The Paris-Dakar Rally is a race so crazy competitors have been taken out by land mines. To say it's grueling is like saying Carrie Prejean likes shooting video. Just what sort of vehicle is required to take on a race where normal conditions include searing heat, towering dunes, ginormous rocks and weather conditions that would give a crab boat captain pause? Volkswagen has the answer in their new Touareg for the next Dakar. The cars, trucks, bikes and buggies that run in the Dakar rally are tech porn of the highest order. Take a look at what VW has to offer for the 2010 running of the race, which will be run through Argentina and Chile. (The name comes from the days when the race ran from Paris to Dakar, Senegal.) The Germans made history last year by taking the checkered flag in the first diesel-powered entry in the automobile class. It entered the diesel 'Reg in the Baja 1000, too. This time around, the Touareg features such cool features as a carbon fiber-reinforced outer skin that weighs a mere 50 kilograms, a braking system capable of exerting pressure equal to that of 700 meters below sea level and a data acquisition system that can store 250 MB of data that is read and analyzed by race engineers at the close of a days stage. Just the run of the mill specs for the Touareg shows you how serious of a challenge the Dakar is. The VW is powered by a 2.5-liter five-cylinder TDI diesel engine with two-stage turbocharging system with exhaust turbochargers and intercooling. The mill, mounted longitudinally behind the front axle, puts out approximately 280 horsepower and more than 440 pound-feet of torque. Gotta love diesels for buckets of torque. All that power and grunt is put to the ground -- no matter what kind of ground it is, tarmac, sand, gravel, rocks, you name it -- via a longitudinally mounted sequential five-speed gearbox and a permanent all-wheel-drive. More slick hardware includes selectable viscous locking mechanical differentials and an hydraulically actuated three-plate ceramic clutch. Stopping power comes from 320 mm ventilated disc brakes squeezed by aluminum calipers with six pistons up front and four out back. The Dakar Touareg even has power-assisted rack and pinion steering. All this is done in a surprisingly lightweight package that tips the scales at just under 4,000 pounds. The Dakar Touareg can hit 100 km/hr from a standstill in 6.1 seconds on firm ground and tops out at , on hard ground, and will top out at approximately 118 mph, which may not seem like much. Unless you're running flat-out through the desert. Photos: VW

The wait is over: The 27-inch Core i5 (and Core i7) iMacs have arrived. We've tested the new quad core iMacs, and it was worth the wait.

When we were getting ready to have our first child, I decided that I would quit my job, work out of home as a freelancer, and take care of our baby while Greta finished graduate school.

That worked well for about two years, but by the time Nora was born, we decided to hire a part-time nanny so I could finish a degree of my own. When Nora was one and Greta and I were starting new jobs in a new state, both kids entered full-time day care, and that was our child-care arrangement until they started kindergarten.

Naturally, at every step along the way, we wondered whether we were making the right parenting decisions. We liked their nanny and their day-care center, but wouldn't it be better for the kids to be cared for full-time by their own parents? At that time, there wasn't a whole lot of research pointing one way or another. The definitive child-care study can probably never be done: Families would have to be randomly assigned to day-care centers or parent care for years, and then the impact of the assignments wouldn't be known until the children reached adulthood. Even then, you wouldn't know if the effects were due to particular parenting or day-care practices, or to the day-care versus parent-care assignment.

Realistically, the next best thing you can do is to follow children from birth to adulthood, and see if kids who happened to have been placed in day care (or with nannies, or grandparents, or some other arrangement) ended up better- or worse-off than those cared for by their mothers. Indeed, such a study was launched by the National Institute of Child Health and Development in the early 1990s. The results have been gradually trickling in as the children in the study aged. The most recent installment, published in 2007, covers kids through the sixth grade.

The study follows over 1,000 children who were randomly selected on their day of birth from ten U.S. hospitals. Researchers checked in intermittently with the families over the next dozen years, assessing both their family situation and the child care provided. Then when the kids entered school, they tracked their progress, got teacher reports on their social behavior, and continued to monitor the quality of their parenting (in addition to whether the kids were in after-school care programs).

