So the words "crocodile on the loose" are generally not the most welcome you'll hear, but they are much better than these five: "Nile crocodile on the loose." Unfortunately, you may hear this exact refrain in the Miami area right now, as a Nile croc -- much faster, more vicious, and more people-hungry than the American crocodile -- escaped from a local breeder and is just wandering around, enjoying its freedom. Luckily, it's only three feet long now, but keep in mind it's getting bigger. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission operatives have been directed to shoot to kill. This isn't the first time: Two more Nile crocs were recently captured in the same area.

Cloudy days are generally thought of as less than desirable. But what if you had a lamp that told you a cloudy day had arrived by creating beautiful puffy white clouds inside your very own home? Might you not change your tune? OK, maybe not, but at least you'd have a really cool lamp.

A Swiss company called Micasa LAB (who somewhat less thrillingly designed iRock, a rocking chair that charges your iPhone) has created a sort of weather lamp called the Nebula 12. It changes in color and gets lighter and darker with the actual weather. It puts out clouds for cloudy weather. It gets bright when it is sunny out. It signals a low-pressure system by taking a cue from the old adage "red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning," and emitting red clouds. Sure, you could just look outside for most of this stuff, but DID YOU HEAR ME THE LAMP MAKES CLOUDS.

When it comes to justification for eating meat, men tend to really take the bull by the horns. They don't just ignore the increasing evidence that it's not good for people, the environment, or, naturally, for the animals who die so we can eat them. Instead, they come up with religious, philosophical, or health-based arguments for doing what they feel like doing anyway.

These insights came from a study looking at female and male college students and their attitudes about meat eating. The study discovered that while women who eat meat tend to try to dissociate from the issue or just not think about it (full disclosure: I eat tons of meat, think meat is pretty evil, and completely justify it with all kinds of acrobatic thinking), men aggressively justify and think of ways to characterize  meat consumption as favorable. They come up with religious justifications. They actually deny that animals suffer when they are killed (oh yeah, a hammer blow to the head doesn't hurt at all!). They say meat is good for you, and that animals are lesser beings than humans.

So back a long time ago in North Korea, when it was just plain old Korea, there was a guy named King Tongmyong and he rode a unicorn. In case you are finding yourself getting jealous of the Koreans and going "goddam it they have the best legends," you should know that this is not a legend. At least not according the Korean Central News Agency's recent statement which said, essentially, that the discovery of a unicorn lair proves that Pyongyang "was a capital city of Ancient Korea as well as Koguryo Kingdom."

An enormous aquarium has opened in Singapore. It has 100,000 species of marine mammals. It has a snorkeling reef, a place to feed manta rays, and a giant viewing panel, the biggest in the world. It sounds great. But there is trouble in deluxe aquarium paradise, in the form of 25 bottle-nosed dolphins currently housed there. Bottle-nosed dolphins are endangered, though it's not clear how endangered they are, and aquarium officials have not exactly endeared themselves to animal lovers by capturing them.

How many energy-savvy people does it take to change a light bulb? Well, that's not really going to be such a big issue when you only have to change it every 20 years.

The new iLumi smartbulb's staying power is only one of its cool features. It can also be programmed to display lots of different colors, and you can use your smartphone to make it dim, change colors, or turn off. (You can tell it's super high-tech because the product name begins with a lowercase i. Damn you, Steve Jobs.) The bulbs have a 100-foot range and can be programmed to turn on and off as needed as you move around the house, or even sync up to music.

Starbucks has come out with some super fancy new coffee that costs $7. Supposedly it tastes really awesome. (At that price it better taste like God's balls.) Comedian Jimmy Kimmel was skeptical that it was really all that, and he held a taste test to see if people could tell the fancy shit from the plain old stuff. Well of course being a sneaky bastard he decided to not even use the fancy coffee in his test and gave samplers two of the same thing -- the regular Starbucks coffee that tiresome bores complain is awful but is really just fine and, truly, if you've ever driven across Kansas, pretty wonderful. Anyway, here is a video of them convincing themselves that a) they are actually drinking two distinct beverages and b) they actually have superior discriminating taste.

Four people died over the past few weeks in the Northern California town of Loomis when they ate soup made from poisonous wild mushrooms. All four were residents of the Gold Age Villa, a small care facility for the elderly, and the soup was prepared by a caretaker, who got sick but did not die. Police believe the incident was accidental.

Traditionally when scientists have wanted to figure out how the population of an area in the distant, non-recorded past, they have looked at things like pollen concentration and ashes left from fire. Now, researchers from University of Massachusetts, Amherst have discovered that human feces is possibly a much more accurate marker of not only how many people lived in a particular area over time, but what factors might have made a place less or more attractive to its inhabitants.

Umea is a city pretty darn far north of Stockholm, which is already way up there. And in the winter, it gets really dark for a really really long time. Which can bum a Swede out. So it is fortunate that an energy company (called Umea Energy) has decided to install ultra-violet, essentially happiness-producing lights at bus stops around the city.

During winter, there are only about seven hours of daylight in Umea -- from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m. Light therapy has long been touted as a way to help winter darkness blues, which is also referred to as S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder) and which is, unsurprisingly, a big problem in Sweden and other very northern countries. Yeah, it takes more energy to run an antidepressant bus stop than a regular one, but the company says their energy comes from "environmentally sound sources," and we believe it because this is Sweden where they care about things. Also, we're talking about the mental health of an entire city here.