It’s official:  There's treasure in them South Staffordshire fields.Some of the 90 pieces of gold and silver found in central England last year - after an unemployed man searching a farmer’s field with a metal detector discovered loot in 2009 - have formally been declared to be treasure.That means it is at least 300 years old and at least 10% precious metal.  It also means you can't have any of it if you find it, is is property of The State. Anyone who finds an object believed to be treasure must report it.Sorry, treasure hunters.

It's open access - for restaurant safety.Restaurant inspections have always been somewhat arcane - a disclosure statement is stuck on a wall but, like those meaningless Proposition 65 statements we see here in California ('this dry cleaners won't give you cancer, but we have to show this sticker saying it might or we will get sued') no one reads them - plus, people are only going to see them after they are already at the restaurant.If you care about food, more laws and more bans and more regulations are not helping you, but more transparency about the government already spending the money doing inspections will.

Do you like cooking but wish the stirring of food didn't force you to pause the DVR and leave the comfort of your living room chair every five minutes?Japanese dentist Hideki Watanabe did also, so he created the Kuru-Kuru Nabe, which literally means round-round pot but in Japan real means a pot that stirs itself. Watanabe created the prototype using dental plaster from his practice to line the inside surface of a metal pot in a spiral design he created using good, old-fashioned trial and error.

Caperea marginata, pigmy right whales, are the last survivors of an aquatic family that evolved 15 million years ago but little else is known about how they behave, what they eat or how many there are in the world's oceans.What scientists do know is that it is not a right whale at all but is instead a type of baleen whale, part of the Cetotheriidae family of whales and that it probably evolved nine million years ago. The six other species believed to make up the Cetotheriidae family have all died out.It was recognized as having an unusual bone structure, including an arched snout, but only now has its position on the whale family tree been established.

On New Year's Day of 1888 in eastern Kentucky, the Hatfield clan set Randolph McCoy's cabin ablaze and gunned down two members of the rival family.That property, which deeds have traced back to Randolph McCoy, is now owned by Bob Scott, a Hatfield descendant who suspected for years the land was the site of the attack and now excavators have found bullets believed to have been fired by the McCoys in self-defense, along with fragments of windows and ceramic from a cabin.

New Zealand author and film-maker Ray Waru has examined military files buried in the national archives and found that a top secret operation, code-named "Project Seal", set out to test  a 'tsunami bomb' doomsday device - one of many secret super weapons researched by the Allies and Axis powers during the war. About 3,700 bombs were tested, first in New Caledonia and later at Whangaparaoa Peninsula, near Auckland. The testing concluded the weapon was feasible and that a series of 10 large offshore blasts could potentially create a 33-foot tsunami capable of inundating a small city.

Americans, Italians and Brits can rejoice - health science has finally caught up to their waistlines. An analysis of 100 studies including three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people.  People not selling diet books or otherwise engaged in feel-good fallacies and scare journalism (like us) have said all along that weight and BMI are fake metrics - there are a lot of knobs to turn in good health and being a certain weight is vital if you have other risk factors.

Progressive social authoritarian Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been engaged in what progressive social authoritarians love to engage in - controlling choice and thinking and freedom to shape it into their personal world view.The rationalizations that social authoritarians engage in to force their world view on others is how Bloomberg could say society needed to 'keep perspective' with a straight face when yet another mentally ill person committed murder in December by pushing someone in front of a subway train, though when a mentally ill person shot up a school in Connecticut, he said guns should be banned. 

The Indiana Jones movies are good when they have some basis in real stuff - like Nazis and the Ark of the Covenant in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and Templars and...well, Nazis again...in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".When Steven Spielberg ventured into fake temples and 1950s alien hokum, we got movies better left to AFI members to have to endure.  So for Indiana Jones 5, he should throw out whatever bad idea he is working on and read about Qin Shi Huang's tomb. The first emperor of China created a  courtyard-style palace tomb inside a 22-square-mile mortuary compound guarded by more than 6,000 full-size statues of warriors, musicians and acrobats.

In western civilization, New Year's Resolutions are a big deal.  A new year means a new opportunity to meet goals - and losing weight is a popular one.But do they work?  People binge like crazy during the holidays and heavy people were not eating moderately before that. So dieters are already in the hole, weightwise.  And eating less food is hard.Writing at Policy Mic, Cameron English says 80% of all dieters fail to lose weight, and one-third even gain additional weight but their health loss may be psychology's gain.  The big question they want to address us: Why is willpower so useless when it's most needed?