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Just Posted: Our in-depth review of the D300S. By adding 720p HD video recording with contrast-detection AF and upping the continuous shooting rate to 7 frames per second, Nikon has made only subtle changes for its latest flagship APS-C DSLR, the D300S. However, its predecessor was an excellent camera and one that has proven hard to beat. So, has Nikon done enough to face up to Canon's rather impressive EOS 7D? Read our 30 page review to find out.

Ever wanted to get a job at Google? Well, you had better be prepared to answer some interesting questions, like: Why are manhole covers round? How many golf balls will fit into a school bus? Read on for the whole list... [answers are included too!]

For electronics fans, the Holy Grail of Black Friday ads is the one from Best Buy, which can list more deals on laptops and home theater stuff than general retailers like Wal-mart and Target can squeeze into their circulars. Unfortunately, those deals are never as good as you hope�is this year an exception? The 2009 Best Buy Black Friday ad has just emerged on the Internet, and, as usual, it lists a number of HDTV deals, though they may not be anything to warrant jumping in line as soon as the last piece of turkey has been eaten. On the low end of the cost spectrum, amid brands like Dynex, are a couple of decent prices on top-tier-brand 32-inch 720p...

Office of Naval Research passes verdict on controversial researcher Rusi Taleyarkhan.

A new species of caecilian can survive on land with no nostrils, lungs, or legs, according to researchers who discovered the bizarre wormlike amphibian.

Can't find a hotspot? Don't worry: There are other ways to get online when you're on the road. Glenn Fleishman explains what they are and how to set them up.

Almost one fifth of Macs fail inside three years

Apple's line of laptops ranked fourth in a multi year reliability survey of nine notebook makers, according to a study of 30,000 portable computers published today by a company that provides after sale warranties.

It’s called ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, but it is way cooler than it sounds. The software, written by a team headed by Qui Pan, a student at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University in England, turns a regular, cheap webcam into a 3D scanner.

Hasselblad has announced a Multi-Shot (MS) version of its H3DII-50 medium format camera. First shown in the H3DII-39 MS in 2008, the system captures four shots in a row, moving the sensor by one pixel between each shot to record full RGB values at each position. THe H3DII-50 MS costs €23,000 with less expensive trade-in prices and a trade-up route for Hasselblad owners.

In a story that can only be described as made-up-but-not, police have busted a gang in Peru who targeted fat people on "lonely roads," killed them, extracted their fat and sold it, possibly to make anti-wrinkle treatments.

The extracted, liquidized fat sold for $15,000 a liter, report the BBC, and it apparently went to "European countries." Four people have been arrested and five, adds the journalist with a straight face, remain "at large." Some of those captured were carrying soft drinks bottles of human fat. To reiterate: bottles of human motherfucking fat. One of them admitted that they'd been luring the chubby with fake job offers, then bumping them off, in the Huanaco and Pasco regions for up to three decades. Police estimate that they may be behind the disappearances of up to 60 people.

The gang has been referred to as the Pishtacos, after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat.

The genesis of this ancient legend is not so hard to trace. The last alleged murder happened in September. Before you get comfortable, and laugh at the people in Peru:

Gen Felix Burga, head of Peru's police criminal division, said there were indications that "an international network trafficking human fat" was operating from Peru.

Stay off those lonely roads.

This fall, MoMA is inviting art lovers to consider the work of the contemporary mixed-media artist who brought us PeeWee's Big Adventure, and the sight of an entire dinner party singing Harry Belafonte's Banana Boat song: Tim Burton.

If you've ever even been slightly curious about Tim Burton, that ultimate disconsolate son of suburbia who's been inviting us into his gleefully bent movie worlds for 27 years now, rest assured your interest will be sated by the show dedicated to the director at the Museum of Modern Art. Opening on November 22nd, it is an almost ludicrously complete assemblage of Burtoniana.



Just about everything one could think of has been matted and framed, up to and including the nascent director's adolescent doodles and prize-winning poster ideas. The director gave the museum curators the full run of his house and assorted papers; they turned up such early gems as a hand-written high school paper titled "Humor In America" ("Types of jokes I've heard and seen: Pollock [sic] jokes (ethnic jokes), Knock-knock jokes, Insults, Stories, One liners, Elephant jokes, Puns...") and this anti-litter poster, which adorned garbage collection trucks in Burton's native Burbank, California, after he won a Keep Burbank Beautiful competition.



