digital technology is making its way into the world of competitive swimming. A beeper that is worn inside the swimming cap helps the swimmer maintain a steady stroke rhythm throughout a race and can be speeded up or slowed down to promote conditioning.

you can watch Jack and Jill, a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on a ledge of a building in lower Manhattan, care for their young at www.55water.com.

half of the Americans polled in a recent survey by the National Science Foundation did not know that the Earth orbits the Sun and that it takes a year to do so.

cranberries were originally known as "crane" berries because their red blossoms evoke that tall wading bird.

SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence organization, reached a milestone in the spring of 2002 by having spent 1 million years of computer time searching for a sign that something other than us is out there. SETI accomplished this in only three "real" years thanks to millions of people who allowed their computers to be used when idle to combine their computing power in the search.

a cat walking across a computer keyboard can enter random data and commands, which may damage files or the computer itself, but a new shareware program can distinguish "cat typing" from "human typing" within two paw steps and emit a sound that irritates the cat so that it gets off the keyboard.

mexico is the eleventh ranked country in the world as a tourist destination, with sales to the United States alone reaching almost 1 billion dollars a year.

according to a poll, while 90 percent of patients want to exchange e-mail with their doctors, only 15 percent of doctors do so.

mosquitoes are attracted to humans by the carbon dioxide we exhale when we breathe. Therefore, if you don't want to attract mosquitoes, don't breathe.

the word "cantaloupe" means singing wolves, and the fruit is so named because of a town in Italy named Cantaloupe that produced the well-known melons and (originally) had many howling wolves.

missionaries to Hawaii designed the Polynesian alphabet that has only 12 characters and is still in use today.

IBM is the process of building the world's fastest computer for the U.S. weather forecasting agency; the computer is expected to be able to do more than 100 trillion calculations per second when completed in the year 2009.

a new Web service called DelayedMail.com promises to store an e-mail for future transmission in its server for up to 97 years so that it can be sent at a predetermined time in the future to a recipient regardless of what happens to the sender, for example from an elderly person to one of their grandchildren when they reach a certain age.