BBC News | SCI/TECH | Carrots return to purple roots

It was not until the 17th Century that [carrots] turned orange, when patriotic Dutch growers favoured the colour - as used on the national flag.

Expect more anonymity ahead as fund firms struggle with portfolio manager defections to hedge funds, firings because of poor performance and layoffs if the economy does not improve.

Academic feminists may argue that the pro-feminist bias in women's studies is necessary to counteract traditional biases that remain pervasive in the rest of the academy and in the culture at large. If this claim had validity in the early 1970s, however, it is certainly specious today, when feminist attitudes are widespread in the culture and especially in the universities.

Some nuggets cited in the report are downright bizarre. For example, Thinking About Women suggests that homemaking is literally a hazardous occupation, since it "exposes [women] to a wide variety of toxic substances" that are not subjected to the same government regulations as in industrial settings, and darkly states that "the high death rate by cancer among housewives [has not] been widely discussed." No factual substantiation is given for the alarming implication.

Salon.com Arts & Entertainment | Mickey Rourke's desperate truths

Good dramatic actors, who need to access a vast color wheel of emotion, are often intolerably volatile, hypersensitive nut jobs in real life. To inhabit characters of dubious artistic value, it is also helpful if they aren't terribly smart. Rourke appears to have both of those qualities; it's an equation that spells temporary magic on-screen and usually results in terrible suffering off-screen.