Friday December 13, 2013  "What's this tickertape thing? Doesn't everybody see spoken words printed out in front of them?"

I keep learning that people often don't know either how differently their minds work from everyone else's, or how similarly they work.

***From Twitter:
trendwatching.com ‏@trendwatching 11 of the world's 20 fastest-growing countries are in sub-Saharan Africa http://buff.ly/1dpkK9u  #2014trends #FABA

***From file770.com:

(1) Now we know – The Green Slime is really black. And it’s living inside the Chernobyl reactor!

    Like out of some B-grade sci fi movie, a robot sent into the [Chernobyl] reactor discovered a thick coat of black slime growing on the walls. Since it is highly radioactive in there, scientists didn’t expect to find anything living, let alone thriving. The robot was instructed to obtain samples of the slime, which it did, and upon examination…the slime was even more amazing than was thought at first glance.

    This slime, a collection of several fungi actually, was more than just surviving in a radioactive environment, it was actually using gamma radiation as a food source. Samples of these fungi grew significantly faster when exposed to gamma radiation at 500 times the normal background radiation level. The fungi appear to use melanin, a chemical found in human skin as well, in the same fashion as plants use chlorophyll. That is to say, the melanin molecule gets struck by a gamma ray and its chemistry is altered. This is an amazing discovery, no one had even suspected that something like this was possible.