News Briefs 17-12-2012

Touretteshero recently posted a Christmas Animation on YouTube.

• @ticbot may be artificial intelligence by accident. @TicBot is cared about and flirted with. He's received death threats and marriage proposals.
• A video to make you believe in global warming.
• Filming on thin ice: Recording the devastation of climate change isn't easy.
• A venomous primate with two tongues would seem safe from the pet trade, but the big-eyed, teddy-bear face of the slow loris has made them a target for illegal pet poachers.
• 6,000 insect species found in one acre of rainforest.
• The mystery of the Piltdown man hoax has been solved.
• It wasn't the Russian winter that defeated Napoleon. It was typhus spread by lice.
• Last week the University of Chicago received what might be an elaborate hoax, a miracle, or the best college admissions application of all time: Abner Ravenwood’s journal from Raiders of the Lost Ark -- addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. (aka Indiana Jones).
• The best of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest, where people write the worst opening sentence of a novel. Betcha can't read just one.
• The Oatmeal responds to a Buzzfeed hit piece.
• Ithkuil: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented.
• Liebenberg Syndrome: When an arm is really a leg, and an elbow is actually a knee.
• Virus rebuilds the heart's own pacemaker.
• Brain injuries revealed in high-def. Gorgeous.
• Videogamers beat surgeons at using surgical robots.
• In Hubble's Shadow (the man's, not the telescope's).
• Radioactive cigarettes: Not only did cigarette makers know about polonium-210 contamination of tobacco for decades – they knew how to fix it and chose not to.
• 'I am Adam Lanza's mother': A Mom's perspective on the [lack of a] mental illness conversation in America.
• More Americans receive mental health treatment in prisons and jails than in hospitals or treatment centers. The three largest inpatient psychiatric facilities in the US are Los Angeles County Jail, Rikers Island Jail in New York City and Cook County Jail in Illinois.

A big thanks to Stuart M.!

Quote of the Day:

The Christmas season’s full of traditions and activities that we can only bear once a year.

Touretteshero