Sometimes eeeevil corporations (aren't they all eeeevil?) give a green light to cool ideas, so let's give it up to Volkswagen for their The Fun Theory award - the idea being that if you make something more fun, they will be more inclined to do it.  Even if it's good for them.The link above has lots of fun theories on the environment, healthy, behavior, etc. but in the meantime check out this clever way they get sloths in Stockholm to take the stairs!

... no, better, if only we had an open source, downloadable, multi-scale, virtual catalog of the mouse brain and its cellular constituents.Wait, now we do!

In 2009, British men made 16.4% more auto accident claims during the Summer than other seasons - and 25% % of men have had a crash or near miss in Summer compared to only 17% of women.The reason?  Well, women are less easily distracted and apparently men will look at anything in a skirt.Did you lose your place in this article because of this pic?  Behavioral psychologists claim 25% of you did.

Well, now there are 7 stages of Mitosis;  Interphase, Prophase, Metaphase, Anaphase, Telophase, Cytokinasis and ...... Delicious!Kevin Van Aelst art - see more here.

Scott Rosenberg delivers a message many in media knew but Scienceblogs bloggers were not thrilled to hear - they were a community to themselves but a commodity to the guy running SEED.  This loss of innocence is, I think, a nearly universal experience online. It occurs when one’s initial surge of idealistic delight at the freedom and opportunities of boundless self-expression slams into the realities of the media business online.And then ...

via It Takes 30, from the Department of Systems Biology @ Harvard Medical SchoolAs so often with mathematical treatments of complex problems, one of the key benefits of creating the model is that it forces you to make explicit your assumptions.

Can't be at the San Diego Comic Con because your dog's Boba Fett costume is at the cleaners? Great news ... ScriptPhD is on the scene.It's just like being there, without having to stare at some guy wearing a t-shirt with barbecue sauce on it from dinner three nights ago telling you you're not really a "Farscape" fan because you pronounced Gigi Edgley's name wrong. 

The 1960s were a great decade - the 1960s that the '60s would become famous for (drugs, riots, protests) didn't really happen until the end and, as David Crosby replied when asked to disclose one thing people did not know about the '60s stated, "They happened in the '70s" - and its mystique has become even greater with the gentle misogyny and rampant chain smoking of "Mad Men".But there was cool science too.  At Psypost, they write of a Journal of Personality and Social Psychology study that set out to find what we could learn about men from what they preferred in women - like the size of butts or boobs.  

Gamblers House, a blog dedicated to work on Chaco Canyon, goes into some common questions they get from visitors. One thing that seems to surprise a lot of visitors is the fact that the Chacoans apparently had no knowledge of the wheel, or if they did have such knowledge they didn’t apply it to transport any of the many things they brought into the canyon from distant sources.Answer; a lack of draft animals.    It's cool stuff.Now tell us why so many of the New World civilizations learned to write either.

The article we all wanted to write, but it isn't science and we feel guilty wasting the audience's time complaining about people they never run across but we see day ... after day ... after day ... They subscribe to our Twitterfeed, they want to write to us on Facebook, they can show us how to make money if we just bookmark them.No one knows what they actually do is just 1 of the 5 signs.  You have to read for the rest ...H/T Jennifer Ouellette at Cocktail Party Physics.