They should stick to physics.

Firstly, there is no such word as "abbreved".

"Neanderthal" dates to 1860-1865, way after the use of the letter thorn had fallen by the wayside. It is also not French, it's German.

There are actually TWO words spelled "ye". The one means "thou" and is indeed pronounced "yee".

The other is the old spelling of "the", was originally pronounced "the" and now pronounced "yee" by almost everybody.

No pre-rinse. If the dishwasher does not get every last trace of dirt, of even dried-on food, then you are either not loading it correctly or you have not dosed the chemicals as required.

Unless you have a 30-year-old machine, dishwashers do their job marvellously well without needing any manual assistance.

"Malaysia Airlines have announced that they are to ban infants in first class." http://diytravelexpert.com/peace-vs-babies/

How come no airline has appealed to families with a "families-only" seating section. They would get more families travelling with them, and passengers not in that area could presumably be spared some of the hullabaloo. It might need a bit of sound-proofing though.

The fastest way to rehydrate if you are dehydrated is NOT to drink plain water. It is a mixture of salt, sugar and water. (It is known as Oral Redydration Therapy: ORT).

Similarly, most foods and beverages contain fluids to a greater or lesser extent and can be used to prevent dehydration. You probably never need to drink water.

That would have pleased W.C. Fields a great deal.

In line with previous comments, Turkey produces marvellous wines in Cappadocia. Greece has Retsina and Ouzo. South Africa does make wine but they also do good spirits and any alcoholic worth his salt will have heard of SA Breweries. Mozambique has a nice domestic beer. There is no shortage of alcohol for travellers in Dubai. Namibia is home to a wonderful brewery that even exports. Need we go on?

This should really perhaps be titled "The World according to a Very Ignorant Alcoholic who has neither Read Anything nor Travelled beyond his Home Town".

When all the comments are about the inaccurate facts then the cartoonist should know that the joke is spectacularly unfunny.

With the shuttle era over, the USA now has no operational capacity to put a human in orbit. The US will in fact be entirely dependent on Russia to convey people to the ISS.

So who really won the space race?

It looks a total wreck.

Xi Chen just made a wild guess, and got it wrong. Fingers go pruney in cold water too!

I have heard it said that the skin absorbs water slowly and after prolonged immersion this causes it to expand. Since it is then larger than the finger, it wrinkles. That sounds more feasible to me.

There is no scientific reason to support the notion that language started with many phonemes and gradually reduced to fewer. That is an assumption based on the belief that man originated in Africa and is therefore circular reasoning.

In evolutionary terms one would always expect that earlier languages would have fewest phonemes, and that with increasing sophistication, more phonemes would be added as necessary.

What has resulted in a gradual reduction in the number of phonemes in modern languages was the invention of writing.

If you exclude Egyptian, Afrikaans, Swahili and Arabic (the earliest written form for languages such as Yoruba), the first African language to develop writing was probably Tswana, where the first book, the Bible, was published in 1857. That is very recent in language terms.

Tswana has already lost one fricative and other phonemes current exist only for old words that are seldom-used, and for loan words from other languages. Modernisation has started.

Johan Fourie is a typically South African name. If he is a former South African and his mother is still living in that country then a lottery win might really have been what he needed to make it possible.

@ T Benson

The answer is yes, but the jets are virtual. That is the purpose of simulator training.

In the simulator they create all sorts of dire emergencies for the pilots. It can be harrowing. A pilot I once worked with described how he was shaken for hours after he "survived" a simulator session in which, after routine testing in which he had done particularly well, they threw the works at him. After an unusually high number of rare simultaneous failures and problems, he ended up averting a virtual crash by flying the simulated plane between airport buildings. It left him as distressed as he would have been if it had happened in an actual aircraft.

That's your disposable jet right there.

It is an early spell-checker. Here we see it correcting the spelling of the word "news", a task that it could easily do by Wednesday.

T: If you're not part of the solution 2x

Buy the kid a really, really nice teddy bear and send it to school with him. Keep using the Ziplocs. And explain that there are cruel people that make kids sad to try change what adults are doing through emotional blackmail.

The thesis was that nothing goes extinct, not that it is impossible to do it again even if you have a death wish. Technology can and does indeed go extinct.

The notion was not that it is impossible to replicate the technnologies but that they never cease to be used. Some things that once were widespread, could be replicated but have long ceased to be used are: using lead in wine as a sweetener, the use of woven asbestos table cloths, making and using radioactive toothpaste, and making ormolu. Nobody continues to produce them. They are extinct.

Some technologies are genuinely lost. For example, despite many theories, thus far nobody has replicated the technology that Stradivarius used to make his violins of incomparable tone. Lost. Extinct.

Ormolu

It was a technology for gilding bronze by painting artefacts with an amalgam of gold and mercury, then burning off the mercury. It tended to kill off the artisans.

It has not been used anywhere in the world since it was banned in France around 1830. The quality of the finish is said to be superior to any attempts to replicate it through other methods.

What's my prize?