Wired has a simple summary article up on how Lithium Ion batteries can go bad. It sounds to my (mostly uninformed on this issue) ear like small manufacturing errors - the kind you might expect when you are trying to shave costs to the bone - are a real risk factor here.

Wired News:

After a week of wrangling, the International Astronomical Union decrees that Pluto does not meet the qualifications to be classified a planet. For the first time since 1930, there are eight planets in the solar system.

It's now classified (along with other small objects out that far) as a dwarf planet, because:

Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

Alas poor Pluto :)

This sounds way too alarmist to me:

"You get these contrails from the jets. The rate at which they're expanding in terms of their fractional cover of the stratosphere is so large that if predictions are right, in 40 years it won't be worth having telescopes on Earth anymore - it's that soon.

"You either give up your cheap trips to Majorca, or you give up astronomy. You can't do both."

Now, I'm hardly an astronomer, but - isn't light pollution as big a problem here? I know that I have a lot more trouble seeing the sky where I live now (suburban Maryland) than where I grew up in New York State.

Scientists have managed to make chickens with mutant genes (their wording, not mine) grow teeth. I want to see chicken lips.

The "Alien" series of movies was creepy, not least because of the way the larval aliens used humans as a womb. It turns out that such parasitic behavior is not unknown (or even rare) in the insect world - have a look at this story about a specific kind of wasp:

As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief paralysis caused by the first sting gives the wasp the luxury of time to deliver a more precise sting to the head.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use sensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

The roach is "owned" after that sting - the wasp leads it, like a dog on a leash, to a lair - which it seals the roach into. The effects of the sting are nothing short of astonishing:

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well. Seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative.

...

Ampulex does not want to kill cockroaches. It doesn't even want to paralyze them the way spiders and snakes do, since it is too small to drag a big paralyzed roach into its burrow. So instead it just delicately retools the roach's neural network to take away its motivation. Its venom does more than make roaches zombies. It also alters their metabolism, so that their intake of oxygen drops by a third.

Especially since this is actual behavior, not a Hollywood special effect. The scary part of the whole thing is the that the wasp manages to completely subvert the will of the roach. It loses any instinct for self preservation, and just waits patiently to be eaten alive. Absolutely terrifying, when you sit back and think about it.

If this kind of thing interests you, check out the book Parasite Rex - it looks like a good summary of the field. Hat tip Bob Congdon.