truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Convenience-store manager Carol Mendenhall told reporters in December that among the police citations she had recently received for a disturbance at her home in Dibble, Okla. (pop. 282), was one for allowing her four goats to have sex in her front yard in public view, which was illegal in Dibble. She admitted that her billy goat Adam had been attending to three females who were in heat at the same time. (The city council has since repealed the ordinance, following a campaign Mendenhall conducted.)

Convenience-store manager Carol Mendenhall told reporters in December that among the police citations she had recently received for a disturbance at her home in Dibble, Okla. (pop. 282), was one for allowing her four goats to have sex in her front yard in public view, which was illegal in Dibble. She admitted that her billy goat, Adam, had been attending to three females who were in heat at the same time. (The city council has since repealed the ordinance, following a campaign Mendenhall conducted.)

It is well-known that methane released by cattle forms a significant amount of the greenhouse gases in some countries, but getting people to abruptly drop beef from their diets might be unrealistic. However, a senior researcher for the Queensland (Australia) government, Athol Klieve, told Agence France-Presse in December that it would be possible to transplant the stomach bacteria of kangaroos into cows to reduce cattle's gas-passing proclivity to the much gentler level of kangaroos' (since the latter have much more efficient digestive systems).

We sleep with the snakes (meaning cobras), we eat with the snakes, we live with the snakes (but) we are not scared, said a 14-year-old girl in a village near Calcutta, India, to a Wall Street Journal reporter in November. Said a village leader, "Whenever I lie down in my bed, a cobra will just slide on top of me, without hurting me." In fact, more than 3,000 cobras live in one hamlet, mostly in peace, with few bite victims (though a cobra bite is often fatal because villagers initially trust the gods and spirit doctors to treat them). Cobras are so revered in the village that cobra bites are usually described as attacks by vipers or by "nonresident" cobras, based on a belief that local cobras are incapable of evil.

Science on the Cutting Edge: To learn how cockroaches socialize, a research team from Free University of Brussels created tiny robots programmed to act like cockroaches, doused them with the proper pheromones, and set them free within crowds of cockroaches to see if they could influence behavior. While some of the robots coaxed real cockroaches to follow them into an unshaded area (away from a dark area that most normally prefer), nearly half of the robots, despite programming, fell under the "spell" of the real ones and headed for the darkness.

To learn how cockroaches socialize, a research team from Free University of Brussels created tiny robots programmed to act like cockroaches, doused them with the proper pheromones, and set them free within crowds of cockroaches to see if they could influence behavior. While some of the robots coaxed real cockroaches to follow them into an unshaded area (away from a dark area that most normally prefer), nearly half of the robots, despite programming, fell under the "spell" of the real ones and headed for the darkness.