“I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff.”

Apolinario Chile Pixtun, a Mayan Indian elder, says there is no truth to rumours that the Mayan calendar predicts an apocalypse on 21 December, 2012 (AP).

“Once hospitals have made that multimillion dollar commitment of buying a robot, they want to market it. Patients intuitively perceive minimally-invasive procedures to be better because of the new technology and the wow factor that goes into it.’’

Jim Hu, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the US, comments on his study suggesting that robot-assisted prostate cancer surgery might produce worse outcomes than traditional surgery (Boston Globe).

“Look at all the paper and trees, he said, that could have been saved if people had not had to write or type out those slashes on paper over the years — not to mention the human labor and time spent typing those two keystrokes countless millions of times in browser address boxes.”

The New York Times notes that Tim Berners-Lee wishes he’d left the // out of web addresses.

“It must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”

Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, outlines the intriguing theory that the LHC is being sabotaged by a time travelling Higgs Boson (NY Times).