In the mechanical world - The highly anticipated launch of The Cosmos 1 spacecraft - which was to deploy solar sails intended to propel the craft with pressure from sunlight, a big step forward toward interstellar flight - met with disaster when a booster rocket failed. What a shame.

In the microscopic world - A very common, and generally harmless, virus has been found to fight cancer. A big benefit of this virus is that it is harmless to healthy cells but attacks and kills at least some forms of cancer quite effectively. Viruses have long been seen as a key to the future of medical and biological development but they can be hard to control and deadly in their own right. This particular virus needs the help of another virus to reproduce and to become an active agent. Almost as if it were designed to be a tool...

In the natural world - A pack of lions were found protecting a recently kidnapped an beaten 12 year old girl in Ethiopia. The finding of the girl with the lions has been corroborated by local officials and some reports say that the lions actually drove off the girls attackers (a group of men who were attempting to force her to marry one of them.) A local wildlife expert speculates that the lions were responding the girls sobs which may have sounded to them like the mewing of a lion cub.

Well, not exactly "she" but scientists have produced self-replicating robots. For now, these are simple, very basic robots that need access to pre-constructed parts in order to replicate. In the near future, they will be expanded for use in exploring deep space, deep sea and other long-term, hard to access areas. Not to mention the nanobots. I'd finish with a tongue-in-cheek technophobic warning, but our new robot overlords wouldn't get it.

I don’t think you'll find it on even the trendiest of menus but apparently German crows have developed a taste for frog livers. Interestingly, they may have developed a technique for extracting just their favorite morsel from a frog, often leaving the newly de-livered amphibians intact enough to live, now bloated and leaking organs, for several minutes.

While the gory scenes this phenomenon is leaving must be disturbing, and messy, I find the rapid spread of this very specific learned behavior fascinating. They have no formal communication system, and yet, there are already reports of similar happening in nearby Denmark. If one of these precise peckers crosses the Atlantic, things could get messy around here.