beep.

Robots will be smarter than humans within 15 years.

Danes who have recently drunk Sprite are 10 per­cent less likely than those who have recently drunk Sprite Zero to support the welfare state, 4 percent of Swiss boys have been molested by email or text mes­sage, and male Montrealers burn 45 percent more calories on average than do female Montrealers dur­ing non kinky sex. Evolutionary ecologists speculated that hermaphrodite sea slugs who consistently stab each other in the head with penile stylets while mat­ing may do so in order to control their partners’ brains or to make them averse to mating with other slugs. Most homosexual mating behavior in insects was found to be unintentional. “The cost of hesita­tion,” explained an entomologist, “appears to be greater than the cost of making some mistakes.” Af­ter examining 500,000 insect fossils, a paleontologist at China’s Capital Normal University at last found two frog hoppers in the missionary position. Naïve Japanese macaques at a national monkey farm exhib­ited specialized neural responses to images of snakes. Touch screen computers engross dominant Sulawesi-crested macaques, thereby soothing social tensions. Dogs wag to the right when happy and to the left when upset, and in turn either relax or upset other dogs who observe them. Semipalmated sand pipers on the periphery of mudflat feeding groups restrict themselves to short, shallow pecks.

EAT, PRAY, GLOVES™

Took a 7 mile dirt road into Bradford County. It’s as far north as you can go in Pennsylvania before crossing the border into New York. The property is surrounded by forested hills. There’s a pond and a vegetable garden in the yard. When she and her husband retired here from Philadelphia five years ago they didn’t realize the property had a gas leak. One night the shed erupted into a spectacular blaze killing two very expensive cats. She had already made plans for a trip to a Delaware showing that was expected to result in a variety of new medals for the more beautiful cat's trophy case. But that seems like the last place she wants to go now.

Pond snails exposed to the dual stresses of over­ crowding and calcium deprivation take longer to real­ize that they are being suffocated by scientists. Pharmacologists determined why a herpes medication makes some Swedes believe themselves to be dead, and a new drug promised to treat the mucocutaneous geni­tal ulcers of Behcet’s sufferers. Veterinary oncologists tracked the trafficking of fetal cells in micro-chimeric puppies dammed by golden ­retriever bitches. The slow galloping of dung beetles was found to violate the tri­pod gait of terrestrial insects. After calculating that mid­size and large mammals take twenty-­one seconds on average to empty their bladders, fluid ­dynamics re­searchers proposed a Law of Urination. At City of Hope hospital, male stem ­cell transplant recipients with graft­-versus-­host disease reported a 21 percent de­crease in sexual fantasy. In the rice fields of Yolo By­pass, experimental populations of Chinook salmon were flourishing, and in the Amazon, zoologists dis­covered a vegetarian piranha and a purring titi mon­key. Western Canada was missing its sardines. Scien­tists pointed out that moonlight is not necessarily beneficial to predatory mammals, because predated mammals, too, can see. A study by researchers at Max­ Planck ­Institut für Psycho linguistik concluded that the universal word is huh. "Interesting,” said an expert in um and uh.

84%