Neighborhood Watch

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-Slate launched a new video series Wednesday called "Grand Unified Weekly," which serves up science news with a side of snark. You may remember it under it's original name: Scientific American's "The Monitor."-A man tried to pay his phone bill with the drawing of a spider. It didn't work. But the email thread between him and the phone company representative is priceless.-A 90-year-old giant tortoise named Lonesome George-he's the last of his kind-mated this year for the first time in decades.-And Everything Was Alright is a short film, a picture book, and an art exhibition about another lonely animal--this time a bear--that dreams of space travel.-Speaking of animals and their urges, The New York Post reports that a dog drove his owner's Chevy van into the side of a Long Island coffee shop Wednesday night. The half-boxer, half-Shar-Pei's name: Bentley.-From the GOOD Community: kapler23, a teacher at a Baltimore high school, shares a bittersweet story about trying to comfort one of his students after a harrowing event.(Photo: a strangely prescient 2004 cover of Life.)