(YouTube link)

Pioneering professional nurse Florence Nightingale {wiki} was already 70 years old when she recorded this snippet for Thomas Edison and posterity in 1890. This recording has been redubbed to different formats and speed-corrected at least once, so the legibility after 119 years is due to Nightingale's slow and overdramatic delivery. -via the Presurfer

For the first time, evidence from an fMRI was introduced as evidence for the defense during the penalty phase of a murder trial. Brian Dugan was convicted in Chicago of the rape and murder of a ten-year-old. Dugan's scan was introduced to show his brain was psychopathic. It is not clear how this information was supposed to mitigate his culpability, as Dugan was ultimately sentenced to death.

“I don’t know of any other cases where fMRI was used in that context,” Stanford professor Hank Greely told Science.

While the possibility of using fMRI data in a variety of contexts, particularly lie detection, has bounced around the margins of the legal system for years, there are almost no documented cases of its actual use. In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, the Supreme Court allowed brain scans to be entered as evidence to show that adolescent brains work differently than adult brains.

That’s a far cry, though, from using fMRI to establish the truth of testimony or that specific structures within an individual defendant’s brain are legally relevant.

It’s difficult to tell whether the Dugan case will be a watershed moment in the use of brain scan evidence in court, or if the evidence impacted the decision in this case.

The jury is still out, so to speak, on the reliability of brain scans for its many possible uses in law enforcement. Link

39-year-old Sara Foss of Derby, England is already the mother of 13 children and is expecting her 14th. She says as soon as the new baby is born in April, she'll try to get pregnant again. Foss vows to keep on having babies until she has twins or triplets!

Her mammoth brood now comprises Patrick, 23, Stephen, 13, Malachai, 12, Peppermint, 11, Echo, 10, Eli, nine, Rogue, eight, Frodo, seven, Morpheus, five, Artemis, four, Blackbird, three, Baudelaire, two, and nine-month-old Voorhees.

No word yet on what number 14 will be named. Link -via I Am Bored

(image credit: Flickr user Mick 0)

(video link)

A team led by psychologist Martin Doherty of the University of Stirling in Scotland found that visual illusions that befuddle adults don't effect children as easily. The pair of orange circles in the above illusion are slightly different in size. The blue dots will either accentuate those differences, or mislead the eye into thinking they are bigger or smaller than they are. In an experiment, participants of different ages were asked to identify the circle that looked bigger.

For 4- to 6-year-olds, accuracy of size perception for misleading images remained at about what it was for control images. Misleading images increasingly elicited errors from older children and tricked adults most of the time. Adults made almost no errors on helpful images. Kids from age 7 to 10 erred on a minority of helpful images, while 4- to 6-year-olds performed no better than chance.

The results suggest that considering context in images is something we learn as we age. Link

Drive sober in Salinas, California, and Tuesday could be your lucky night. At a certain DUI checkpoint, some motorists who pass through will be awarded a free turkey!

This is the seventh year Salinas police have added a giveaway to the Thanksgiving week DUI checkpoint.

It's become so popular, Salinas police are now asking drivers not to go through the checkpoint more than once just to try to win a turkey.

Police keep the location secret ahead of set up.

The turkeys were donated by police, businesses, and private citizens. http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local-beat/Why-Drivers-Flock-To-One-DUI-Checkpoint-70989117.html -via J-Walk Blog

(YouTube link)

These festive robots were built from RoboBuilder kits and synchronized to some classic holiday tunes. OK, just pretend that those little squeaks and servo motor noises are jingle bells. -via Geeks Are Sexy

The Denver Post recently uncovered a collection of photographs taken by Durango, Colorado photographers William Pennington and Lisle Updike between 1915 and 1920. They were featured in the newspaper in 1974. From that article:

These pictures, bearing the stamp of their studio, were recently discovered in a long forgotten file of the Denver Post library.

The two young photographers supported themselves with their portrait business, but satisfied their artistic urges by traveling around the Four Corners area in a wagon taking pictures such as the ones appearing on this page.

“There was no money in taking pictures of Indians,” Updike, 84, said from his winter home in Phoenix, Arizona. His sons and grandsons now operate a chain of Updike studios in Utah and Arizona.

Updike died a couple of years after the original article appeared. The linked post features 16 of those prints. Link -via Cynical-C

(image credit: The Pennington Studio)

The annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade rolls through New York every year, but how much do you really know about the annual production? Today's Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss will test your memory ahead of the big event. I scored a miserable 20%! Surely you can do better. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/41371

Illustrator Christoph Niemann looks at the identification of leaves in a whole new way. See a collection of leaves from trees you never knew existed, like the Fast Forwood and the Alder Ego. Link -via Swiss Miss

(YouTube link)

A cat spruces up a fennec fox. -via YesButNoButYes

Mmmm, beaver! Bug Girl posted these beaver recipes from a 1960 pamphlet entitled Good Eating from Woods and Fields, which also includes instructions for cooking muskrat. Link -Thanks, ersatz soubriquet!

See more from the booklet in her Flickr stream.

British citizen and experienced sailor Laura Hughes and her friend John Cochrane were battling gale force winds off the Turkish coast when a rope got caught in her boat's propeller and killed the engine. She sent a Mayday signal and a boat responded, but the crew demanded 10,000 euros for their rescue -more money than Hughes had. So she jumped in to swim to shore. But she had some precious cargo to take with her -two dogs and their nine puppies who were born during the boat trip!

So, wearing a lifejacket, Miss Hughes jumped out of the boat, carrying the nine Rottweiler puppies 'African-style' by balancing the crate on her head and holding the side with one hand while swimming with the other.

Mr Cochrane and the two adult dogs also jumped off the boat and swam to the nearest beach at the Greek resort of Lalissos about 100 metres from their boat.When they got to the shore, exhausted, they were helped by German tourists from a beach hotel and members of the emergency services.

The British Embassy found Laura and John a hotel room for the night - and the puppies spent the night at a local Greek police station.

Link -via Arbroath

(image credit: KNSNEWS)

The folks who bring you the Merriam-Webster dictionary select their top words of the year not by how trendy or new they are, but by which words are the most looked up in their online dictionary. This year, nine of the top ten words are easily linked to big news stories. For example, the word people look up more than any other was "admonish", which had to do with Rep. Joe Wilson's interruption of president Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress in September.

Wilson's interruption wasn't exactly an act of admonishing, since that word (defined by the Visual Thesaurus as "warn strongly" or "take to task") usually implies a gentler, not so confrontational approach. Admonish made the news the following week when the House of Representatives voted on a resolution disapproving of Wilson's conduct. The resolution wasn't so strong as a rebuke or censure, so admonish fit the bill in many of the press descriptions.

Other words on the list include philanderer, pandemic, and rogue. Link -via Metafilter

(vimeo link) Some things are so obvious, it only took a quarter-century for someone to think of this. (via b3ta)