Global warming... True or not, it seems every time you turn around there's another story on the news or in a magazine about how global warming is contributing to or causing some horrible something or other... In fact, it seems most everything is linked to global warming these days... And if you don't believe it, just ask Dr. John Brignell, a British engineering professor!

Dr Brignell maintains Numberwatch.co.uk, a web site devoted to monitoring the misuse of numbers in the media and politics... He's even written a couple of books on the subject (Sorry, wrong number! and The Epidemiologists: have they got scares for you!)...

And lately, he's been tracking global warming... Not with a thermometer, mind you, but with a web browser... He's compiled a list of over 600 things (and growing) either caused by or linked to global warming! Some are good, some are bad, and some are just ludicrous... They include:

• The melting and eventual loss of the snow and ice in the Alps
• The increase in snowfall near the Great Lakes
• An increase in the U.S death rate
• Fading fall foliage
• The collapse of Swedish gingerbread houses
• A shortage of maple syrup
• An increase in land suitable for agriculture
• The loss of agricultural land to deserts
• Teenage drinking
• and more!

So go check out the list... It's interesting when you see everything put together...

(And if you've seen a story he's missed, feel free to submit it and he's add it!)

Are you from the United States? Then there is a 1 in 25 chance your last name is Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis! The U.S Census Bureau has released its second ever list of frequently occurring surnames and these 7 topped the list, accounting for 4% of the entire population of the United States... Pretty good when you consider of 6 million last names were identified...

The full top 10 included:

• Smith - 2,376,206 people
• Johnson - 1,857,160 people
• Williams - 1,534,042 people
• Brown - 1,380,145 people
• Jones - 1,362,755 people
• Miller - 1,127,803 people
• Davis - 1,072,335 people
• Garcia - 858,289 people
• Rodriguez - 804,240 people
• Wilson - 783,051 people

And apparently the common names are pretty common... The top 275 names (out of 6 million, remember) accounted for the 26.2% of the last names! On the other end of the spectrum, the lease common 5.09 million last names only accounts for 2.5% of the population!

So where is your last name on the list? If there are at least 100 people with it (how big is your family?), you can find out where it ranks in the great scheme of things... Or, if you are of a more trivial bent, you can check out the "Technical Documentation" and find out why Mickey Mouse was accepted as a valid name...

There are certain characteristics that go along with being the first born child in a family... You're usually the first one to do stuff: first to go to school, first to learn to drive, first to go to college... And you're always going to have younger siblings either looking to emulate you or looking to surpass you...

Things get a little dicey when your younger sibling is your twin...

Things get even more confusing when your younger sibling is 26 minutes older than you are!

Which is something Peter Sullivan Cirioli is going to have to deal with... He was born at WakeMed Cary hospital in Cary, North Carolina, at 1:32 AM this last Sunday morning...

Allison Raye Cirioli was born 34 minutes later... But due to Daylight Savings Time - clocks were turned back an hour at 2AM this last Sunday - her official birth time is 1:06 AM!!!

"We just never even thought about it until after [Peter] was born and then we realized it was going to happen... It was really kind of amazing," mother Laura Cirioli said... But they aren't getting caught up in any debates over first born rights - they're just glad both kids are healthy and home... "We'll let them work that out between themselves," father Jason Cirioli said... "I don't want to get into the middle of it..."

There are two types of science: the kind that discovers a way to make the world a better place and the kind that makes you wonder what they were thinking when they did it... Tomorrow, Alex Boase shares his list of the 10 weirdest of the latter in this week's New Scientist...
"I started collecting examples of bizarre experiments years ago while in graduate school studying the history of science. I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating," Boase said...
"These experiments are not the work of cranks... All were performed by honest, hardworking scientists who were not prepared to accept common-sense explanations of how the world works... Sometimes such single-mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries... At other times it can end up closer to madness..."

So, what qualifies as weird and strange in the realm of scientific experiments?

Some examples:

• What happens to an Elephant on LSD? Researchers found out in 1962 when they shot up an elephant with 3000 times the maximum human dose... The elephant promptly keeled over and died... "It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD," the researchers concluded...
• Do aircraft passengers told they are about to die in crash make more mistakes on written tests? 10 unwitting soldiers in the 1960s got to be part of this one... Their plane started falling out of the sky and a steward gave them insurance forms and said they had to complete them before the crash! And the pilot's response when the last form was completed? "Just kidding about that emergency folks!"
• Is laughing spontaneous when a person is tickled? For lack of willing volunteers, psychologist Clarence Leuba had to do all his experiments on his two kids!
• Can people really sleep if their eyes are taped open and bright lights are aimed at them? In 1960, Ian Oswald tried to find out... Going all out, he also sent painful shocks into the volunteers' legs and blasted loud music at them... Still, the volunteers must have been pretty tired, because their EEG shows all of them fell asleep anyways...
• Can a corpse we brought back to life by putting it on a seesaw? Back in the 1930s, Robert Cornish tried to revive corpses by "stimulating" their blood through the up and down motion of a seesaw while injecting adrenalin and anti-coagulants...
• Just what will a male turkey mate with? Apparently anything with a head! Pennsylvania State University researchers used a lifelike model of a female turkey and kept removing pieces... Finally only the head remained... On a stick... And the male turkey was still interested...