Introducing: Gordon - part robot, part rodent (and you thought New York rats were bad). Technically, it’s Gordons (plural) as the artificially grown rat brains that power the robot are short-lived and frequently swapped. “It’s quite funny — you get differences between the brains” explains Professor Kevin Warwick (aka Davros), “one is a bit boisterous and active, while we know another is not going to do what we want it to.”

Just what we need a Cyborg with multiple-personality disorder.

L7 World was able to obtain an exclusive look at Gordon in action (video right). He can’t do much yet, he mostly just avoids running into walls with about an 80% success rate, but scientists say he’s still learning and should be killing all the humans in no-time.

The legislation was spearheaded by the Great Apes Project (GAP), which believes (among other things) apes aka “community of equals” should enjoy the right to due process including “the right to appeal, either directly or, if they lack the relevant capacity, through an advocate, to a judicial tribunal.”

You show me a monkey (And yes I know apes are primates, not monkeys, I’m intenionally being speciesist), show me one that can “directly appeal” its case in court and… well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. And if monkeys really are equals as GAP claims, then how far behind can inter-species marriages be? Well in the immortal words of Charlton Heston, keep “your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!”

According to Sen. Kemp Hannon the answer is simple: flush them down the toilet! Hannon sponsored legislation affectionately dubbed “Hannibal Lecter’s bill” that would make alkaline hydrolysis, a process in which deceased bodies are dissolved with lye, available to the public in New York state. The result is an environmentally-friendly brown sludge that can safely be flushed down the drain. And you thought the toilet was just for dead goldfish!

Beyond that the article contains little in the way of science. Instead it outright attacks men, touting this “future without men” as having no war or crime. The entire 2nd half of the article explores how great and normal lesbian couples are.

First off regardless of the truth behind the science this article is clearly written as gay propaganda. But more importantly, what if I wrote an article about the extinction of the black man and went on about how great it would be. After all, in the same way the prison population would drop if all the men died, it would also significantly drop if all the black men died.

Back to the real science, researchers at the MIT-affiliated Whitehead Institute already found that, in the six million years since humankind diverged from chimps, not a single gene has been lost. Moreover, look around. There are male animals that have been around a lot longer than us, crocodiles for instance. In other words, we ain’t going anyway haters!

Somewhere out there a teardrop is running down the face of a Martian.

Researchers at Exeter University asked 740 first-time pregnant women to provide records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy. Those with the highest energy intakes at conception produced sons 56% of the time, but those with low energy intake had sons only 46% of the time.

Dr Fiona Mathews of the Exeter’s School of Biosciences attributes this to the evolutionary drive to produce descendants, explaining “Potentially, males of most species can father more offspring than females, but this can be strongly influenced by the size or social status of the male, with poor quality males failing to breed at all. Females, on the other hand, reproduce more consistently. If a mother has plentiful resources then it can make sense to invest in producing a son because he is likely to produce more grandchildren than would a daughter. However, in leaner times having a daughter is a safer bet.”

It just goes to show you that if you want your kids to grow up big and strong, you’d better eat your Wheaties!

If you have any doubts to the voyeuristic nature of these so-called medical marvels, you need only browse the ABC News website where they have assembled these sad stories into a modern day sideshow (link). The photos are clearly picked for their shock value. And you won’t find any mundane medical marvels like Lance Armstrong with his super-sized heart (link) only, dare I say it, freaks.

But don’t disconnect your modem just yet. The grid won’t go online until the summer and when it does it’ll be busy recording the 56 million CDs worth of data generated from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe.

If and when it does disseminate down to the public, Ian Bird (project leader for CERN’s high-speed computing project) believes “It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere.” Just imagine, one day you’ll explain to your grandchildren how you watched a little hourglass while pages loaded! Until then take a cue from the Slowskys and smell the roses (video right).
 

But don’t worry the children are in good hands… er clamps. In addition to conversation skills rivaling those of George Bush, robo-sitter is also educational (i.e. it beams advertisements from its eyes). It is able to recognize each meatbag by a special computerized badge-necklace.

I give robo-sitter 6 months tops before an unruly kid sticks his badge on some old lady and hilarity ensues.

Consequently, those with higher testosterone levels (i.e. men) tend to perform better at spatial tasks. While those with lower levels (i.e. women) tend to have better verbal skills (the better to nag you with).

Of course when it comes to measuring masculinity, counting solely on your digits just doesn’t add up. For a true measure we need to examine the brain. Luckily, there’s a simple online quiz over at BBC.co.uk (link) that’ll tell you just how manly (or girly) you are!