I've had it with these $#&@?! dead snakes biting me
Farmer Danny Anderson, 53, must have thought he had things under control after using a shovel to hack the head off a snake that had slithered onto his farm in central Washington State. He couldn't possibly have predicted what happened next: The severed head did a "backflip almost" and bit his finger, the AP reports, sending Anderson to the hospital as his tongue swelled from venom. Actually, maybe he could have predicted this bizarre plot twist from straight out of Snakes on a Plane 2. At least five other men have received snakebites on their fingers from dead or decapitated snakes, according to a 1999 New England Journal of Medicine paper. The phenomenon may go even further back. As noted in the December 1999 SciAm, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in an 1820 letter to his wife Mary that "vipers kill, though dead." In fact, "decapitated snake heads are dangerous for between 20 and 60 minutes after removal from the body of the snake," Jeffrey Suchard of the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix told SciAm's own Steve Mirsky earlier that year. So remember: wait an hour before handling a dead snake. (AP)

Twister in Brooklyn
A tornado tore through downtown Brooklyn Wednesday night, the first twister to hit the borough since 1889 and only the sixth to touch down in New York City since 1974, Newsday reports. Conspiracy theorists immediately cried global warming. Climate researcher James Hansen told the blog Wired Science that individual weather events don't have single causes. But can global warming increase the tendency for bad storms, by giving them more heat to draw energy from? "There," Hansen says, "the answer seems to be yes." (Newsday; Wired Science)

Space teacher
Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off on Thursday on an 11-day mission to the International Space Station, carrying teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who trained and waited 22 years for a shot at space travel: Morgan, 55, served as backup for fellow space teacher Christa McAuliffe, who died when the ill-fated 1986 Challenger mission blew up 73 seconds after liftoff. Morgan has always insisted that McAuliffe "was, is and always will be our first teacher in space"—even though McAuliffe technically never reached space . "I'm just another teacher going in space and there are more to come," Morgan said. "People will be thinking of Christa and the Challenger crew and what they were trying to do, and that's a good thing." (New York Times; NASA preflight interview)

Mars Phoenix rises
In other space news, the Mars Phoenix lander blasted off last week on its nine-month journey. After a risky landing, the spacecraft is set to take up residence on the Red Planet's north pole, where it will dig into the arctic soil and ice for traces of water and the possibility of ETs. ( NASA)

… And this little (cloned) piggy
Japanese researchers say they have achieved a cloning first, er, fourth: they claim to have cloned a pig from a cloned clone's clone. (Got that?) The geneticists responsible for the fourth-generation clone, a male pig born at Tokyo's Meiji University in July, told the Associated Press it proves that multiple generations of clones are possible in mammals much larger than mice, which have already been multiply cloned. In other words, Attack of the Clones, meet Animal Farm… (AP)

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