Kim Arlington, with The Sydney Morning Herald, reports:

Neil Jordan likes to get inside an animal's mind when he's working to save a species. Take lions, for example.

"Lions are ambush predators; they rely on stealth and the element of surprise in order to bring down their prey," he said. "As soon as they lose that element of surprise, as soon as the prey sees them, they abandon their hunt."

That is why he and fellow researchers are going to Botswana to paint eyes on cows' rumps. They hope it will prove a low-cost way to protect livestock from lions, and lions from being killed by farmers in retaliation.

Dr Jordan, who holds a research post at the Taronga Conservation Society, said:

"We wanted to hijack this natural response by painting eyes on the rumps of cows, so that lions could be tricked into thinking they'd been seen and abandon the hunt," he said.

It's the same kind of "psychological trickery" employed by woodcutters in India, who ward off tigers by wearing face masks on the backs of their heads, and butterflies that avoid becoming bird food thanks to eye-like patterns on their wings. 

My first year in college was at a local junior college and of course one of my first classes was Psychology. I was nervous my first day and the tension continued to build as we all sat waiting for the professor to arrive. It was deathly silent and I watched the clock in front of the room a little disappointed that the professor was already 5 minutes late.

Then one brave student spoke up, commenting that because the teacher was only an associate professor we could leave after waiting for only 15 minutes. This sounded good to me. It seemed that this broke the tension and a conversation took off from there. Another student asked if anyone knew anything about the teacher and there were numerous answers. He was a hard grader, another commented that he was strict, one girl said that she heard he gave an overabundance of homework. There were numerous comments after that and most were not very complimentary. There were a lot of jokes at the teacher's expense.

Finally, the student at the beginning who seemed to know the rules, stood up and said, "Well, it has been 15 minutes but I'm not going to leave. In fact, I think I will stay and begin today's class."

In most of the United States there is a policy of checking on any stalled vehicle on the highway when temperatures drop to single digits or below. About 3:00 am one very cold morning, Montana State Trooper Allan Nixon responded to a call about a car that was off the shoulder of the road outside Great Falls, Montana.  He located the car, stuck in deep snow but with the engine still running.

Pulling in behind the car with his emergency lights on, the trooper walked to the driver's door to find an older man passed out behind the wheel with a nearly empty vodka bottle on the seat beside him. The driver woke up when the trooper tapped on the window. Seeing the rotating lights in his rearview mirror, and the state trooper standing next to his car, the man panicked. He jerked the gearshift into "drive" and hit the gas.  

The car's speedometer was showing 20, 30, 40, and then 50 MPH, but it was still stuck in the snow, wheels spinning. The trooper having a sense of humor, began running in place next to the speeding (but stationary) car. The driver totally freaked out, thinking the trooper was actually keeping up with him. This went on for another 30 seconds before the trooper yelled, "PULL OVER!"  The man nodded, turned his wheel, and stopped the engine.  Needless to say, the man from North Dakota was arrested and is probably still shaking his head over the state trooper in Montana who could run 50 miles per hour.