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Doctor Who meets Top Gear. With the BBC's blessing. :-)

(This is on YouTube where all the world can see. Beware one clip from the finale.)

Bric a Brac Tastic

Teach The Controversy tees. Heh.

Translucent Creatures

The Particle Zoo. Soft toys. (No Z-neutrinos, alas.)

The sun is more ordinary than it should be.

Animal Kingdom's Odd Couples

Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Earlier start to life on Earth? Fossilised stromatolites, containing Earth's oldest known life, turn out to contain hundreds of different species of microbes living in sophisticated harmony.

Crunch on way for natural therapies: "The Federal Government is investigating tougher disclosure measures for the $2 billion-a-year complementary medicines industry in the wake of findings that top-selling remedies are backed by scant evidence that they work."

Scientists have found DNA molecules in a meteorite that landed Down Under. Not quite as exciting as it sounds; what they actually found was uracil, one of the bases in RNA, and xanthine, a close relative of guanine, one of the bases in DNA. (And a close relative of caffeine, lol). But they're definitely extraterrestrial, not contaminants.