It almost sounds like the realms of the Ignoble prize – measuring how fast people walk at different places and times, but actually this study is absolutely fascinating – for once confirming the sort of folk wisdom that so often is debunked by scientific measurement.

An experiment conducted in 32 cities has revealed that average walking speeds have increased by about 10 per cent since 1994….The steepest acceleration was found in Asian “tiger” countries such as China and Singapore, which have experienced particularly marked social and economic change.
Pedestrians in these nations walk between 20 and 30 per cent faster than they did in the early 1990s. Singapore has the quickest walkers in the world. London was the fastest-paced British city, but finished only 12th in the final league table, behind supposedly more laid-back cities such as Copenhagen (2nd) and Dublin (5th).

Of course it then raises lots of interesting questions of interpretation: is this a good or a bad thing? You could easily spin it either way.

Well, not quite, but I’m surprised this story hasn’t got more publicity:

Osiris, which is 150 light years from Earth and has the official title HD 209458b, was the first extra-solar world known to have an atmosphere, mainly composed of hydrogen. But its atmosphere was found to be boiling away into space.
In 2004, astronomers revealed that the planet’s outer atmosphere contained carbon and oxygen, thought to be swept up from the deeper levels by the flow of escaping hydrogen. The new discovery of water vapour emerged from measurements taken as Osiris passed directly in front of its parent star

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It seems about 3.3m years ago a hominid was too lazy to make his or her own bed and hopped into a handy gorilla’s one – probably after the gorilla had got out. And that was how the human race acquired what would be pubic lice.