It's not elegant and it's not sexy – it looks like a large photocopier – but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.

Signaling the end, says Blackwell, to the frustration of being told by a bookseller that a title is out of print, or not in stock, the Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework. Blackwell hopes to increase this to over a million titles by the end of the summer – the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space, or over 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are currently out-of-copyright works, but Blackwell is working with publishers throughout the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings, and says the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

A teacher at Wiley Elementary School, in Richland, Washington, asked students to put together their autobiographies. One 8-year-old boy included a photograph of his father, David Henes. The photo showed Henes, who is a member of the Army National Guard, in uniform and holding his rifle. School officials told the boy to remove that photo, saying it wasn't appropriate for the classroom.

The new guidelines include language that leaves the door open for creationists to wedge religious myths into the science curriculum. The vote on the overall standard was 13-2 to adopt.

And it has been shown repeatedly that suicide increases in the month after a front page suicide story. There is also evidence that the effect is bigger for famous people and gruesome attempts.

Doodling isn’t the distraction it’s commonly thought to be, researchers say–in fact, it aids concentration, and memory. A new study suggests that doodling takes up just enough attention to keep the brain from wandering further afield, explains lead researcher Jackie Andrade.

Horses were first domesticated on the plains of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago - 1,000 years earlier than thought - by people who rode them and drank their milk, researchers said.

Tomorrow, several of us are going to testify at the State Board of Education hearings over the revising of the science standards. This happens once every ten years, and since Texas is an adoption state for textbooks, it effects more than just the schools in Texas. They are attempting to keep language in the standards that allows teachers to teach the alleged “strengths and weaknesses” of scientific theories. As you know, this is a bogus concept, and they are only interested in teaching the alleged “weaknesses” of just a single theory of science.