Here’s an interesting study for those among us interested in adult education: Watching With Intent To Repeat Ignites Key Learning Area Of Brain. A snip:

As detailed in the Dec. 20 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, found that when a person watches someone else perform a task with the intention of later replicating the observed performance, motor areas of the brain are activated in a fashion similar to that with accompanies actual movement.

I haven’t looked into this in any great depth, but it seems like this info could be useful to those whose sessions involve teaching motor skills of some sort—from surgical techniques to cake decorating. (Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the pointer.)

Here are the top 100 April fools hoaxes, from the Swiss spaghetti harvest to the British postal address turnabout. I think my favorite is “planetary alignment decreases gravity:”

In 1976 the British astronomer Patrick Moore announced on BBC Radio 2 that at 9:47 AM a once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event was going to occur that listeners could experience in their very own homes. The planet Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, temporarily causing a gravitational alignment that would counteract and lessen the Earth’s own gravity. Moore told his listeners that if they jumped in the air at the exact moment that this planetary alignment occurred, they would experience a strange floating sensation. When 9:47 AM arrived, BBC2 began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners claiming to have felt the sensation. One woman even reported that she and her eleven friends had risen from their chairs and floated around the room.