Brendan I. Koerner

When an anonymous Californian posted a MiG-21 fighter jet for sale on www.ebay.com last November, the prospect of the plane falling into terrorist hands apparently didn't rankle U.S. authorities too much. After all, a foreign buyer would need a hard-to-obtain export license to cart the prize away.

But the MiG's sale did stir unease over the wild and wooly nature of online auctions, which increasingly feature illicit goods like stolen car parts, unregistered firearms, and purloined antiquities. EBay alone adds… more

So much depends upon a lone water molecule. Take the alkaloid C17H19NO3, better known as morphine, a painkiller no hospital can do without. Lop off two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen, as German chemist Augustus Matthiessen first did in 1869, and you're left with apomorphine, which is less effective at dulling pain than a shot of Southern Comfort. Instead, its most obvious effect is to cause rapid and severe vomiting -- useful when a toddler drinks Liquid-Plumer, perhaps,… more

The vacant lot on Ames Street should have been teeming with cranes and cement trucks by now. Situated on the eastern edge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, the property is earmarked as the future home of the MIT Media Laboratory, which long ago outgrew its I. M. Pei digs next door. First announced in 1999, the planned $115 million, 197,000-square-foot complex was supposed to open this year. The date was later rolled back to 2004, then 2005. Now… more

Last year, Irish President Mary McAleese approved a law that makes trespassing a criminal, not civil, offense. The law's unspoken target: Ireland's 25,000 Travellers, nomadic people known derisively as "tinkers" or "white gypsies." Travellers typically live in ad-hoc trailer camps, pulling up stakes whenever seasonal work is available elsewhere. The criminal trespass law--the first in Europe--makes Travellers subject to arrest for erecting unauthorized camps.

But unlike past attempts to curb Travellers, the new law was not accepted quietly. Within hours… more

It's a political tale as old as Capitol Hill: A lumbering industry selects a certain corporate-friendly party to be its Beltway patsy. In exchange for the requisite campaign donations and other perks, members of said party use their clout to push through the industry's legislative agenda--an agenda that would rip off consumers and harm the overall economy but enrich the corporate string-pullers immensely. Pundits and public-interest types grumble over the bald-faced cronyism, but as long as the money keeps flowing,… more

To mod the Bard: What fools these console makers be! When the Web site for Hong Kong-based hardware retailer Lik Sang International mysteriously went dark last fall, Microsoft's fingerprints were all over the shutdown. Lik Sang had been doing a brisk business in chips that disabled the Xbox's security controls, allowing hobbyists to run open source nuggets like Mozilla and Gimp on their consoles. When the company's site reappeared a few weeks later -- minus the mod chips -- a… more

It was odd for a man to be pacing around his front yard in the wee hours of a chilly October morning. As Seattle police and paramedics pulled closer, however, they noticed something even stranger: The pacing man, 29-year-old Donyea Jones, was burned so badly, the flesh was literally melting off his frame. "My wife poured gasoline on me and lit me on fire," he explained calmly before being rushed to nearby Harborview Medical Center, where he died of his… more

Bill Roche was so close to his dream job. An overachieving police officer in a Bay Area suburb, Roche had made detective while still in his 20s. Confident that his law-enforcement resume was sufficiently impressive after seven years on the force, he applied to become a U.S. Secret Service agent in 1997. Throughout the yearlong selection process, his interviewers lauded him as an excellent candidate. But before he could earn his earpiece and Ray-Bans, there was one last detail to… more

Fresh from a morning surf off the coast of Malibu, the maharishi of the wireless Internet shows up at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons sporting a rumpled T-shirt and Mayan sandals. It's an outfit more popular among aging head shop owners than youthful tech moguls, but Sky Dylan Dayton likes to live up to his Age of Aquarius name.

Besides, the Wavy Gravy getup is crucial to Dayton's offbeat allure. His man-of-the-people sales patter could seem corny coming from a… more

Ongoing conflict in the Middle East forced the postponement of the celebratory grand opening of Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt -- a revival of the country's famed library -- planned for last April.

But the recent fighting didn't slow the library's headfirst foray into cyberspace. In April, Bibliotheca began offering the public access to over 100 trillion bytes of data via its Web site (www.bibalex.org)-including snapshots of 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. The digital collection, stored on… more