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"I am beyond happy because I had to prove that (last year's victory) was not chance, so now I am totally at peace. I love to compete against myself and getting better and better," said Ronnie White, of Fort Worth, Texas. Fifty mental athletes competed all day in the 13th annual championship in lower Manhattan that included events such as memorizing the names of 99 people and their pictures, a 50-line poem in free verse and over 100 single numbers in the right order. In the category of speed numbers, computer science student Nelson Dellis, 26, won and topped White's previous record by remembering in five minutes 178 different numbers in their right order. White, who is able to memorize a deck of cards in 1.5 minutes, will go on to represent the United States at the World Memory Championships in Guangzhou, China in November. Mostly won by Britons, last year's world championship was clinched by Briton Ben Pridmore, who memorized a randomly shuffled deck of 52 cards in 24 seconds. Despite their astounding feats, most competitors profess nothing unusual about their prodigious memories, claiming that all it takes is regular mental exercise.

Ask CEOs to pick their favorite color and what they select will often be very different than what most people would pick. For example, when 877 members of USA TODAY's CEO panel took an online personality color test, they were three times more likely to favor magenta than the public at large, three times less likely to select red, and 3½ times less likely to choose yellow.

Now a researcher at Websense, a security firm based in San Diego, has developed a way to monitor such malicious activity automatically. Speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco last week, Stephan Chenette, a principal security researcher at Websense, detailed an experimental system that crawls the Web, identifying the source of content embedded in Web pages and determining whether any code on a site is acting maliciously. Chenette's software, called FireShark, creates a map of interconnected websites and highlights potentially malicious content. Every day, the software maps the connections between nearly a million websites and the servers that provide content to those sites. "When you graph multiple sites, you can see their communities of content," Chenette says. While some of the content hubs that connect different communities could be legitimate--such as the servers that provide ads to many different sites--other sources of content could indicate that an attacker is serving up malicious code, he says. According to a study published by Websense, online attackers' use of legitimate sites to spread malicious software has increased 225 percent over the past year.