There are two theories as to how the brain develops its ability to predict people's actions.

One, "theory theory", argued that it was due to logical processes. But the other, "simulation theory", is the idea that we put ourselves in the shoes of other people to guess what they will do.

This means we will use the same area of the brain when predicting others' actions as when we plan our own - and this is what the Dutch scientists have found.

They scanned people's brains under two conditions - both while they were planning actions and while they were predicting the actions of another person - and found the same area of the brain lit up under both.

Texas: University of Texas of the Permian Basin officials will find out by the middle of this week if it will be home to a replica of Stonehenge.
Pending approval by the University of Texas at Austin's board of regents, a group of private investors want to build a close-to-life-size replica of the thousands-of-years-old megalithic site near West Amesbury, England.

"It was a pipe dream that a couple of us had, and to think it actually might happen is so incredible," said Chris Stanley, chairman of UTPB's humanities and fine arts department. Dick Gillham, Permian Basin Stonehenge coordinator, said if the UT board approves the construction, he estimates completion by June 30.

New Zealand: After the team finished surveying, it took months to fence, excavate and level the site. Late February's torrential rains in Wairarapa, in the southern half of the North Island of New Zealand, didn't help. The ditch kept collapsing. "I guess we dug heavy, sloppy, hard clay about three times, my daughter and I," says Leather, laughing now at the memory of the bad weather. "There were ducks swimming around over there."

Next they erected the pillars and lintels, hollow structures constructed using wood and cement board (hewn stone would have been too expensive and time-consuming to erect). But in a nod to the old, the finished henge will be coated with cement and covered in plaster sculpted to look like stone. Inside the "stones" will be some modern accoutrements: wires to allow a sound system to be installed. "We've already got two couples who want to get married out here," says Hall.

An obelisk inside the stone circle will mark the passage of the year as the shadow of the obelisk moves in a figure eight on a mosaic of 18,500 tiles below. The tiles will display the date and the constellations of the zodiac. Outside the circle, three pairs of standing stones will show where the sun will rise and set for each of the solstices and equinoxes. "So you can see the enormous distances the sun actually travels along the horizon," says Hall.

Every key point will have a plaque denoting its significance. "It may be a simple phrase like 'midsummer solstice sunrise.' The ones that are more seasonally oriented will have something like 'time to harvest the kumara (sweet potato),'" says Leather.

Bruce Reimer [sic, though I think this should actually be David Reimer, Bruce's identical twin] started to become Brenda on July 3, 1967. Physicians at Johns Hopkins surgically castrated him, and the remaining skin was used to forge a "cosmetic vaginal cleft". Money sent the family back to Winnipeg with strict instructions. "He told us not to talk about it," Ron Reimer told John Colapinto. "Not to tell [Brenda] the whole truth, and that she shouldn't know she wasn't a girl."

Things started going wrong almost immediately. Janet Reimer recalled dressing Brenda in her first dress just before the child was due to turn two. "She was ripping at it, trying to tear it off. I remember thinking, 'Oh, my God, she knows she's a boy and she doesn't want girls' clothing." Brenda was bullied viciously at school. When she urinated standing up in the school lavatories, she was threatened with a knifing.

[...]

By the time Brenda reached her teens she had attempted suicide at least once; she refused further surgery but consented, though irregularly, to take oestrogen supplements to encourage the development of breasts. John Money gradually drifted from the Reimers' lives, but Brenda remained under constant psychiatric treatment. It was after one such session with a Winnipeg psychiatrist in 1980 that Ron Reimer collected his daughter in the car and, instead of taking her home, drove her to an ice-cream parlour, where he told her everything.

The upturn in Reimer's fortunes lasted several years. Brenda opted for a sex change within weeks of her father telling her the truth. Thanks to developments in phalloplasty, Brenda, taking the name David, received surgery that after five years left him with a reconstructed penis resembling a real one, with limited sensation, and usable for sex. When he was 23 he met Jane, a single mother of three, and married her soon afterwards. In 2000, he went public with his story.

Each day he also tips the man who parks his car for him in the NCP car park he uses - "Five pounds, but don't say which NCP it is or he may get into trouble with his bosses." When he visits his barber, Trumper's in Curzon Street, he gives £5 tips to the manicurist and shaver, leaving these for them at the reception desk while "the man who actually cuts your hair usually stands at the desk as you are leaving and you can give it to him direct." He also tips the maitre d' of the restaurants he patronises as part of his work - but never the doormen.

Another uninhibited tipper, who was none the less inhibited enough about his privacy not to want to be named, tells me: "I am quite unembarrassed about tipping, but I am not a lavish tipper. However, in restaurants it makes sense to tip the maitre d' before rather than after. Very smart people, or, if you want to describe them as plutocrats and big shots, tip on a different scale because they must have immaculate service. In somewhere like the Mirabelle, I have learned to get the maitre d' over as we sit down and give him £30. What's the point of tipping at the end? Everyone is giving 5% at the end, but if you give him £30 at the beginning that puts you right to the front of the queue; all you have to do is scratch your nose and you immediately stand out."

Staffordshire: Carved on the base of the Shepherd's Monument, a white marble arbor at Shugborough Hall, the letters are D.O.U.O. S.V.A.V.V.M. and they have been flummoxing some of the nation's finest minds since they were put there circa 1748. Charles Darwin is said to have had a stab at decoding them, so too the local bigwig Josiah Wedgwood - both to no avail.

The mystery surrounding the uneven row of letters is seasoned with some big rumours, the most dramatic being that they may actually point to the Holy Grail. So Shugborough - the ancestral home of Lord Lichfield - has now drafted in Bletchley Park and its Second World War code-breakers.

Herefordshire: And then there are those who are convinced it is lodged in a much less romantic resting place - the vault of a branch of Lloyds TSB bank somewhere in Herefordshire, taken there for safe-keeping from its last home - a grand, if fly-blown, house in west Wales.

It is a long and winding road to Nanteos Mansion. One must cross the Black Mountains and the Cambrian Mountains and negotiate the Devil Bridge Gorges before dropping down into the soft, remote countryside of lowland Ceredigion (Cardiganshire).

[...]

For the next two centuries the cup stood behind glass, apparently performing miracles and attracting pilgrims by the hundred. Richard Wagner - who wrote the Grail opera Parsifal - made a visit to see it at the invitation of the then heir to the house, George Powell, a masochistic homosexual with a fondness for the birch and the works of the Marquis de Sade. Powell, who was friends with the poet Algernon Swinburne and fed roast monkey flesh to Guy de Maupassant, believed that the cup possessed miraculous healing powers. Water poured into it was sent around the world to those afflicted with various diseases and ailments.

2. One title is Summer In The World It's 4 O'Clock, which is about the fact that on this tiny scale we see this little bird struggling and there is nothing we can do about it - just like there is nothing we can do about anything that is happening across the world. (Tate curator Susan May)

3. Another title for the display is Just A Single Wrong Move, which "is about how all of us can be trapped after just one mistake". (Tate curator Susan May)

4. Blocking the View, the third title is meant to be ironic. (Tate curator Susan May)