A German student created a major traffic jam in Bavaria after making a rude gesture at a group of Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang members, hurling a puppy at them and then escaping on a stolen bulldozer.

From honest-to-god Reuters by way of Tyler Cowen.

Now, I’m no expert on Babylonian mythology, and some of my information on this is a bit fragmented and sketchy, but apparently there was a myth in which a lot of Mesopotamian law and culture had been handed down by anthropomorphic fish-people before the Flood, after which the fish presumably became less talkative. In commemoration of this legendary past, Babylonian and Assyrian priests and scholars (on at least certain occasions) supposedly wore actual fish costumes. They wore a big fish-head miter and robes with scales and fins. At least, that’s the story I’m putting together from a brief reference in this episode of In Our Time and this JSTOR article.

Now, if anyone has any other reputable information about fish-dressed Babylonian scholars — or decent access to JSTOR, at least — I’d be thrilled to hear about it. This is the kind of bizarre history I like best. I’ve also never been so disappointed with modern academic regalia.

I was originally going to post some articles about Kyrgyzstan or Thomas de Quincey but I decided that watching dogs play in the snow is more important.

…Wilson and Kenway Louie described the behavior of rats that had been trained to run on a circular track. As expected, running on the track generated a distinct pattern of neural firing in the rat hippocampus, a brain area essential for the formation of long-term memory…

… as before, Wilson kept the electrodes in place while the rats drifted off to sleep… The scientists examined 45 dreams and found that 20 of the dreams repeated the exact same patterns of brain activity exhibited while running in a circle. In fact, the correlation between the dream and the reality was so close that Wilson could predict the exact position of the rodent on the track while it was asleep.

I’m sure you want to read Jonah Lehrer’s article about dreaming.

Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist who specializes in building artificial animals.

By now you’ve probably heard about the orca that drowned his trainer a few days ago. What you may not have heard is that Tilikum is a serial killer whale.

He was one of three killer whales blamed for the 1991 drowning of a trainer while he performed at the now-defunct Sealand of the Pacific in British Columbia. In 1999, the dead body of a naked man was found lying across Tilikum’s back at SeaWorld Orlando.

A team of Canadian researchers got a bunch of Central American fruit bats drunk and measured how often they crashed. I love science.

The flying mammals were placed in a closed obstacle course on the forest floor. “It’s like walking a straight line,” Fenton quipped, referring to a common test given to suspected drunk drivers by police – except to succeed, the bats had to maneuver around hanging plastic chains without crashing.

The team also recorded the bats’ echolocation calls to see if they’d “slur their words,” Fenton said.

The science-y part of this is that despite being colossally sloshed the bats actually displayed almost no impairment. The researchers theorized that this resulted from the bats’ regular ingestion of fermented fruit. However, it’s important to note that other drunk bat studies have yielded different results:

… a previous study in Israel had shown that drunk Egyptian fruit bats crashed more frequently in experiments than the New World bats did, Fenton said.

In the depths of the Indian Ocean lies some sweet science. The Crysomallon squamiferum snail takes iron sulfide from the water and uses it to build a metal shell. Better yet, it repels intruders with nanotechnology* – apparently the shell fractures in such a way as to grind down the predator’s weapon. Read the full article.

* Well, kinda. It sounds pretty cool, though.

When drawing up animal cruelty legislation, most countries apply extra protections to vertebrates, since they usually have more complex nervous systems than invertebrates. Cephalopods are an exception:

In the UK, cephalopods such as octopuses are regarded as honorary vertebrates under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and other cruelty to animals legislation, extending to them protections not normally afforded to invertebrates.

- Wikipedia

Which makes sense, since they’re intelligent enough to open screw-top jars, learn tricks, and of course armor themselves with coconut shells.

My pyromaniacal readers will no doubt be thrilled to hear that the Gävle goat has once again been reduced to cinders.

Gavle city spokeswoman Anna Ostman said someone set fire to the 43-foot-high (13-meter-high) creature around 3 a.m. local time. Only a charred wooden skeleton of the traditional Swedish Christmas symbol remained on Wednesday morning.

“It feels very sad,” Ostman said. “We had really hoped that he would survive Christmas and New Year’s.”

Vandals have burned down the goat 24 times since it was first set up in Gavle in 1966 to mark the holiday season. It has also been smashed several times, run over by a car and had its legs cut off.