There's only one way to find out: Edward Cussler and Brian Gettelfinger of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis filled a swimming pool with syrup and tested how fast 16 volunteers swam.

The most troublesome part of the experiment was getting permission to do it in the first place. Cussler and Gettelfinger had to obtain 22 separate kinds of approval, including persuading the local authorities that it was okay to put their syrup down the drain afterwards.

But it was worth the hassle, Cussler says, not least because his quest for an answer made him something of a celebrity on campus. "The whole university was arguing about it," he recalls. "It was absolutely hilarious."

The result? No - humans don't swim slower in syrup.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040920/pf/040920-2_pf.html

MIT Professor Matt Wilson found that after running a maze, rats mentally replay the action - backwards!

... following a spatial experience such as running laps on a track, the awake animal replays the memory so precisely that its recorded brain activity corresponds exactly to the places it has just been. However, to the researchers' surprise, the episode is replayed in time-reverse order, with the most recent locations first, proceeding sequentially back to the beginning of the task.

This backward instant replay may play a significant role in reinforcing learning, Wilson said. "Understanding this replay is likely to be critical in understanding how animals - and humans - learn from experience. This phenomenon may constitute a general mechanism of learning and memory."

Link

In the 1970s, a Czech magazine published a DIY guide on how to make your very own paper pinhole camera:

Its creators, Martin Pilný, Mirek Kolár and Richard Vyškovský, came up with a functional pinhole camera made of stiff paper, designed for 35 mm film, which resembles a real camera. It may not be the most practical of devices, but it works!

Link

Protecting her 7-year old son, Lydia Angyiou of Ivujivik, Arctic Quebec, fought a polar bear hand-to-hand - and lived to tell about it!

Angyiou, 41, who lives not far from the youth centre, was outside with her two younger children when she saw the polar bear eying the boys. She immediately ran towards animal: all she could think about was protecting her seven-year old son.

Link

The largest lightning storm ever detected is currently raging in Saturn.

The storm is larger than the continental United States, with electrical activity 1,000 times stronger than the lightning on Earth. The storm is about 2,175 miles wide (3,500 kilometers).

Link

Take a look at earth lights at night, powered by Google Maps. Link

From the news article:

The Japanese Olympic Committee is telling athletes competing at the Turin Winter Olympic Games not to open web logs because the Olympic Charter bans athletes' journalist activities when the games are on, and violators will be disqualified.

After Kentaro Minagawa (Albirex Niigata) finished fourth in the Men's World Cup Slalom in Wengen, Switzerland, on Jan 15, he updated his blog the next day. He wrote: "This evening, I am relaxing since my event finished yesterday. Next time, I want to win. I want to ski faster than anybody else."

Link

The first rule of pillow fight club is, you do talk about pillow fight club.... On Valentine's Day, a thousand people showed up to pummel each other with pillows. Link (via Metafilter)

From the website:

The AOL Throne was built in the summer of 2003. It contains 4000 CDs, weighs at least 150 pounds, barely fits through doors, and plugs into an electical outlet.

Checkout photos from the construction of this one-of-a-kind chair! http://stupidco.com/aol_throne_intro.html

LiftPort Group successfully built a mile-long tether into the sky, stretched taut by large balloons. A robot then climbed up the tether kind of like a space elevator.

The company's lofty objective will sound familiar to followers of NASA's Centennial Challenges programme. The desired outcome is a 62,000-mile (99,779 km) tether that robotic lifters – powered by laser beams from Earth – can climb, ferrying cargo, satellites and eventually people into space.

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8725 (via digg)

This Vietnamese man has gone 33 years without sleep:

Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.

Link

This video clip purportedly show the resuscitation of a dead dog, as conducted in the 1940 by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in the former USSR.

Mind you, it's a propaganda video from an era designed to make the Russians look good (regardless of scientific merit - some Stalin-era scientists even outright faked data to make them look good / avoid the gulags).

Link: "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" (via WFMU Beware of the Blog - worth a read)

Before you dismiss it out of hand, however, see also this Pittsburgh Tribune article on how scientists at the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research revived dogs 3 hours after clinical death (no brain activity).

Safar, who died two years ago, proposed flushing the circulatory system with an ice-cold salt solution, which would drop the core body temperature to about 50 degrees compared to the usual 98.6 degrees.

Cooling the body in this way would buy extra time to transport injured soldiers or trauma victims in cardiac arrest to the hospital, Safar reasoned. The cold temperature would have a preserving effect so no damage would occur to tissues and organs, even though the heart would be stopped.

Link

BTW, the Safar Center is named after Dr. Peter Safar, the inventor of CPR.

Donald Pottle took this amazing picture of an arteriole (blood vessel that connect the artery to the capillaries) in the eye. This photo is the winner of the 2004 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition. Checkout this year's winners: http://www.olympusbioscapes.com/gallery/2005/index.html (via Stuff on Fire)

Joanna Lopianowski-Roberts spent 10 years to create this 40" x 80" masterpiece of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling entirely in cross-stitch (including 628, 296 stitches in 1,802 different color combination). Link (via Boing Boing)

I can't say it any better, folks:

Situated in an elegantly restored house beside Beijing's West Lake, it is China's first speciality penis restaurant.

Link (via Geoff Coupe's Blog)