I think your best one was to say that the average rainfall is around 6.1 cubic inches! The error is confusing millilitres with millimetres. The first is a measurement of volume (about 6.1 cubic inches) and the second is a length, interpreted in this case as a depth. The area of Brisbane according to wikipedia (I know it's been raining in more than one place but this is an approximation) is 5904.8 square kilometers which gives a total typical rainfall for this area for this month of about 590 million tons or about 3.6x10^13 cubic inches.

I'm sure there should be some sort of record broken for most orders of magnitude out here :-)

As a little off-topic trivia, slavery (as in the ownership of one human by another) only became illegal in the UK on 6th April 2010 (source).

Slavery was abolished in stages throughout the British Empire in the 19th Century but the status of slave was never acknowledged in the UK so it was never illegal to own one since they didn't exist!

Maybe I'm being a bit old fashioned about this but surely the best solution is to use pen and paper!

This is almost exactly what Jonathan Shorr of the University of Baltimore was quoted as saying by BBC news. The students think they are having an easy course but in fact are "tricked" into learning something. I don't have a problem with this per se but surely not for adults. This is the kind of technique you use with young children who don't want to learn. If people at university don't want to learn (or can't learn without being hoodwinked) then they shouldn't be there.

Typist losing synchronicity?

Indeed. With any flammable fuel there is always the potential for problems to arise leading to fire or other danger. We think we've got petroleum products fairly well sussed but every now and then something goes wrong. The key is to learn from mistakes and make future use of any given fuel or technology better and more idiot-proof.

No we don't... Geek squad car. It is basically the same, isn't it?

I don't know if you've seen TFA or just making a quick joke but a comparison between the main picture and a google image search for "demolition man car" shows that you're basically spot on!

As a corollary to the parent, many proteins require chaperones to help fold correctly. The chaperones interact with the protein as it is being translated from the mRNA and help guide it to a folded state. Of course, we don't fully understand any of it.

There's always someone saying things should or shouldn't be in idle but surely this is one of the cases where it shouldn't be?

There's been nothing but positive reviews of this guy's work here so far (and one Soviet Russia joke)

Even if this event is spread over only 1/100 of the surface of a sphere, this energy output is equivalent to the entire output of the milky way, assuming high estimates for number of stars in this galaxy (400 billion or so).It's a truly staggering amount of energy that I don't think humans can appreciate. We all like to bandy about numbers like 10^{nn} without having a clue.

Space is big.

Even the full paper isn't much help. They don't go into details on the fights themselves. An excerpt from the methods says:

"[T]he female was removed from the home cage; an opaque divider was inserted into the cage and isolated the focal mouse on one side; an opponent was placed in the cage's opposite side; the mice were given 2 min to acclimate; the divider was removed and the mice were given 10 min to freely interact."

They then go on to talk about "winning experiences" without detail. Presumably they judged winning from the body language of the mice concerned. A winner would presumably dominate a loser with the loser often on their back or trying to stay out the way in a corner or similar.