We Germans have lots of traditions pertaining to New Year's Eve (which over here is called Silvester) and the beginning of each new year. Just from the top of my head: Of course, there is food, in many families traditionally Fondue, there's the firecrackers, and there's drinking in moderation, of course! And then there's the weirder traditions, like watching the same, English-language (!) skit every year.

There are lots and lots of reasons to like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

93,000 flights, 9,000 airports, 24 hours. Zürich University of Applied Sciences produced this wonderful video to show the global flight paths and streams of air traffic. Each dot represents a single plane, with between 8,000 and 13,000 planes in the air at any given time, so make sure you're watching in High Quality.

(Data from 2008.)

And it looks like this parrot, also of remarkable plumage, definitely was not "tired and shagged out after a long squawk" then, eh?! Television viewers in the UK (and perhaps most readers of this blog?) have been fortunate these past few weeks, since the BBC began airing the new documentary series "Last Chance to See" where Stephen Fry joined zoologist Mark Carwardine in retracing a journey the latter shared with the late Douglas Adams when they went around the world looking for species literally on the brink of extinction!