For five years now the ill and elderly in Japan and Europe have had adorable, furry, sensor-ridden robotic seals to speed recover and improve health. Two months ago PAROs arrived stateside and are gaining traction in nursing homes and hospitals across the country. At $6,000 a pop, they're not cheap, but they also don't smell, bite, require training, or cough up an unexpected hairball. Similar to that other four-letter robot, PARO has sensors that track everything from touch to light to posture and learns from human interaction. Stroke the thing and it remembers what action caused the positive feedback. Smack it, and it won't repeat the "bad" behavior which preceded the beatdown.

Why seals? "People don't have many interactions with them," explained a PARO robots spokesperson. "They won't be let down by any preconceptions they might have."

See the cutie in action, after the jump.

Odd looking? That’s an understatement. But the barrelye, better known as the spookfish, just got its claim to fame. What makes this skinny, sea creature so special? Just look into its eyes. Literally. The spookfish is the first vertebrate discovered to use mirrors for eyes. Instead of using lenses to focus light and create images, the spookfish utilizes reflective mirrors.

Are you feeling lucky? If you were born in December, January or February, maybe not. Economists from the University of Notre Dame found people born during winter months tend to be less healthy, less intelligent, less educated and lower paid compared with individuals born in spring, summer or fall.

Like a cowboy loosely holding the reins, Larry Weatherman steers up Deer Creek Road with his left hand on the wheel, his right arm ready at his side. His upper body rocks with the motion of the pickup as he navigates the dirt road’s gauntlet of potholes and rocks. Since his retirement from the Missoula County Sheriff’s Department in 2000, Weatherman has adopted the bushy white mustache and Stetson of a gentleman rancher.

Financial institutions aren't the only banks hurting these days. Brain banks—repositories for donated brains—are running low on fresh noggins for research, said a group of scientists from various institutions in the United Kingdom this week. Get past the ewww factor (remember nasty Halloween games and that creep Frankenstein?), and fresh brains are essential for researching neurological and psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer's, autism, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia.

Apparently, Rupert Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University in northern England, knows where to find a good party. Till took a second look, or rather, a second hear, at the 5,000-year-old Stonehenge and discovered that its huge stone slabs reflected sound perfectly, making the site the perfect place to listen to repetitive, trance-like music.

With about half of the United States’ workforce classified as “white collar”, a new study out of Canada is relevant food for thought-- but don’t think about it too much! The study, which examined calories consumed after participants completed various intellectually challenging activities, determined that test subjects ate more after finishing more strenuous intellectual activities than when they finished intellectual activities that were less demanding.

Chances are you've played Rock, Paper, Scissors, but how do you calculate your strategy, if you have one at all?

In Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, physicist Len Fisher points out that putting yourself in your opponent's mindset is a key to success in the game.

Darwin's visit to the Galapagos in 1835 missed finding a new species that has eluded generations of scientists until now – the "rosada" land iguana.

New to science, yes, but the iguana's lineage marks one of the oldest cases of divergence from other species on the Galapagos. Scientists were surprised to date the species' origin to more than five million years ago, before some of the islands had even formed.

Ah, New Year's. The time for spirited debauchery, reflection on the year gone by, and resolutions for the year to come. On New Year's Day, most people wake up determined (through the haze of their hang-overs) to do something different this year, whether it be losing weight, learning a new skill, or to quit biting their nails. That's admirable, but for the risk-takers and more impulsive among us, keeping a new year's resolution may be near impossible, and it's due to the dope—or lack, thereof.

The Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton’s voluptuous body shape and elongated head and neck, recorded in ancient depictions of the male ruler, have long perplexed historians. But now Irwin Braverman, a professor of dermatology and an expert on visual diagnosis at the Yale University School of Medicine, is offering a theory on the characteristics, which are not found in representations of other pharaohs: Akhenaton may have suffered from two genetic disorders that affect body shape.