Speculative fiction has produced many great works of literature. Even a partial list of SF's canonical works could fill many blogposts. It would be difficult to talk seriously about the last century of literature without considering HG Wells, or George Orwell, or JG Ballard at the very least. And of the writers working today, how many owe something to the works of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut or Philip K Dick? In fact, the number of SF authors being retrospectively rolled in to the literary canon seems to grow exponentially year on year.

“There’s a shop in a small village in rural Scotland which still sells boxes of goods marked with pre-decimal prices which may well have been placed there 80 years ago.
“This treasure trove of a hardware store sells new products too. But its shelves, exterior haven’t changed for years; its contents forgotten, dust-covered and unusual, branded with the names of companies long since out of business.

TheChapel. A short film. (HDR timelapse)
Watch it in HD if you can...

Up to 17 percent of people with Parkinson's disease who take dopamine agonists exhibit an impulse control disorder, according to a 2010 study published in the Archives of Neurology.

Up and down Detroit’s streets, buildings stand abandoned and in ruin. French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre set out to document the decline of an American city. Their book “The Ruins of Detroit“, a document of decaying buildings frozen in time, was published in December 2010.

Maria Shiver & Arnold Schwarzenegger ceramic vase. Handmade.
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Few would choose to rent an apartment where a previous occupant had taken their own life. So a death is frequently followed by a demand for money.
"There are a lot of them," says Sachiko Tanaka who set up a support group for the families of suicides after her own son died.
"Mostly it's compensation for loss of rent for flats. The biggest was 120m yen (900,000 UKS/1.45 million USD). The claim was that the entire apartment building was worthless because one person committed suicide there. So they have to pay to rebuild it."
Many families are also required to pay for expensive purification rituals.

The tests, called single nucleotide polymorphism-based arrays, allow doctors to scan a child's genome for extra or missing copies of genes that could explain their disability.
But they can also show large, identical chunks of DNA that a child might have inherited from two closely related relatives, such as a father and daughter, raising social and legal issues that institutions and the scientific community must address.

THE best man at a wedding was left battered and bloodied after he was hit in the head by a fast-moving dildo.

The flying phallus left Darwin architect Jure Skumavc, 31, nursing a split forehead.

Mr Skumavc said he was injured by the bullet-shaped, pink, sex toy - measuring about 12cm in length - at a bucks party to farewell friend's Peter Rolih's bachelorhood.

Mr Skumavc was still sporting a scar on his forehead at Mr Rolih's wedding nearly three weeks after being dinged by the artificial dong. The darting dildo drama unfolded on December 28 in a rented two-bedroom unit in Brisbane.

Mr Skumavc said about eight other friends joined Mr Rolih for the party.

He said a scantily clad exotic dancer appeared after awhile and was soon performing her party trick: shooting dildos at the guests.

...This means that huge amounts of CO2 can be dissolved in large, deep lakes. Also, CO2 dissolves more readily in cooler water, such as that at the bottom of a lake. A small rise in water temperature can lead to the release of a large amount of CO2.

Once the lake is saturated with CO2 [from nearby volcanic activity], it is very unstable. A trigger is all that is needed to set off an eruption. In the case of the 1986 eruption at Lake Nyos, landslides were the suspected triggers, but an actual volcanic eruption, an earthquake, or even wind and rain storms are other possible triggers[...] Bubbles start forming and the water is lifted even higher in the lake (buoyancy), where even more of the CO2 comes out of solution. This process forms a column of gas. At this point the water at the bottom of this column is pulled up by suction, and it too loses its CO2 in a runaway process. This eruption pours CO2 into the air and can also displace water to form a tsunami.

[...]At Lake Nyos, the gas cloud descended from the lake into a nearby village where it settled, killing nearly everyone. In this eruption, some people as far as 25 km (15.5 miles) from the lake died

French police say they have arrested a 63-year-old woman who was leading her 40-year-old companion along a busy shopping street by a leash attached to his exposed penis.

Bugorski was a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino. Specifically he worked with the Soviet particle accelerator the synchrotron U-70. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment. As he was leaning over the piece of equipment he stuck his head through the part of the accelerator that the proton beam was running through. Supposedly, he saw a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns” at this point. Interestingly, he did not feel any pain when this happened.

Well, there's two sides to every story, or to quote a less banal maxim, history is written by the winners. That's the philosophy behind "The Last Ringbearer," a novel set during and after the end of the War of the Ring (the climactic battle at the end of "The Lord of the Rings") and told from the point of view of the losers. The novel was written by Kirill Yeskov, a Russian paleontologist, and published to acclaim in his homeland in 1999. Translations of the book have also appeared in other European nations, but fear of the vigilant and litigious Tolkien estate has heretofore prevented its publication in English.

Newspaper boxes in downtown Seattle were hijacked this week, The Slog reports, with display copies of The Seattle Times replaced to bear a new lead story, headlined "'We're killing everybody we can,' Seattle police declare." While The Stranger offers little context, the city's police have been involved in a series of controversies, including -- probably most prominently -- the Aug. 30, 2010, killing of a homeless wood carver. Police officer Ian Birk shot well-known carver John Williams after he told Williams three times to drop his whittling knife; Williams was partially deaf.