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POPSThe Girls 'Sexualised' At Age Of Five Researcher Dr Eileen Zurbriggen said that girls as young at four are at risk. "The consequences of the sexualisation of girls in media today are very real and are likely to be a negative influence on girls' healthy development," she said. "As a society, we need to replace all these sexualised images with ones showing girls in positive settings. "The goal should be to deliver messages to all adolescents - boy and girls - that lead to healthy sexual development." Michele Elliot, of child protection charity Kidscape, said: "Bratz dolls are little sexualised creatures which give the wrong message to kids. "Let them be kids. We have got children of 12, 13 and 14 who are ashamed that they haven't had sex yet. They think sex is the be all and end all." A spokesman for Bratz said that children see the dolls as being pretty rather than sexy.
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POPSWhy kindness has become our forbidden pleasure? "What is to be done? Nothing, many would say. Human beings are innately selfish and that is that. Newspapers bombard us with scientific evidence to back up this pessimism. We read about greedy chimpanzees, selfish genes, ruthless mate-selection strategies, even about meerkats - those famously cooperative creatures - who instead of looking out for their fellows spend most of their time "watching their own backs". Richard Dawkins of "selfish gene" fame lays it on the line: "Human society based simply on the gene's law of universal ruthless selfishness would be a very nasty society in which to live. But unfortunately, however much we deplore something, this does not stop it being true ..." Yet Dawkins does not despair: "If you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity "
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POPSExquisite Butterflies I have always wanted to collect specimens of butterflies but simply don't have the heart to kill these perfect little jewels. (A couple of pictures are of moths and not butterflies)
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POPS'bizarre mix of mammal, bird and reptile, with very complex sexuality' The fact that the animal has five X and five Y chromosomes is "the weirdest thing about a very weird animal," said Ewan Birney, a co-author on the paper, based at the European Bioinformatics Institute, near Cambridge. "In theory it means there are 25 possible sexes, though in practice that doesn't happen."
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POPSThink Animals Don't Think Like Us? Think Again "By implication, a vast world of animal cognition exists out there, not just in African Grey parrots but in other creatures, too. It is a world largely untapped by science. Clearly, animals know more than we think, and think a great deal more than we know. That, essentially, was what Alex (and a growing number of research projects) taught us. He taught us that our vanity had blinded us to the true nature of minds, animal and human; that so much more is to be learned about animal minds than received doctrine allowed. No wonder Alex and I faced so much flak!" From Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence—and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process, by Irene Pepperberg.
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POPSThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Also Know As The Trash Vortex 
Sad Picture: No one to blame for this but ourselves. Four fifths of the plastic detritus floating over 2.5 million square miles of ocean surface arrives there from land-based run off: from stormwater, in other words: litter. Sadly - many people take the "out of sight, out of mind" approach. Plastic contamination in the world's oceans is worse than previously imagined and no amount of technology can clean it up. We are damned to a future of pollution by plastic. All succeeding generations will only see an ocean filled with trash. Net a piece of plastic, and you’ll find barnacles and small crabs clinging to it. Not a good thing for fish, birds, and mammals that mistake it for its natural food, such as eggs, jellyfish, or other sea creatures. Most of the plastic will eventually photo-degrade into small, dust-like particles to the point that it will be non-detectable to the human eye, but ingestible by sea mammals, birds, and fish—many of which we then consume ourselves.
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POPSAnimal senses humans don't have You might think you're smart, but none of your senses rival the keenest abilities in the animal world. Animals see in the dark, sniff prey miles away, and detect electrical output from muscle twitches in hidden meals. Read on, so you don't become one of those meals.<<
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POPSCan You Become a Creature of New Habits? “The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”
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POPS"Rats are more honest." "he started training giant pouched rats - an African species known for its large size, sunny disposition, and ultra-keen nostrils - to detect the faintest whiff of TNT and other explosives. Because the rats are too light to trigger the explosive, they are not harmed in the exercise; they simply signal the location of the explosive to a handler, who has it defused and removed."
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POPSBBC opens world's biggest online zoo more: Starting with 370 animals, including four octopuses and a solitary starfish, the databank of clips and still pictures will be reinforced on a daily basis. BBC staff are combing through hundreds of wildlife programmes, from spectaculars such as Planet Earth to regional TV news items, to create an unprecedented collection. Early stars in terms of hits online include Darwin's frog, a tiny resident of forests in Chile, which gives birth through the mouth of the male. The process is repeated in slow motion – another feature of the archive's ability to spy on Earth's wild creatures to an unprecedented extent.
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POPSNew clues on "The Great Dying" The lessons of the Permian-Triassic massacre are "directly applicable to the present," said John Isbell, a geoscientist at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. He said the world today is in danger of exceeding a CO2 "threshold" that could set off an environmental upheaval as great as the one 251 million years ago.
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POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
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