Steele's Rudimentary Economics - Disguised under the cover of 'Rudimentary Economics' is hidden a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from 1885. more inside

My Frog has no Lungs - how does it breathe? By osmosis, bitch. First lungless frog found. Evar. more inside

Charlton Heston Passes Away at the Age of 84

How does the mind store information? What kinds of memory do people have? How easy is it for you to remember certain things? In the following experiments, you can learn something about human minds. Or, you can skip that and read about the human memory model. I forget what it was I was going to say.

Many, possibly every episode of Rainbow Quest - Lost treasure now found, like a coprolite at the back of a stenchy old cave. Rainbow Quest was a late sixties folk music program, mostly unrehearsed, on which host Pete Seeger brought just about every great folk act and sang every great folk song you can think of. I can't think of any. more inside

Daily caffeine 'protects brain' - brain is said to be 'thankful'. more inside

If You Want Closure In Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs is the book title that has beaten off competition from to win The Bookseller magazine's prize for oddest title, a competition which began in 1978, and the roll-call of previous winners includes Lick My Greasy Chicken, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love a Barnacle, and of course the classic Quidnunc Kid's Guide to Sensible Arguments.

Does the Human Brain Possess Potential “Super Powers”?

Bead Me Up, Scotty - a crafty take on Star Trek. more inside

'Mean Spirited' Goat kills Pastor - an angry goat, probably looking something like this one, in the words of the police 'just went berserk' and attacked and killed an elderly Christian Ecclesiastical official in Tennessee, USA. more inside

How did humans evolve a brain that supports language? - a post from Babel's Dawn blog discussing the events of the Evolang* conference in Barcelona, which apparently signals the end of Chomsky's Generative grammar theory as an explanation of human language evolution.

Let's Talk - picture by Polish photographer Marcin Nawrocki

Flipping particle could explain missing antimatter - In its early days, the cosmos was apparently a cauldron of radiation & equal amounts of matter and antimatter. As it cooled, all the antimatter supposedly was annihilated in collisions with matter - but for some reason the proportions ended up lopsided, allowing some of the matter to form the elements, stars and galaxies we see today. The precise reason for this is unknown to physics, perhaps until now. more inside

The Big Dog Quadruped Robot is Evolving - FLV video with sound - We've talked about Boston Dynamics' Quadruped Robot before (but the video link is dead now). Here's an update. It runs, it jumps, it dances to the sound of a model airplane engine: it crosses the uncanny valley. Hello, biological entities, this is the future.

How the BBC rendered their spinning globe logo in 1985 - A live picture of a spinning globe had been shown before BBC programmes since the Sixties. When colour came to BBC 1, a curved mirror was added behind the globe, and the effect this produced continued to be seen on screen for over fifteen years. But technology had moved on and time was running out for this mechanical symbol. A solid state device had generated the symbol on BBC 2 since the end of the Seventies. Subsequently, electronic clocks on both networks had replaced the mechanical clocks. And in early 1984, work began on a project to generate a digital symbol for BBC 1 too. Here is the story of those great men & women, etc..

Birmingham is the weirdest place to live in the UK - we all knew this, comes as no surprise, right? Almost two-thirds of Brummies believe in the supernatural after reports of giant hailstones hitting city streets and Martians dropping in for mince pies at the Rowley Regis home of Jean Hingley in 1979. Also, The Bull Ring. It's actually the 10th Circle of Hell, it's just been outsourced.

The 14 Precepts of Engaged Buddhism By Thich Nhat Hanh.

Neanderthals (Probably) had Language Comparable to Modern Humes

New Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart portrait found

Google Sky, peoples. more inside