science

ONCE you know what it is, this apparently innocuous picture of a blob assumes a terrible gravity. It is an adult human brain that is entirely smooth – free of the ridges and folds so characteristic of our species' most complex organ.
We can only imagine what life was like for this person. He or she was a resident of what is now North Texas State Hospital, a mental health facility, and died there in 1970, but that's all we know. While the jar containing the brain is labelled with a reference number, the microfilm containing the patient's medical records has been lost.

Behold the glory that is the first rainbow image obtained from Venus. This rainbow is a type of glory, formed by light passing through cloud droplets. Glories are formed when light bounces off spherical cloud particles in the same direction from which it came, creating a ring of light only visible if you (or a spacecraft) are directly between the center of the glory and the sun. That's what happened here--the image below was captured by the European Space Agency's Venus Express...

"A full glory has never been seen before outside of the terrestrial environment," Wojciech Markiewicz, at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research...

Jump forward to 2013, when last month Italian surgeon Sergio Canavero said that we have at last figured out that issue of connecting the spinal cord. The head transplant is now feasible, said Canavero, and he has a project called HEAVEN that's going to do it.

Now they want back? Make up your mind!