Texas Monthly profiled Reddy Ice — the bagged ice giant that dominates North America's market — and found that its sales are one of the most accurate real-time gauges of how Americans are actually feeling: parties and gatherings mean ice sales spike; hunkering down means they drop. Care to guess where they are right now? Also: a new lab study found that when competition was designed to mirror how people actually vie for jobs, women competed just as hard as men and won top positions more often — but the wages at the top had been bid down so fiercely that winners ended up no better off. And at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday, a Chinese robot named Lightning ran 100 meters in 9.32 seconds — beating Usain Bolt's 9.58-second world record from 2009, set by a human, which held for 17 years. At the finish line, the robots crashed into cushions and were carried off on stretchers. Plus Columbia House shutting down, a guinea pig sanctuary, a laptop fire on a plane, and a very aggressive donkey.
","author_name":"Keith Conrad"}