Mass murderer Charles Manson plans to marry a 26-year-old woman who left her Midwestern home and spent the past nine years trying to help exonerate him.

Afton Elaine Burton, the raven-haired bride-to-be, said she loves the man convicted in the notorious murders of seven people, including pregnant actress Sharon Tate.

No date has been set, but a wedding coordinator has been assigned by the prison to handle the nuptials, and the couple has until early February to get married before they would have to reapply.

The Kings County marriage license, viewed Monday by The Associated Press, was issued Nov. 7 for the 80-year-old Manson and Burton, who lives in Corcoran – the site of the prison – and maintains several websites advocating his innocence.

Burton, who goes by the name “Star,” told the AP that she and Manson will be married next month.

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Photo Credit: Fox NewsA North Carolina man is working hard to get the most out of his Olive Garden Never Ending Pasta Pass.

Alan Martin was one of the lucky 1,000 people who in September raced to buy one of the all-you-can-eat passes.

Over the past six weeks, Martin has eaten at Olive Garden every day, twice a day, totaling up to 95 meals and ringing up $1,510 worth of food, according toFox 8 WGHP.

Now when he goes into the restaurant, Martin told WGHP that the waitstaff treat him “like a celebrity.”

The pasta pass, which Martin bought for $100, is good for all of the pasta, salad, bread and Coca-Cola drinks a person can eat during the seven week period, which runs until Nov. 9.

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Photo Credit: WikipediaIn college, it wasn’t rare to hear a verbal battle regarding artificial intelligence erupt between my friends studying neuroscience and my friends studying computer science.

One rather outrageous fellow would mention the possibility of a computer takeover, and off they went. The neuroscience-savvy would awe at the potential of such hybrid technology as the CS majors argued we have nothing to fear, as computers will always need a programmer to tell them what to do.

Today’s news brings us to the Neural Turing Machine, a computer that will combine the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain learns, enabling it to actually program itself. Perhaps my CS friends should reevaluate their position?

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Photo Credit: Piotr Naskrecki Piotr Naskrecki was taking a nighttime walk in a rainforest in Guyana, when he heard rustling as if something were creeping underfoot. When he turned on his flashlight, he expected to see a small mammal, such as a possum or a rat.

“When I turned on the light, I couldn’t quite understand what I was seeing,” said Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

A moment later, he realized he was looking not at a brown, furry mammal, but an enormous, puppy-size spider.

Known as the South American Goliath birdeater (Theraphosa blondi), the colossal arachnid is the world’s largest spider, according to Guinness World Records. Itsleg span can reach up to a foot (30 centimeters), or about the size of “a child’s forearm,” with a body the size of “a large fist,” Naskrecki told Live Science. And the spider can weigh more than 6 oz. (170 grams) — about as much as a young puppy, the scientist wrote on his blog. [See Photos of the Goliath Birdeater Spider]

Some sources say the giant huntsman spider, which has a larger leg span, is bigger than the birdeater. But the huntsman is much more delicate than the hefty birdeater — comparing the two would be “like comparing a giraffe to an elephant,” Naskrecki said.

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Photo Credit: CNETFor a percentage of epilepsy patients, medication is less effective at controlling seizures, or it doesn’t work at all. For these patients, there is another option: brain surgery. This is usually a deeply invasive procedure, wherein the section of the patient’s brain is either removed, stimulated or disconnected; afterward, recovery can take up to three months.

A robot five years in the making by researchers at Vanderbilt University may be in line to make the surgery less time consuming, less invasive and with a shorter recovery time.

The area of the brain involved in epileptic seizures is the hippocampus, which is located in the lower regions of the brain. The surgical robot developed by mechanical engineering graduate student David Comber and mechanical engineering associate professor Eric Barth enters the brain from underneath by going through the patient’s cheek, carefully negotiating gaps in the bone. This is not only a shorter route, it also avoids drilling through the skull.

The working prototype involved the development of a shape-memory alloy needle — that is, an alloy that can remember its original shape and return to it when heated after being deformed — that can operate along a curving path. The robot also needed to be able to operated from inside an MRI machine, which creates a strong magnetic field.

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