Via Colony Worlds comes the news that Tom and Tina Sjogren, a dedicated pair of adventurers, have announced their intent to head to Mars in the year 2014. The Sjogrens are experienced and hardy types, having climbed Everest and visited the South Pole twice (under their own steam and unsupported), and have apparently made serious and detailed plans as to how they intend to go about this incredible undertaking. I’d love to see them succeed, but there are so many factors to overcome that it seems a long shot at best. But who knows? Maybe the molten core of Mars will have started to generate a magnetic field by then.

I know it’s wrong to feel vindicated by the results of cognitive research. But that doesn’t stop a little voice inside me cheering  the announcement that forgetfulness is actually a sign your brain is functioning correctly. However, I will stop short of making the fallacious logical leap of assuming that, because I am more forgetful than others, my brain must be functioning more correctly than average …

News just in from the soft sciences – monkeys can learn to calculate statistics. Insert a joke about the forward planning department of your favourite government or corporation here.

If there’s not a band with that as their name, I think we can rest assured that there shortly will be. It’s well established that various species of fungus can consume things that other lifeforms cannot (plastic, aviation fuel and so forth), but now it appears that certain species of fungus can not only survive in but thrive on the heavy radiation in the graphite rods of the defunct Chernobyl power plant. I’m not too shocked, myself – if fungus can survive in a three-week old cup of coffee, a damaged nuclear plant must be a picnic. [BeyondTheBeyond]

Although it’s nowhere near the uncanny valley, the CB2 robot developed by engineers from Osaka University looks pretty scary to me. Sure, it may have been designed to simulate the behaviour of a human toddler and offer insight into developmental child psychology and the human learning process, and that’s a fine and worthy cause. But it still looks very weird.