing 'how to' advice while 13 percent of searches revealed suicide prevention information. Only 12 percent of searches result in sites that discourage suicide, according to AFP.

Botanists are baffled with the discovery of a new species of giant self-destructing palm tree in Madagascar which is said to flower only once in its 100 year life. According to botanist from the Kew Gardens in London, the 60-foot palm which has 16-foot leaves, because the moment it does, it spends so much energy that it dies.

A virtual nuclear fusion reaction has been modeled on a supercomputer running for 20 minutes on bicycle power pedaled by 10 cyclists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The students duly claimed a world record for human-powered computing, saying the task produced more computations in those 20 minutes than all of humanity did in the first 3,000 years of civilization. They also said that more arithmetic calculations were computed than were done on the entire earth up to 1960.

A web search reunited two South Florida sisters with their Russian cousin, after being separated for 70 years. The three were pulled apart back in 1937, when the Soviet Union forced their parents to flee to the United States, taking them along. Ossie Rasher, 81, and Sophia Altfield, 78, were reunited with their cousin Rosalie Berkovich, 80, after Berkovich's son scoured Google and found Rasher and Altfield's names on a genealogy website earlier this month. The three met up only a few weeks after.