Maybe it was an accident or perhaps an ancient experiment. Many thousands of years ago, early humans somehow figured out they could make better stone tools by treating the rocks with fire. Evidence of that, dating 72,000 years ago, has been found on the southeastern tip of Africa, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

Sleep is a rare commodity for Juan Cortez. Between nights spent clearing tables at a Manhattan nightclub and days running food to customers in a Bronx restaurant, the 42-year-old Peruvian immigrant worries more about finding time for shuteye than job security.

When launched to great fanfare nearly a year ago, some feared the Large Hadron Collider would create a black hole that would suck in the world. It turns out the Hadron may be the black hole.

Boeing-support blog says it’s “grass roots,” but is backed by business groups and a PR firm.

Coal companies and environmentalists alike are counting on a breakthrough in carbon capture and storage technology to siphon off harmful emissions from the world’s coal plants. Critics say the effort to create ‘clean coal’ is an expensive pipe dream.

All taxpayers will be able to convert all or some of their traditional IRAs into a Roth IRA, regardless of income, in 2010.

The average American family of four spends about $5,000 a year on food prepared at home, according to the federal government’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. So a 20 percent savings could yield a cool $1,000.

Asia has sent ever-increasing amounts of money to the West, while the U.S. is moving ever-rising mountains of debt to the East. That trade averted the financial Armageddon many feared; that’s good news, and it’s still going on.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We don’t normally run other news organization’s stories about The Seattle Times in our pages. We try to report fairly and accurately on ourselves. But a piece in Monday’s New York Times got a lot of national attention and sparked dialogue in the continuing conversation about the future of newspapers and journalism. We decided to share it with you here, just as it ran in The New York Times.

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