C’mon lets do the twist: How owls turn their heads around 270 degrees [Article]

They are the only species that can turn their heads around 270 degrees.  Educate yourself on how owls do the twist without breaking their necks or severing their arteries. A couple of interesting videos in there too! What would you do if you could see behind you this way?

This space is yours too [Video]

In her final days as Commander of the International Space Station, Sunita Williams of NASA recorded an extensive tour of the orbital laboratory and downlinked the video on Nov. 18, just hours before she, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko and Flight Engineer Aki Hoshide of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency departed in their Soyuz TMA-05M spacecraft for a landing on the steppe of Kazakhstan. The tour includes scenes of each of the station’s modules and research facilities with a running narrative by Williams of the work that has taken place and which is ongoing aboard the orbital outpost.

Born to rule – the chasm between the rich and everyone else [article]

George Monibot, writing in the Guardian, expounds on one of the reasons why the rulers (politicians/ plutocrats) seem to make decisions almost entirely disconnected with the reality of the vast majority of who they rule. When the rich are born to rule, the results can be fatal. It has some interesting observations of the the impacts that elite private / boarding schools have on the impressionable young minds going through the system.

Should you be merciful towards robots? [Article]

More & more robots are getting into mainstream work, replacing humans at a fraction of the cost – an industrialist’s dream come true. They’re also becoming more human-like in their appearances, as Scott Adams points out, and asks the question: ‘Who has the right to kill a robot?’ But more importantly, as this other article about a 2007 research discovers, the way humans relate to ‘human-like’ machines is changing too – discover how