Science Friday – bacterial poets’ society, flying cats, and robot spiders.

Things you won't see at the dead zoo

The Telegraph have a nice slideshow of a Victorian collection of curios and impossibilities that went up for auction last week.  Did you score the winged kitten, the 'Siamese' sheep, or the web-footed saber-toothed flying monkey?? (via @pixievondust). And remember, our own Dead zoo reopens on the 29th!

A trip down scientific memory lane

For anyone who likes old maps, antiquated diagrams, old medical images, and hand-drawn astronomical charts, the "Pictures of Science: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration" compiled by the New York Public Library is sure to please. The blog thumbnail image is a Dali-esque hand drawing of sunspots: http://short.ie/wudgxn .

Join our book club!

You've finished The Picture of Dorian Gray, and you're hankering for a new book?  Pick up a copy of "How Many Friends Does One Person Need?" at our bookshop.  you've got a week from today to read it, and then meet the author Robin Dunbar on April 30th at PRISM, the Science Gallery book club.

If you'd rather read a bacterium than a book...

Well, somebody's done it.  In what could quickly become a game of one-upmanship, Christian Bok is going to encode his poem "directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans."  Who'd have thought a double-degree in microbiology and literature could be so useful??

Your Solar System, Your Call

Popular Science have a Gallery of the "First crowdsourced images of Mars."  Some striking images "selected by Earthlings" like you and me.

What brain drain?

So-called 'brain games' are probably as effective at increasing your IQ as playing Super Mario Bros.  Which either means they're pretty useless, or a lot of us (you know who you are) should have three doctorates already.

If you really want to give the old brain a workout, try getting Android running on an iPhone, or understanding the new changes to Facebook's privacy policy.

Lastly, robot spiders.

Are awesome.