n average worker wastes almost one year of his or her working life puffing away on cigarettes, a new poll revealed. Three 15-minute smoking breaks a day cost employers 195 working hours a year for each worker. That is equivalent to 8,677 hours in an average 44-year working lifetime or simply put, nearly a whole year smoking instead of working.

A court ruling made recently has deemed it illegal for males to scratch their private parts in public. The decision was made at Italy's Court of Appeal, where a man's act of scratching his private parts was described as "an act contrary to decorum and public decency. "

Two new planets similar to Jupiter and Saturn, were discovered by scientists, revealing an entirely new solar system 5,000 light years away from our own. The scientists, led by astronomy professor Andrzej Udalski, of the Warsaw University observatory, discovered the solar system by first detecting the presence of the star, which they identified to be smaller and much cooler than our own. An overlapping of the star and another much farther one visible from Earth resulted in the 500x magnification of the farther star. Discovered by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), the phenomenon was dubbed OGLE-2006-BLG-109.

ilipino inventor Virgilio Malang invented a vitamin-enriched beer that has garnered awards and recognition worldwide even before it is commercially marketed. Malang's Vitamin Beer, fortified with Vitamin B Complex, became widely popular at the First International Inventors' Day Convention held recently in Bangkok, Thailand. It also won a gold medal at the European Union-sponsored Genius-Europe competition at the Budapest Fair Center in Hungary and it also won the Romanian Ministry Education and Research Cup few years ago.

According to Britain's Ministry of Defense, the number of UFO sightings in the country rose by about 40 percent last year. The Ministry of Defense said that in 2007, it had recorded at least 135 reports of UFO sightings. That is up from the 97 sightings recorded in 2006.