WUV...TWUE WUV

Scientists discover true love goes the headline in the Times of London.

Brain scans have proved that a small number of couples can respond with as much passion after 20 years as most people exhibit only in the first flush of love.

The findings overturn the conventional view that love and sexual desire peak at the start of a relationship and then decline as the years pass.

Is it me or do the first and second paragraphs contradict each other? If it's only a small number of couples who are this lucky, then isn't the conventional view pretty much intact?

Would dearly like to see their findings cross-referenced with how much sleep these folks get. Her Awesomeness and I can be as oh-lord-get-a-room affectionate as anybody, but not after a week of little ones waking up at 1:30 in the morning with gastric issues.

14-YEAR-OLD GIRL DISCOVERS SUPERNOVA

Very cool:

Moore, a ninth-grader at Warwick Valley High, is believed to be the youngest person to identify a supernova, which is a little more impressive than your ability to find the Big and Little dippers on a clear summer night.

Moore can take astronomy next year, but she should probably teach it. "Maybe when I was four I realized there are things out there you have to explore or you're missing out," she said, surrounded by most of the 10 telescopes she keeps in her
backyard observatory. "I feel like I'm making a difference in the scientific community. That's really special."

Moore found her supernova as part of a research team led by Tim Puckett in Atlanta. Puckett has 28 people in five countries looking for subtle changes in images of the night sky taken by his telescopes. She started looking with her father, Robert, in April and spotted a dying star in September. The find has been confirmed by the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at Harvard, which named it the very uninspiring UGC 12682. Still, her dad's over the moon about it. He bought Caroline her first scope four years ago and built the observatory with a retractable roof.

Oh, man. I can barely hang a coat hook and this guy's building an observatory for his daughter. More cool stuff here, and if you're an über-astro-geek the particulars from Caltech are here.

PIGEONS ARE AS SMART AS 3-YEAR-OLDS

This much I suspected...

Japanese scientists from Keio University have found that pigeons have self-cognitive abilities higher than 3-year-old humans. They have 'trained pigeons to discriminate real-time self-image using mirrors as well as videotaped self-image, and proved that pigeons can recognize video images that reflect their movements as self-image.' Until recently, it was widely admitted that only humans and primates such as chimpanzees could recognize images of themselves. Now, researchers have found that dolphins or elephants also could do it. But these Japanese scientists have proven that pigeons also were able to do it -- and even discriminate paintings of Van Gogh from Chagall.

Well, heck - they fly around enough art museums, you'd think they'd pick it up sooner or later.

At least my kids don't leave fifty tons of sh*t on the Foreign Office roof.

BOTANICAL GARDENS: SOCIETY'S GREAT MENACE

I love it when smart people say fool things:

In a candid conversation with an audience here at the Aspen Environment Forum, eminent biologist/naturalist EO Wilson said soccer moms are killing off bio-education because they don’t let their children experience nature...In what he calls the “soccer mom syndrome” Wilson said the worst thing a parent can do for a child is to take him or her to a botanical garden where all the trees are marked and labeled. Instead, “Go to the seashore and give them a pail and bucket. Let them experience nature…and then come back and ask questions,” Wilson said.

Thanks, doc! This totally gets me out of taking the kids to the library, that horrible place where all the books are marked and labeled. Better to send them outside to experience nature by reading a candy wrapper some kid dropped on our lawn.

I will leave for others the deliciousness of an environmentalist telling people in Colorado to go to the seashore, regardless of how many Aspenites can simply hop their Gulfstreams back to Malibu to do just that.

DOUBLE THE MOMMIES, DOUBLE THE BABY-SHOWER SCHWAG?

One baby, one dad, two moms:

Ten human embryos each containing the DNA from one man and two women have been created in a project that within three years could lead to the first genetically altered babies being born in Britain.

The form of gene transplant proposed in Newcastle will be bitterly opposed by pro-life campaigners but offers the first realistic hope of an effective treatment for an entire class of serious genetic diseases.

And then comes the science, which is quite beyond me especially at this hour. The opportunities are limitless, and not just for lawyers, stand-up comics and talk-show blowhards.