• Greener cooking methods have been quite the craze lately, but the search for the perfect solution will (hopefully) continue until there is one. In Senegal, “green charcoal” is now being produced from agricultural waste materials to replace the black kind that has caused the destruction of so many trees.

• “Bell-bottoms and gas masks”: Check out National Geographic‘s slideshow of the first Earth Day, back in 1970. (And learn here about its history—why is it April 22, anyway?)

• Gotta pay some respect to history’s Earth Day heroes, whether they be from comic books or real life.

• Here’s the bad news first: Dow Chemical is sponsoring a fish festival near a polluted Michigan river where the (toxic) fish that are caught will be donated to the poor. But the good news: If you like SunChips, you can soon rest assured about their packaging—by 2010, it will be fully compostable.

Image: Flickr / kimberlyfaye

• A new music video, “Take Aim at Climate Change,” puts some beats to an earth-inspired message. It was released by Polar-Palooza, a multimedia initiative supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

• Thanks to new iPods for the womb, your unborn children can hear your REO Speedwagon playlist.

• Health officials in Sao Paulo, Brazil plan to perform vasectomies on 25 wild capuchin monkeys.

• A man helped his wife deliver a baby he did not know was coming—he thought her weight gain was related to quitting smoking.

• They’re not on a low-cal diet, red pandas just prefer Sweet’N Low (and other artificial sweeteners) to natural sugar.

• And if you think you had a rough week—at least you’re not 26 and trapped inside a two-year-old‘s body.

• “We didn’t pay 37 million zlotys [7.6 million pounds] for the largest elephant house in Europe to have a gay elephant live there” —Polish politician Michal Grzes.

• A chocolate inhaler now provides calorie-free indulgence in four flavors: raspberry, mint, mango, and plain. Inhaled mango-flavored chocolate powder? Really?

• What to do if you—oops!—swallow the Higgs boson.

• A divorced couple fights over frozen dog sperm.

• Watch a spider roll like an eight-spoked wheel.

• And, a humpback whale was spotted swimming under New York City’s Verrazano Bridge! Watch it surface here.

•Villagers in England chased away a Google car, saying that Google Street View is, yes, an invasion of privacy—and will also facilitate crime in their area.

•Good news for chocolate lovers: Eating it can help your math skills [ed. note: We refute this claim based on personal experience—we couldn't eat more chocolate, and couldn't be worse at math].

•Gals, take pride: sisters bring more happiness (and balance) to a family than do brothers.

•But any mothers out there, you might want to get your baby formula examined: It could contain rocket fuel.

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It’s April Fool’s Day, and the science world is overflowing with gags. But not all of the forehead-slapping headlines today are jokes. Can you guess which one of the following is true? (Answer at the end of the post.)

1) Google announces an artificial intelligence breakthrough, an autonomous problem-solver that will be the “first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.”

2) A “finetics” project in England plans to harness the strength of swimming fish to power UK homes: “Environmentalists welcomed the opportunity to not only generate clean energy but ensure rivers are maintained for wildlife.”

3) Bars are now partaking in a program telling pregnant women when to stop drinking.

4) The Concorde will fly one more time, say technicians who have made secret preparations at France’s Museum of Air and Space, which has kept the supersonic plane flight-ready since its retirement in 2003.

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•Plants can twitter, but it seems celebrities can’t—not on their own, anyway.

• Toxic sofas, after being shipped from China with packets of a harmful mold-inhibitor, caused extreme skin rashes and burns on at least 1,600—and possibly tens of thousands not yet identified—people in England.

• Science education is under assault in Texas.

• In another move of, weirdly, putting animals on birth control, China is putting gerbils on the pill.

• Daddy long-legs are threatened by climate change, a gorilla suffered a seizure and was given an MRI, and a campaign helps endangered species by enlisting clothing brands to save their namesakes: Lacoste to the crocodiles’ rescue!

• Also, we’re doomed.

• An undersea volcano that erupted for days near Tonga in the South Pacific led to a short-lived tsunami alert for surrounding areas.

• Surfing may become a more earth-friendly sport, with boards made from at least 50 percent renewable materials reducing the use of petroleum, traditionally the primary component in surfboards.

• By discovering the gene that helps convert carbohydrate into fat in the liver, researchers may have inched closer to developing a genetic equivalent of the Atkins diet.

• In good news for endangered species, conservationists have developed a way to use 3-D imaging to track tiger populations—and then, in bad news for an already-extinct species, a celebrated paleontologist who discovered the  world’s best-preserved dinosaur will now plead guilty for stealing dinosaur bones from federal land.

• Monkeys in Japan showed off some pretty good dental hygiene habits. Here, they are seen teaching their young to floss.

• Researchers in California have claimed that they are “knocking at the door” of artificial life and that they will be able to complete a second genesis in five—okay, maybe ten—years.

• In good news for the environment, a wind-up eco-media player may put the battery life of the iPod to shame, while in bad news, space junk has struck again: Scientists have faced a real challenge in dealing with the excess debris floating around in space, and this week a one-centimeter piece of an old “payload assist motor” gave the crew of the International Space Station a close call. Flying objects are a real hazard in space, where they travel tens of thousands of miles per hour, but the crew took shelter in the Russian Soyuz capsule and is now fine—beyond the continuing menace of space junk.

• A blogger calls out physicists for allowing economists to take all the rap for disbursing poor or unreliable science, while these Stanford biologists rap about what makes us human.

Roman Catholic bishops have called for a new kind of abstinence this Lent: no text messaging. They have deemed every Friday during Lent “no SMS day,” partly to honor “concrete” rather than “virtual” relationships. But the refrain from phones is also an attempt to bring attention to the ongoing conflict in Congo, which is partly fueled by coltan, a mineral found aplenty in the eastern part of the country and which is crucial for many technologies, including cell phones.

Others, meanwhile,  are embracing technology to the fullest—enough to try and turn magic carpet rides into reality. In space, no less. A Japanese astronaut will try to fly on a carpet when he arrives at the International Space Station later this month—he’ll also try 16 other challenges out of the total 1,597 total suggestions submitted.

Over in Italy, a “vampire” skeleton has been exhumed from a mass grave in Venice. It is thought to be from a period during the Middle Ages when vampires were believed to spread the plague by chewing on people’s shrouds after dying—an act that grave-diggers sought to prevent by putting bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires.

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• German twenty-somethings would rather give up sex than the Internet: In an industry survey, 84 percent of 19- to 29-year-olds said they would rather live without their current partner or an automobile than their Internet connection, and 97 percent found it “unthinkable” to live without a cell phone.

• The “Bodies” exhibit has reached Poland, and government officials are investigating whether the human cadavers on display amount to desecration of the human body. Next in the investigation queue: this woman.

• Meanwhile, Mother Russia “disproves” [sic] of the “monopolizing” American control over the Internet. A government official has spoken out against the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which creates top-level domain names (like .com) and manages IP addresses. The goverment reportedly plans to release suggestions for how to “demonopolize” the Internet—like oh, say, put a few crooked billionaires in charge.