While no one was paying attention, someone in Germany pulled off what is clearly the heist of the century, and maybe the finest and most worthwhile criminal act of all time -- sorry, Great Train Robbery. This weekend saw thieves in the town of Bad Hersfeld make off with a parked trailer containing five and a half tons of delicious, creamy, chocolatey Nutella.

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Staff at Australia's Featherdale Wildlife Park are scratching their heads over the recent theft of one of their emus. How the bird burglars carried a bird the size of a small ostrich over an electrified barbed wire fence in the dead of night while avoiding a guard and security camera is one good question, but there's an even better one -- why would anyone steal an emu in the first place?

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We knew it was only a matter of time before the stray dogs of the world rose up against their mistreatment at the hands of humans, and it appears that the revolution has begun, At least, it has in India, where a stray dog reportedly stole a bag containing over 400,000 Indian rupees -- almost $7,500 U.S. dollars -- from a man when he stepped outside for just a moment to wash his face.

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One of the unfortunate happenstances of the digital age we live in is the fact that items like iPhones have become increasingly more likely to be stolen. Everyone wants the latest phone, tablet, computer, or whatever the newest thing companies like Apple are producing. So when an iPhone is lost, chances are there's someone else out there fiddling with it. That's what happened to Nadav Nirenberg this past New Year's Eve. He lost his phone, and another scurrilous individual decided to keep it. How did Nirenberg know someone had it? Well, he received an email alert that the person had been messaging the ladies through OkCupid on it. That's when things got interesting.

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Whatever hangovers, hookups, or regrettable strikeouts your New Year's Eve may have had in store, we're prepared to say your evening was probably still better than that of Apple Store employees in Paris, who not only had to work the holiday, but spent it being held up by a team of armed robbers. Just one employee was slightly hurt, thankfully, but the robbers escaped in a van brimming over with Apple gadgets before police arrived on the scene. The company isn't sharing the particulars of just what goods were nicked in this Grand Theft Apple, but they have put the price tag for the whole theft at about 1 millions euros, or close to $1.6 million. What goods could a theft that big from an Apple store have potentially netted the thieves responsible? We do the math below.

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If you're a tiny, single-celled animal like a protozoan, photosynthesis is a pretty neat ability, as being able to make food just by laying in the sun is significantly easier than going out and hunting down your own meals. Unfortunately for protozoa, photosynthesis is also a rather tricky proposition, requiring millions of years of evolutionary practice to evolve. One species has developed its own workaround for that small problem, though -- it got the best of both worlds by absorbing algae cells and stealing the genes that control photosynthesis right out of their DNA.

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In news that suggests that those Duke boys are at it again, a man has been arrested in Missouri after stealing a car, then challenging a Maries County sheriff to a race. That ended about as well as you would expect, with officers eventually shooting out the engine of the car, bumping it to a stop, and having to break the driver's side window and pull the man out when he refused to exit the vehicle.

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People really want to get their hands on Apple's latest devices, regardless of what they are. It is known. That's why they're such a big target when it comes to theft, and the iPad Mini's no different. With a caper that appears to be ripped straight from any generic heist movie, a pair of thieves managed to scamper off with two pallets of the gadgets -- worth $1.5 million -- from JFK airport late Monday night.

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Bitcoin theft is apparently a lucrative business. Bitfloor, a Bitcoin exchange, had around 24,000 Bitcoins stolen yesterday. The founder of Bitfloor, Roman Shtylman, revealed the robbery in a Bitcoin Forum post. At the going rate, this comes out to around $250,000. As of right now, Bitfloor is still down as they try to recover their losses and move forward. Given the fluidity of this particular pseudo currency, chances are slim that they'll ever see those Bitcoins returned.

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Bob Russell's 1967 Austin Healey 3000 was stolen 42 years ago in front of his Philly apartment, right after his second date with his future wife. You'd think the story ends here, with Bob living happily ever after with the love of his life. Nope. Sequels.

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The thing to do, apparently, when you're bored at work is to just start stealing. That always leads to excitement. Between April and May, that's allegedly what Todd Anthony Cofield, Jr. did whilst working at an Amazon distribution center in South Carolina. Authorities are saying that Cofield nabbed 726 iPods and 49 HP laptops during his spree. Who knew that stealing so much valuable technology would have people look into it?

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Back in January of last year, Hudson Urban Bicycles proposed a bold experiment: Leave a locked-up bike on the streets of New York's SoHo neighborhood and take a photograph of it every day. Like the crumbling of a mountain side from eons of erosion, the bike vanished bit by bit as it was stripped of its parts. It takes nearly six months before the first act of larceny occurs -- the theft of the bike's water bottle -- and it's all downhill from there. By day 270, the bike is completely gone.

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A team of researchers from the University of California at San Diego have found that thermal imaging cameras can be used to steal PIN numbers when people make a cash withdrawal from an ATM. Residual heat from a person's finger when it touches the keypad to punch in their PIN can be viewed with an infrared camera to give away your combination without anyone having to actually see your finger on the button. For criminals, thermal imaging has some advantages. Whether or not the user visually blocks the keypad while they type their number will make no difference, and PIN harvesting can still be automated to provide crooks with a leg up. Researchers Keaton Mowery, Sarah Meiklejohn and Stefan Savage of UCSD studied 21 volunteers punching in 27 randomly selected PIN numbers on plastic and brushed metal keys. The study showed that plastic PIN pads retain the heat signature from the finger the longest showing which numbers and which order they were pressed.

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A Bitcoin user has lost 25,000 Bitcoins -- the digital peer-to-peer currency that is all the rage in digital peer-to-peer currencies these days -- which currently translates to nearly half a million tangible bucks at $487,749.

First thing that I noticed is that my slush's pool account got hacked into and someone changed the payout address to this: 15iUDqk6nLmav3B1xUHPQivDpfMruVsu9f I then changed the password and proceeded to run some antivirus and anti malware scans. Some stuff was found, but they were all cleaned up and they were all in my windows user profile temp dir which I deleted all the temp files. God I can't even type properly. Sorry folks I'm a bit emotional now. I then left another virus scanner running and went to sleep. When I woke up I check my bitcoin wallet. I leave the client running to help the network, and I notice -25,000 (and a transaction fee) gone.

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This past Friday at 8 AM, the doors at the Pak'n Save in Hamilton, New Zealand. Shortly thereafter, patrons entered the store and began purchasing goods from the self-scan machines. The only catch is that not a single employee was in the store; nor should they have been, as the Pak'n Save was meant to be closed for Good Friday. Glenn Miller, the owner of the shop is blaming the incident on a computer glitch that opened the doors to the store when they should have stayed shut. From the security camera footage, it appeared that most people were unaware that the store's staff wasn't in the building, with most of them paying for their groceries via self-scan and leaving. However, not everyone was so moral, taking the opportunity to waltz off with what was referred to as "truckloads of groceries."

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There have been many effects of Eve Online's decision to deal a large blow to the black market for their in-game currency by essentially making it purchasable for real money. The one that we like the most, however, is that it is now really easy to quantify actions in Eve Online to people who don't play the game. Case in point: In-game business machinations have lead to a player known as Bad Bobby walking away from a gutted in-game corporation with items worth $45,000. And it was all game legal.

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It is worth remembering that while you can pick up a lot of free comics on Free Comic Book Day, the holiday does not mean that everything in the store is free. This subtle nuance was apparently lost on one Australian man, who tried to make off with a $160 (in Aussie money) volume of the X-Men Omnibus. He was stopped in his tracks by, I kid you not, Spider-Man, The Flash, and two Jedi.

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