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Nathan Rothschild made a killing with help from a pigeon bringing news of Wellington's victory over Napoleon at Waterloo. Traders today use algorithms and high-speed networks to respond quickly to market-mov­ing news.

Sea gliders are small unmanned vessels which are now cruising the briny by the hundred. Gliders are also quiet — so quiet that, as one researcher puts it, you can use them "to hear a fish fart". In 2009 a glider called Scarlet Knight, operated by Rutgers Universi­ty, in New Jersey, crossed the Atlantic on a single battery charge, though it took seven months to do so.

Software developed by Probayes, a firm based near Grenoble, in France, identifies and then steers clear of drivers who are angry, drowsy, tipsy or aggressive. Upset drivers tend to speed up and brake quickly.

In December last year Newt Gingrich, then a candidate for the Re­publican presidential nomination in America, said Palestine had textbooks "that say, if there are 13 Jews and nine Jews are killed, how many Jews are left?"... In Afghan refugee camps in the 1980s, children were confronted with mathematical problems like this: "One group of mujahideen attack 50 Russian soldiers. In that at­tack 20 Russians were killed. How many Russians fled?"

According to Joseph Henrich and his colleagues at the University of Bri­tish Columbia, most undergraduates are WEIRD. Those who teach them might well agree. But Dr Henrich did not intend the term as an insult when he popularised it in a paper published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2010. Instead, he was proposing an acronym: Western, Edu­cated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic.

Bronze is copper to which tin has been added; when zinc is added instead it makes brass.

An Ig Nobel was won by a group of neuroscientists who had put a dead salmon in a brain scanner and showed it some pictures. They demonstrat­ed something that looked a lot like electrical activity in the fish's brain.

Commuting by car allowed suburbs to spread, making fortunes for prescient housebuilders and landowners. Roadbuilding be­came a far bigger business, whereas blacksmiths, farriers and buggy-whip makers faded away as America's horse and mule population fell from 26m in 1915 to 3m in 1960. Now another re­volution on wheels is on the horizon: the driverless car.

Just as nobody could have predicted the impact of the steam engine in 1750—or the printing press in 1450, or the transistor in 1950 — it is impos­sible to foresee the long-term impact of 3D printing. But the technology is coming, and it is likely to disrupt every field it touches.

Lawrence Bonassar and Jason Spector of Cornell University scanned the ear of a five-year-old girl. Using that image, they print­ed a mould. They then injected the mould with rat collagen, which acted as a scaffold, and millions of cartilage cells from calves. After allowing the result to grow for a few days, they implanted it under the skin on a rat's back and left the cells to grow for three months. This produced a fair facsimile of an ear, the same size and shape as the original.

As an astronomer I scratched my head over a letter in which a reader suggested a mnemonic using your hands for distinguishing between a waxing and waning moon. He did this to point out your apparent incor­rect caption of a waxing moon in Rio de Janeiro. Unfortunately, his mne­monic would only work in the northern hemisphere, where the moon is observed in the southern sky with the right side of the moon sunward during the waxing phase and the left side sunward during the waning phase.

A green pixel on a satellite image doesn't tell you whether it's a park or a private garden.

In 1935 Erwin Schrodinger who was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, imagined putting a cat, a flask of Prussic acid, a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, an electric relay and a hammer in a sealed box. If the atom decays, the Geiger counter detects the radiation and sends a signal that trips the relay, which releases the hammer, which smashes the flask and poisons the cat.

Scientists should be on tap, not on top.

Researchers have long debated whether the apes fight for land, or for fe­males. One lesson, which may surprise cynics, is that humans are more peaceful than chimps.

Einstein mused, "The eternal mystery of the world is its compre- hensibility," and "the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."

Even at the speed of light, the trip from Earth to Mars and back can be as long as 44 minutes.

At 23:28 Greenwich Mean Time on November 8th an asteroid by the name of 2005-YU 55 whizzed within 324,600km (201,700 miles) of Earth which is an astronomical hair's breadth.

Creativity depends on serendipity as much as planning: Pixar itself started life making computer parts and only dabbled in animation as a sideline.

But why blow a scientist up ostentatiously in the morning instead of removing him quietly at night?

The Taliban have always said that the foreigners have the watches, but they have the time.