truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

In May, NASA sought subjects for a study into the effects of microgravity on the human body and offered each participant $17,000 to lie in bed for 90 straight days.

His countrymen are too polite, wrote French doctor Frederic Saldmann in his new book (translated as "Spring Cleaning") and can improve their health by uninhibitedly embracing their bodily functions that he said too many Frenchmen suppress. According to a May dispatch from Paris in London's Daily Telegraph, Saldmann wrote that the intestines, stomach and esophagus benefit if gas is expelled promptly and pores freely excrete toxins. In fact, he wrote, doing away with antiperspirants also facilitates "a certain number of messages that are potentially very attractive to the opposite sex."

Last year News of the Weird reported on an organic art project, "Victimless Leather," in which artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr attempted to grow embryonic stem cells of a species onto an artificial platform, in this case creating leather from mouse cells without the need to kill cows. However, in the latest demonstration of the project, at New York City's Museum of Modern Art this spring, the exhibit apparently grew so rapidly that it overwhelmed the space available, and curator Paola Antonelli said she was forced to kill the organism. She told the Art Newspaper that it was a difficult decision. "I've always been pro-choice, and all of a sudden I'm here not sleeping at night about killing a coat."

Worth Every Penny: At an April auction in Beijing, artist Liu Xiaodong's large (8 feet by 30 feet) oil pAin'ting, part of his Three Gorges series, brought the equivalent of about $8 million. The work, "Breeding Ground No. 1," depicts 11 men in their underwear playing cards.

Art is no longer just a pAin'ting on the wall, said the curator of the Museum of Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, Israel, in April. "Art is life; life is art." He gave that as an explanation for why he had accepted, as a live exhibit, seven young people from Berlin whose art is merely to live in the museum for three weeks with lice on their heads. The artists denied they intended a Holocaust expression based on Nazis' references to Jews as "parasites."

Last year, Montreal, Quebec, artist Michel de Broin created, as art, the hollowed-out shell of an old Buick powered only by a four-seater bicycle (with hand brakes, or, failing them, Fred Flintstone-type brakes). Nonetheless, when a group took the car out for a spin last October, an overzealous officer ticketed them for "driving" an unsafe "car," but in April, after a daylong court hearing, the charges were dropped.