truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Researchers at the University of Calgary said in July that female mice in their study were not only sexually aroused by whiffs of male mouse pheromones but that the scent apparently made the females' brains grow larger.

Endangered! (1) Biologists who have been studying "Lonesome George," the sole survivor of a species of Galapagos Island tortoises, told Reuters News Service in July that they are skeptical he will ever mate, even though he may live another 100 years. After so many abortive attempts to pair him with a female (even having randy young male and female tortoises demonstrate mating for him), they say George remains totally uninterested. (2) And in Australia, a turtle species named in 1990 for now-deceased Steve Irwin is now thought to be growing endangered, according to an Australian Associated Press dispatch in August. The elseya irwini is one of the few turtles that respirates through its excretory opening.

Endangered! Biologists who have been studying "Lonesome George," the sole survivor of a species of Galapagos Island tortoises, told Reuters News Service in July that they are skeptical he will ever mate, even though he may live another 100 years. After so many abortive attempts to pair him with a female (even having randy young male and female tortoises demonstrate mating for him), they say George remains totally uninterested.

In June, the town council in Ledbury, England, turned down Timothy Fry's request to be allowed to exercise his two snakes, Rose and Buddy, in the town's park. He said he'd been letting them roam, leashless, for the last year with no complAin'ts, but admitted that the two (a corn snake and a rat snake) were getting stressed from all the attention they have been receiving.

Chief Deputy Terry Thompson was driving around Rayville, La., in June when he saw several cars stopped for an 8-foot snake in the road, with some motorists threatening to run over it or shoot it so that traffic could pass. Thompson stepped in to save it and then realized that he recognized the snake. It was, he remembered, the one-eyed boa constrictor that had turned up missing in March after owner Chad Foote had moved into town, and Foote said he was ecstatic to have it returned, considering the handsome price one has to pay for a snake with one eye.

A Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) researcher reported in June that his work reveals that cockroaches have memories and the ability to learn, in that they can be taught to salivate (upon exposure to a specific odor), just as Pavlov showed that dogs could be taught to salivate (upon hearing a bell).