the new shelton wet/dry

A former Greek policeman who invented 19 fictional offspring to claim benefits for what would have been the largest family in Greece has been arrested for benefit fraud.

Toronto Zoo’s ‘gay’ penguins split as Buddy finds a female mate.

Iceland, where everyone’s related to Bjork. Genealogical website helps couples avoid incest.

Frogs can detect earthquakes.

Like humans, wasps recognize faces.

Can the width of a CEO’s face affect his firm’s performance?

What does it mean for your relationship when you find yourself stuck in a rut? A group of researchers decided to answer this question by examining how being bored now affects relationship satisfaction down the road.

How removing clothes changes the way the mind is perceived. More: The Psychology of Nakedness.

Naked mole rat: Even its sperm is weird. Previously: In addition to its longevity, naked mole-rats have an extraordinary resistance to cancer as tumors have never been observed in these rodents.

Chimpanzees more closely related to humans than previously thought.

Ecstacy users may be causing permanent harm to their brains, new research suggests.

Alcohol causes risky sexual behavior. (Until now, researchers were doubtful about the exact cause-and-effect relationship between alcohol consumption and unsafe sex.)

A group of investigators from the University of Iowa have published a case report about a 14 year old boy with severe antisocial behavior: He is aggressive, manipulative, and callous; features consistent with psychopathy. Other problems include: egocentricity, impulsivity, hyperactivity, lack of empathy, lack of respect for authority, impaired moral judgment, an inability to plan ahead, and poor frustration tolerance.

Deliberate skull deformations that tracks the practice of molding the shape of the skull from ancient times to the modern body modification scene.

Taxi driver training changes brain structure.

Why humans have a fear of snakes, even though they pose little threat in modern society.

Inverse zombies studied using anaesthesia.

The depressingly endless stream of papers that claim to have found that body posture somehow influences the contents of some cognition about the world. The latest “exciting” new finding claims that estimates of magnitude (size, amount, etc) are affected by your posture.

Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms.

“Most pumps are made of rigid materials,” says Nawroth. “For medical pumps inside the human body, we need flexible pumps because they move fluids in a much gentler way that does not destroy tissues and cells.” Nawroth is working with Caltech engineer John Dabiri, an expert on jellyfish propulsion.

This paper considers how people respond to space in restaurants.

Walking may have had wet start. Based on the way that primitive lungfish use their fins to move along tank bottoms, researchers argue for an underwater start to four-legged locomotion.

Male Physical Attractiveness Part II: Chicks Dig Scars. [Thanks Tim]

It is now possible to use dental X-rays to predict who is at risk of fractures.

In Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, the penis is connected directly to the brain.

In the last few months, search engines have banished much of the useless content that used to plague their results. How did they do it?

A new model of human interactions predicts how many people will purchase a product when a seller advertises it.

Netflix Looks Toward Original Content, Competition With HBO Go.

Google’s 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets.

Louis CK’s Paypal Experiment Already a Success.

In his book, Isaacson incorrectly suggests Jobs created and wrote much of the “To the crazy ones” launch commercial. To me, this is a case of revisionist history. The Real Story Behind Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign.

Facebook’s Timeline turns your old updates into an unexpurgated biography.

Brick-and-mortar stores still have some reasons to exist. For the following reasons, the Internet still hasn’t turned us into full-on cyber-consumerists.

The 25 Most Valuable Blogs In America.

After successfully counterfeiting “lifestyle” drugs such as Viagra and Cialis, Xu had branched out into even more profitable life-saving medications, such as Plavix and Casodex, as well as Tamiflu for avian flu, which brought in profits more than 500 per cent higher than Viagra. How investigators unravelled Europe’s biggest-ever fake-medicine scam.

The True Origins of Pizza: Irony, the Internet and East Asian Nationalisms.

Sörgel based his solution for Pan-European power and self-sufficiency on the observation that, although significant amounts of water flow into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar (from the Atlantic Ocean) and the Dardanelles (from the Black Sea), its level stays the same, through evaporation. Hence his proposal to dam the Mediterranean at both ends, using the reduced inflow to generate massive amounts of hydroelectricity. The Atlantropa Project.

Freakonomics: Examination of a very popular popular-statistics series reveals avoidable errors.

Would-be space explorers, scientists, and a couple of crackpots gather at DARPA’s 100-Year Starship Symposium to try to get interstellar travel unstuck.

Imagine a bill covered with microscopic holes that make it glow slightly in the light. It’s tech borrowed from a butterfly, and it may soon be foiling counterfeiters around the world.

Laser tattoo removal gains popularity.

Inside the Vatican’s pornographic bathroom.

When she was found dead at 41, Carole Myers left a statement saying she had suffered Satantic child abuse at the hands of her parents. But did she?

I went to the bookstore and bought a book on counting called “Blackjack for Blood.” I practiced on decks of cards at home. I thought I had it down. I felt like I was ready.

Around 63 readers, identified by number in a program and on a giant screen to the right of the room, read portions of the text over a five-hour period.

Remembering Larry Levan, ‘The Jimi Hendrix Of Dance Music.’

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935.

Top economists reveal their graphs of 2011.

5 Puzzling International Borders.