- Do speedy elephants walk or run?
- Singing ‘rewires’ damaged brain
- Review highlights health benefits of flexible working arrangements: Blood pressure, sleep and mental health improve
- An Ecological Approach to Prospective and Retrospective Timing of Long Durations: A Study Involving Gamers
- Skeletal Remains from Punic Carthage Do Not Support Systematic Sacrifice of Infants
- Experts stunned by swan ‘divorce’
- Moonlight Makes Owls More Chatty
- New data on how much infection in the first wave of the pandemic
- Moving through time: Thinking of the past or future causes us to sway backward or forward
- Viability and Resilience of Languages in Competition
- Dinosaur extinction grounded ancient birds, new research finds
The flip side of yesterday’s post…
- Rick Mercer lighting into Stephen Harper for proroguing the government while still ostensibly fighting a war for democracy in Afghanistan.
- Girls and boys have similar math abilities.
- Someone felt it necessary to create a Misery Index.
- People who return things to libraries decades and decades after the items were due. Better late than never!
- People continue to remove themselves from the gene pool in exciting ways. See also: Large Wild and Exotic Cats Make Dangerous Pets (PDF), a helpful 4-page pamphlet from the USDA.
- The Wikipedia list of unusual articles. I particularly like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_insult and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet-related_injury. - It’s now possible to use your Blackberry to Google stuff like, oh, how to deliver a baby, should the occasion call for it.
- People who think up stuff like this:
- …and this:
- Oak clones from the Pleistocene. They estimate they’re 13,000 years old.
- Listening to music can help cure ringing in the ears caused by… listening to music.
- Refusing vaccines really does put you (and your kids) at increased risk.
- Really, really, REALLY big explosions.
- There is a gene called Sonic Hedgehog.
- You can score a free holiday in exchange for your poop.
- In this country sometimes storms toss lobsters right up on the beach!
- The Governor General’s house has a public skating rink.
There we go! Fluffy bunnies!
- People getting all public healthish about Santa. (The BMJ link is clearly in jest, but still, that’s up there with Cookie Monster now going on about cookies as a “sometimes food” and Christopher Robin becoming a girl.)

- If you’re a teenager, apparently being a violent jerk is an effective way to boost your cool factor.
- Want to see Antarctica before it all melts? Well, you’re part of the problem.
- While champagne may be reasonably good for you, apparently we need to wear goggles while opening it. Also, some bad people spray it all over the place instead of drinking it. No, no, no. Also a no-no: handling your tarantula sans goggles.
- Drinks with actual flavour give worse hangovers.
- Apparently the world needs a new acronym, REV, to describe “rape with extreme violence“. Think “…mutilate female genitals with guns, pieces of glass, wood, or heated plastic”. What a charming way to conduct a war.
- I still can’t read headlines like this one: 2 dead in murder-suicide in Sask. town without assuming it’s a woman who’s been killed and wondering boyfriend or husband?. …And yes, yet again in this case it was a woman shot by her partner.
- I’m cold.
- Platinum Blonde, of all bands, in the Hall of Fame. I mean. Really.
- People’s obsession with hand sanitizers is going to kill us all.
- Our security while flying requires that we confiscate babies’ teethers.

- We continue to fund fancy buildings in underserved neighbourhoods, but not the programs and organizations to staff them effectively.

See, this is what happens when I spend a whole day feeling cranky and reading my RSS… all the depressing stuff floats to the top. Perhaps next week I’ll manage a companion post on good stuff, but the first Monday of the year didn’t lend itself to fluffy bunnies.
…Um, happy new year!
- Bird-like dinosaur was ‘venomous’
Mon Dec 21, 2009
- Physicists disappointed at discovery of dark mattress
- Men think their dance moves improve with age
Fri Dec 18, 2009
Wed Dec 16, 2009
- Octopus carries around coconut shells as suits of armour
- Effect of listening to Nellie the Elephant during CPR training on performance of chest compressions by lay people: randomised crossover trial
- A report on the zombie outbreak of 2009: how mathematics can save us (no, really) [Holiday Review]
Mon Dec 14, 2009
Sun Dec 13, 2009
Mon Dec 07, 2009
- PICTURES: Best Microscopic-Life Images of 2009 Named
Mon Nov 30, 2009
- Toronto Zoo’s elephant matriarch dies
- The Gruesome Power of Raptor Talons
- Learning His Body, Learning to Dance
Mon Nov 30, 2009
Tue Nov 24, 2009
Wed Nov 25, 2009