A lot of the drawings on display date from the time Burton spent working at Disney, just after attending CalArts. Apparently, while animating such projects as The Fox And The Hound, Burton found he needed a less treacly creative outlet, and badly: most of the sketches from this period betray a mordant sense of humor and the same dark view of humankind that he would later explore in his feature films. Strangely, these images whipsaw between the grim and the twee. Men and women are portrayed as gothic grotesques, or the drawings hinge on kind of sweet little visual puns: a stringy-haired, football-headed woman tugging a string between both ears gets the caption MENTAL FLOSS, for example. Another drawing features two bunny rabbits with baskets of eggs, one saying to the other, "We've been telling the kids the story of Christ all these years...Well, I think they're old enough now to know what Easter's really all about."



The gallery is crammed with material. (Evidently the excavations of Burton's home proved fruitful.) In addition to the sketches and the high school coursework, there are sculptures — seven of which, in the museum courtyard, Burton made specially for the show — movie props, costumes, posters, Polaroids, and assorted notes such as would please the most dedicated connoisseur of arcana. In one corner, Burton's 1983 adaptation of Hansel and Gretel — screened by the Disney channel exactly once — plays. In it, a Japanese brother and sister outsmart a wicked witch with candy cane rhinoplasty who lives in a house that looks like a quivering, pink tongue. There's also a gingerbread man character who talks to Hansel even as he eats him up. "If you think I'm tasty, and you want my body, come on take another bite," taunts the pastry, to the rhythm of "If You Think I'm Sexy."



Visitors enter the exhibit through an immense mouth that hangs, red carpet-tongue extended; in the black-and-white striped corridor behind, Burton's animated shorts play on flat screens. (At the other end, presumably somewhere in the gallery's stomach, is a room lit by UV light, where Burton's blacklight paintings on velvet are displayed.) It is a curatorial choice that seems to cleave to the crowd-pleasing side of things. It's anyone's guess why the curators thought Burton's work needed such a loud proclamation of its difference from typical museum fare as a jagged-tooth orifice; it looks like the sort of thing one might encounter at an amusement park ride.



The man himself described the process of having his work turned out for display as "surreal" and "an out-of-body experience." He remembered to thank the exhibition sponsor, the ridiculously renamed SyFy — "I'm a sci-fi kinda guy" — only at the very last second.



The exhibit includes a life-sized statue of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands, as well as this sketch of the character.



Artifacts from Beetlejuice include this sculpture, a yellowed copy of The Afterlife newspaper ("ECTOPLASM LEAK AT PLANT NUMBER 9" "EXORCISM RATE SOARS"), and Burton's own hand-written notes about the project, which compare it to that other well-known "extreme four character conflict," Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. In the nearby Mars Attacks section, there are latex severed heads and a gigantic painting of Martian anatomy. Sweeney Todd has a wooden box and an engraved set of cutthroat razors.



Batman is represented by various latex cowls, and Batman Returns merits the inclusion of Michelle Pfeiffer's whipstitched catsuit.

In a class composition Burton completed on September 27, 1974, at the age of 16, he imbued an ordinary trip to the doctor for a checkup and a tetanus shot with a sense of heavy foreboding. "There was a ghoulish smile on his face," wrote Burton, "like he enjoyed sticking the needle in my arm."

Tim Burton has stuck the needle in the moviegoing public's arm for nearly 30 years — by the looks of this show, thoroughly enjoying himself in the process. Long may he continue.

Tim Burton At MoMA [MoMA]

"I'd be shocked if no life existed on Europa," one scientist says—and provocative new research suggests the moon's seas have enough oxygen for fishlike animals.

Mutations in the FOXP2 gene could help explain why humans can speak but chimps can't.

Tokyo now has the most Michelin three-star restaurants, overtaking Paris as the world's culinary capital, says the authoritative food guide.

Hey, guys, running a tad behind this morning (Thank you, Victoria's Secret Fashion Show), so here are outtakes from Megan Fox's recent photoshoot for The New York Times Magazine. Because there's really not enough pics of Megan Fox accentuating... ...read full story