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Wooster Collective spotted this fun prank at Bristol Zoo where an informational placard about Homo Sapiens was installed outside the zoo’s cafe.

I just realized there aren’t that many pictures of yours truly on this site… so here’s one:

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An American organization claiming to defend the rights of mermaids is threatening to appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam, after its municipality offered a $1 million prize to whoever could provide proof for the existence of a mermaid off the northern city’s shores.

A letter received by the municipality over the weekend states that the organization, presenting itself as the Mermaid Medical Association in Brooklyn, New York, was shocked to hear about the prize offered by the city.

This offer, the organization said, “badly and outrageously damages the legendary mermaid legacy.”

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Around a dozen Japanese tourists a year need psychological treatment after visiting Paris as the reality of unfriendly locals and scruffy streets clashes with their expectations, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

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Already this year, Japan’s embassy in Paris has had to repatriate at least four visitors — including two women who believed their hotel room was being bugged and there was a plot against them.

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At 25-45mm in length, the gobies are so small and cryptic they are often invisible to the casual visitor – but they make up almost half of all the fish life on the reef, says ichthyologist Professor David Bellwood of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

‘These fish may be tiny, but they are very important. They are telling us that the world has changed, and in ways we do not understand. That we may not be able to manage things as well as we hoped,’ he says.

‘In 1998 there was a major coral bleaching event that affected corals across a huge area of the reef. After some years, quite a lot of the coral has recovered – and looks more or less as it once did.’

‘But the gobies have not come back. Something is not right if the fastest breeders of the reef are still missing. Overall, the coral fish fauna are still in a degraded state – after 30 generations.’

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Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city’s surveillance network has claimed.

The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.

In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers.

David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: “It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.”

He added: “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness.

“It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.

“The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV.”

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The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo. A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

It’s not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late ’90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.