Word: weirdness
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...fakery of the Weekly World News was built on the fear that comes from ignorance: in its pages other countries were woefully backward, nature was dangerous, outer space terrifying, weird-looking people scary. If we have to sacrifice Bat Boy on the altar of knowledge, then he's a small offering. Besides, he's totally freaky looking...
...mystery may have been solved, by a team of neuroscientists at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Researcher Thomas McHugh and several colleagues have uncovered a specific memory circuit in the brains of mice that is probably the cause of this weird sensation, which turns out to be a sort of memory-based analogue of an optical illusion. Although neuroscientists have realized for some time that memory is made up of many different components--long and short term, episodic (that is to say, memories of events) and fact based, and that it takes place in different parts...
...Toowoomba Mayor Thorley sees it the same way. Like the state, her town has explored several options to get more water to people, from tapping into natural underground aquifers to pumping water some 700 m up the mountainside. "If we're seeing such weird weather - if we're going to have to pump water all over Australia via huge pipelines - wouldn't it be wiser to find another way?" says Thorley. "It would be worth...
Then there are the hedge funds, unregulated investment firms that had been snapping up that private-equity debt, subprime mortgages and all sorts of other weird new securities. After several years of calm, fund blowups have become commonplace this summer--and because hedgies have lots of leeway in how they value their odd investments, there may be many more blowups in the wings that we don't know about...
...Stardust opens Aug. 10, starring Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert De Niro. Beowulf, written by Gaiman and directed by Robert Zemeckis, is coming in November. Next year Dakota Fanning will star in Coraline, based on Gaiman's children's book. Is he about to cross over from the weird world of cult fame to the equally weird but more lucrative world of actual, real-world, mainstream fame? "Oh, God," says Gaiman. "I hope...