Photo Credit: FeatheredTar / Creative Commons A man who’s dedicated his life to putting bad guys in jail, may soon have to join them there.

Miami-Dade Crime Stoppers Executive Director Richard “Dick” Masten will find out Thursday just how long he will spend locked up after a courtroom student where he ate a piece of paper containing information regarding an anonymous tip.

“I probably shouldn’t have eaten that piece of paper,” Masten told CBS4′s Lauren Pastrana Monday night.

But he doesn’t regret his courtroom snack.

“I don’t have any regrets. I mean I don’t like the idea of going to jail, but I didn’t really have any alternative,” Masten said. “The way I look at it, we make a solemn promise to our tipsters that we’ll never let them be identified.”

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Photo Credit: WSJKyle Bishop figured it was risky when he applied to a University of Arizona Ph.D. program in English eight years ago by proposing a dissertation on zombie movies.

He was dead wrong.

The program approved Mr. Bishop’s proposal, and he is now chairman of Southern Utah University’s English department. The 40-year-old has been invited to give zombie lectures in Hawaii, Canada and Spain.

“It’s clearly now acceptable to study zombies seriously,” he says.

Just as zombies—those mythical revived corpses hungry for living human flesh and gray matter—have infiltrated pop culture, they have also gotten their hands on our brainiest reserves: the academy.

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Francois LenoirYou’ve probably heard of the Stone Age diet craze known as the Paleolithic Diet, made popular most recently by Dr. Loren Cordain’s best-seller The Paleo Diet. The premise is simple: If our early human ancestors couldn’t have eaten it, we shouldn’t, either. It’s the one time, it seems, that being like a caveman is a good thing.

The theory goes (and archaeological evidence corroborates) that early hunter-gatherers, while they may not have lived as long, still had some major health advantages on most of us modern humans. They were much taller, averaging 6-foot-5 to our 5-foot-11; had stronger, heavier bones; had more robust immune systems; and were leaner, tougher, and hardier than we are today. Higher levels of physical activity also played a vital role in cave people’s vitality, and so did their high levels of wild food consumption: wild game meat, gathered greens and fruits, and healthy fats such as nuts.

Cordain suggests that prior to the agricultural revolution, early humans ate this Paleo Diet for 2.5 million years. The 10,000 years since the popularization of farming — or just 333 human generations — he says, is clearly a drop in the chronological bucket when compared with the millennia leading up to it. Thus, he maintains, the hunter-gatherer diet our ancestors lived on is far more deeply and indelibly imprinted into our DNA than our habits of the last few thousand years. I’m inclined to agree with him. In fact, I’m going to see his 2.5 million years and raise him a few millennia, and show you what we were really designed to eat. The real Paleo Diet would have included bugs. Lots and lots of bugs.

“From the time mammals first appeared until 50 million years ago — a total of 150 million years, three quarters of the entire time mammals have existed — our ancestors were primarily insectivorous,” write S. Boyd Eaton and Dorothy A. Nelson in their paper “Calcium in Evolutionary Perspective.” “Given the slow and conservative nature of genetic evolution, this long-standing adaptation for insect consumption must have made a significant impact on our genetic heritage. Consequently, the nutritional properties of insects have relevance for understanding the forces that have shaped the nutritional requirements of present-day humans.”

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Photo Credit: Sharon ScobleIt’s hard to imagine a creature more menacing than a great white shark swimming in the surf, but a giant crocodile comes close.

An estimated 12-foot crocodile was spotted cruising in the swells this past week at Cable Beach in Broome, Western Australia, prompting officials to close the beach to swimmers and surfers for a day.

It’s unclear what lured the reptile into the surf zone, but the unusual sighting generated quite the spectacle.

Sharon Scoble, a Broome local, captured the images that accompany this report after receiving a call from her son, who spotted the croc while driving to the beach.

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Photo Credit: Solent News/RexIt’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?

With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.

But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream.

And now? Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google’s director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of “the singularity” – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.

But it’s what came next that puts this into context. It’s since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.

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