A big, scary step for science: the first synthetic life form.

China is suffering a wave of attacks of deranged men on kindergartens - reminds me of the high-school shootings in the U.S., minus the guns.

I've just learned about commonplacing - the act of taking down quotes, poems, pieces of news in a commonplace book, a kind of personal scrapbook. This was common in England and the U.K. in the 17th century, but somehow died off since. The first thing I thought when I read about these was: these are just like blogs! Wikipedia tells me this analogy has (of course) been pointed out before.