• Monkeys in Japan showed off some pretty good dental hygiene habits. Here, they are seen teaching their young to floss.
• Researchers in California have claimed that they are “knocking at the door” of artificial life and that they will be able to complete a second genesis in five—okay, maybe ten—years.
• In good news for the environment, a wind-up eco-media player may put the battery life of the iPod to shame, while in bad news, space junk has struck again: Scientists have faced a real challenge in dealing with the excess debris floating around in space, and this week a one-centimeter piece of an old "payload assist motor" gave the crew of the International Space Station a close call. Flying objects are a real hazard in space, where they travel tens of thousands of miles per hour, but the crew took shelter in the Russian Soyuz capsule and is now fine—beyond the continuing menace of space junk.
• A blogger calls out physicists for allowing economists to take all the rap for disbursing poor or unreliable science, while these Stanford biologists rap about what makes us human.
