How Fast Do Thoughts Travel?

You're daydreaming about Antarctica while sitting outside in the hot sun when you look up and are blinded by the sun. Your attention shifts instantaneously from Antarctica to the sun. It takes light eight and a half minutes to make that journey.
But your thoughts don't actually travel through space. Instead, they come and go inside your head. Scientists are still figuring out how it works, but it's known that it depends on brain cells named neurons. They interact by sending electric pulses down their branching dendrites and axons.
Your thoughts travel up to 500 miles an hour, which is fast for a living system, but very slow compared to light.

Mysterious Flash From Jupiter

On June 3rd, an Australian astronomer saw a two-second long light flash from Jupiter on his telescope. A Philippines astronomer saw the same thing.
It is suspected that something big must've hit the planet for it to create a flash so bright for Earth to see it. Images taken on June 7th showed no signs of debris over the cloud tops, which meant the object didn't descend below the clouds and make an explosion as a fireball. Instead the flash is assumed to come from a giant meteor burning up above the cloud tops.

Bunnies Become Biofuel

Parks in Stockholm (the capital of Sweden) are being overrun with hungry rabbits. To keep the rabbits from destroying the parks, the city of Stockholm hires hunters to reduce the number of rabbits in the parks. The bodies of the rabbits, which can be as many as 6,000 a year, are frozen. And then they're moved to a heating plant, where they turn into fuel to heat Swedish homes.
A survey shows that while some Swedes are okay with using bunny bodies to heat their homes and think it's resourceful, others think this is not a good way to treat rabbits, to put it mildly.

Save the Ocean

The oceans are diminishing. Two-thirds of species in the northern Atlantic are being overfished. Some fish that used to be plentiful have been fished to almost extinction. Also, the gigantic trawling nets that sweep up everything in their path catch unwanted things. A quarter of the fish caught in nets are unwanted. Nets also entangle larger creatures, such as dolphins, drowning them.
Climate change is also affecting the ocean. Warmer waters damage or kill algae that fish feed on. There are then less algae-eating fish around, since some starve to death, which means less food for those animals that would usually eat them. The food chain is knocked off and the whole ecosystem suffers.

Lack of Sleep = Cold?

Studies show that poor sleep and susceptibility to colds go hand in hand. In a recent study, scientists followed 153 men and woman for two weeks, keeping track of their duration and quality of sleep. Then, during a five-day period, they exposed the subjects to cold viruses. It turned out that those who slept an average of fewer than seven hours a night were three times as likely to get sick than those who averaged at least eight hours.
It seems that sleep and immunity are tightly linked. Studies have shown that mammals that produce greater levels of white cells also require the most sleep. And researchers have shown that species that sleep more have more resistance against pathogens.

Monkey on Mars

Russia is going to send a cosmonaut (that's what they call astronauts. Yay, new vocabulary!) to Mars. But there's a problem. No one knows how the radiation exposure during a year-and-a-half-long flight would harm travelers. A monkey has volunteered to travel instead. At least, I hope so. It'd be cruel to force the monkey to do it.
The monkey will be taken care of by a robot. Is there going to be any kind of human or even sub-human on this journey? How come robots and monkeys are going to Mars before human?
Back to (monkey) business! The robot will feed the monkey and clean up after it. The humans will have to teach the monkey how to cooperate and work with the robot. Back to kindergarten!
I still think the monkey should get paid.

The Problem with Bottled Water

Producing, packaging and transporting a liter of bottled water requires between 1,100 and 2,000 times more energy on average than treating and delivering the same amount of tap water. But, the popularity of bottled water has rised. For example, in 2007, Americans bought more than 33 billion liters, a 70% increase since 2001. In fact, bottled water has become so popular in the United States, it outsells both milk and beer currently. Clouds beat cows!
The irony is that bottled water is sometimes little more than tap water, which costs very little and is much better regulated and more rigorously tested than bottled water. I know, right?
The oil used for just producing the plastic bottles annually could supply total U.S. demand for about 2 and a half days. That's 60 hours or 3,600 minutes or 216,000 seconds.
Next time you are holding a bottle of water, think before you drink (It'll also prevent you from spilling your water)!