Two scientific studies discovered that at least 3 animals may be able to plan ahead.

Nicholas Mulcahy and Josep Call of the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany found that bonobo chimp and orangutans

… could choose a suitable tool for reaching a treat, carry it away and return with it to retrieve a treat hours later. It seems the apes were planning ahead for future rewards …

Joanna Dally of the University of Cambridge, UK, found that Western scrub-jays:

… remember which birds were watching them when they first stored their food. They then use this information to decide whether to move the goods elsewhere to avoid theft …

Link – via Olgui

Katherine "Kerry" Close, a 13-year-old 8th-grader from Spring Lake, New Jersey, won yesterday’s Scripps National Spelling Bee and took home $42,000 in cash and prizes.

The winning word? "Ursprache", which means a language that is the recorded or hypothetical ancestor of another language or group of languages.

Link

Found at Bits & Pieces.

Artist Donna Pardue of Austin, Texas, makes amazing sculptures out of apples, "the archetypal fruit" because:

Although the apple represents some of our most powerful emotions and beliefs— all that is most wholesome, Eve’s apple was the instrument of the original sin and therefore, the cause of aging and mortality. The Norse goddess of immortality, Idun, had a box of magic apples, which the gods ate every day in order to keep themselves young. Other references to the apple occur in the tales of King Arthur and Avalon (the place of apples) and the Brothers Grimm character, Sleeping Beauty, who fell into a deathlike sleep after eating an apple with a magical poison.

Because the sculptures are made of fruit, they decay almost instantly:

When fresh, the sculptures have a transluscent quality, almost marble-like in appearance, but this lasts only an hour or so. They begin to take on a brown, bruised quality, then a soft leather-like quality and finally begin to wrinkle. After a year, they have shrunken and wrinkled considerably and have taken on a warm brown color.

This particular one is called "Adam Ate Most of It".

Link – Thanks Yayo!

In a move sure to generate controversy, a company that makes RFID tracking tags suggested that its product can be injected into living tissue of immigrants and guest workers to track their movements:

Scott Silverman, Chairman of the Board of VeriChip Corporation, has proposed implanting the company’s RFID tracking tags in immigrant and guest workers. …

Silverman was being interviewed on "Fox & Friends." Responding to the Bush administration’s call to know "who is in our country and why they are here," he proposed using VeriChip RFID implants to register workers at the border, and then verify their identities in the workplace. He added, "We have talked to many people in Washington about using it…."

Link – via J-Walk Blog

Hannah Greely made this marvelous-looking dog welcome mat, titled "Muddle", from coconut fiber and silicon glue.

Link – via WMMNA