On his way out the door to a wedding, cat lover Charlie Stross casually pointed to Parasites, and a hundred people felt compelled to name their favorites. Man, that Toxoplasma gondii is somethin’ else!
- Earthquake swarm rocks Yellowstone.
- Formation of unusual ring of radiation around Earth explained.
- NASA’s plutonium problem could end deep-space exploration.
- Evolution of the feather revealed by dinosaur specimens preserved in 8–million-year-old pieces of amber forgotten in museum storerooms.
- Sasquatch sightings map: Click on your area to zoom.
- Why today’s inventors need to read more science fiction.
- Gene discovery paves the way for a pill to erase your most painful memories.
- Why neuroscience is ending the Prozac era: The big money has moved from developing psychiatric drugs to manipulating our brain networks.
- Strange new state of consciousness could exist, researcher says.
- Our nose knows ten types of odour. How many types of odour do other animals smell?
- Nine in 10 Briitsh men fake their love of sports to impress their friends and colleagues.
- Why people give in to temptation when no-one’s watching.
- Privacy row as road chiefs track drivers on motorways by collecting data on their mobiles and satnavs.
- In 1961 accident, the US nearly detonated an atomic bomb over North Carolina.
- Make sure you know who will inherit your twitter account: Digital assets could be lost to heirs unless they are part of an estate plan.
- Funerals for fallen robots.
- Electronic dance music’s love affair with ecstasy.
- There is no population explosion on this planet.
- Forbes calls Goldman CEO holier than Mother Teresa. Matt Taibbi fills them in on some of the ways the bank has made its money.
- Elites’ strange plot to take over the world: A few decades ago, politicians hatched a Tom Friedman-esque idea to unite U.S. and Western Europe. Did it succeed?
- Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) asks if FBI can get iPhone 5S fingerprint data via Patriot Act. WSJ wonders about those fingerprints, too.
- The wild story of the hidden classified briefing for a national-security document on the Friday in August that Congress started its summer recess.
Quote of the Day:
Mr. Prosser said, “You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know.”
“Appropriate time?” hooted Arthur. “Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he’d come to clean to windows and he said no, he’d come to demolish the house. He didn’t tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me.”
“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”
“But the plans were on display …”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”
Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
