New Rule: As far as I’m concerned, Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper still doesn’t have enough shit going on. I need Caffeine-free Diet Cherry Chocolate Dr. Pepper. No, I need Cool Ranch Extreme Caffeine-free Diet Cherry Cocolate Dr. Pepper. Baked. And I want a sticker on it, telling kids that drugs are bad.

Queen Sofia’s husband, King Juan Carlos, had already declined his invitation to the lunch at Windsor Castle on Friday.

He is recovering from surgery last month after he fell and broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana.

Good. This isn’t the 1850s. What kind of asshole goes around hunting elephants? Oh, a King, how surprising.

The virus used in the research was an M13 bacteriophage, which attacks bacteria but is benign to humans. The Berkeley team used genetic engineering techniques to add four negatively charged molecules to one end of the corkscrew-shaped proteins that coat the virus.

These additional molecules increased the charge difference between the proteins’ positive and negative ends, boosting the voltage of the virus.

South Korea says it will increase customs inspections targeting capsules containing powdered human flesh.

The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion (Capsicum Chinense), endemic to the district of Moruga in Trinidad and Tobago, is currently the world’s hottest Chili pepper. The New Mexico State University’s Chili Pepper Institute has identified the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion as the newest hottest chili pepper in the world as of February 2012. According to the New Mexico State University Chili Institute, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion ranks as high as 2,009,231 SHU on the Scoville scale, making it the hottest chili pepper in the world to date.

Paul Bosland, a renowned chili pepper expert and director of the Chili Institute, said that, “You take a bite. It doesn’t seem so bad, and then it builds and it builds and it builds. So it is quite nasty.”

The golf ball-sized chili pepper scored the highest among a handful of chili breeds reputed to be among the hottest in the world. Its mean heat topped more than 1.2 million units on the Scoville heat scale, while fruits from some individual plants reached 2 million heat units.

Leaving out the heat the Moruga Scorpion has a tender fruitlike flavor, which makes it a unique sweet-hot combination.

For the sake of comparison, the jalapeno varies between 2500 and 8000 Scoville units, and the Indian “Ghost Chile” which is all the rage these days (I just bought a bar of chocolate that was mixed with ghost chile) chlocks in at about a million Scoville units (although that varies widely according to the conditions in which it’s grown, which is true of all chiles).

Israel has declared the German author Guenter Grass “persona non grata” and barred him from entering the country.

Grass, a Nobel laureate, recently criticised Israel in a poem.

In it, Grass condemned German arms sales to Israel, and said the Jewish state must not be allowed to launch military strikes against Iran.

Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai says Grass is not welcome because he has tried “to inflame hatred against the State and people of Israel.”

Yishai, the leader of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish party in Israel’s coalition government, suggested that Grass should go to Iran, “where he would find a sympathetic audience should he want to continue disseminating his warped and mendacious work.”

Damn right. If you write an uncomplimentary poem about a nation, you certainly shouldn’t have the unmitigated gall to expect that you might be able to visit afterwards. Maybe if he’d written an email, or a song, but a poem? That’s a bridge too far.

Around 58 million years ago, a monstrous snake slithered out of the swampy jungles of South America and began a reign of terror.

Weighing more than a tonne and measuring 14m (approximately 50ft) the giant reptile could swallow a whole crocodile without showing a bulge. But a few years ago, scientists never even knew it existed.

“Never in your wildest dreams do you expect to find a 14m boa constrictor. The biggest snake today is half that size,” says Dr Carlos Jaramillo, a scientist with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and part of the team that made the discovery.

Thought to be a distant relative of the anaconda and boa constrictor, the snake – named Titanoboa – was not venomous. Instead, it crushed its prey with the constricting force of 400lbs per sq inch – the equivalent of lying under the weight of one and a half times the Brooklyn Bridge.

The fossils were exposed by excavation at the massive Cerrejon open-face coal mine in northern Colombia. In 2002, scientists had discovered at that site the remains of a tropical rainforest from the Palaeocene Epoch – perhaps the planet’s first.

As well as fossilised leaves and plants, they unearthed reptiles so big they defied imagination.

“What we found was a giant world of lost reptiles – turtles the size of a kitchen table and the biggest crocodiles in the history of fossil records,” says Jonathan Bloch, an expert in vertebrate evolution at the University of Florida.

“After the extinction of the dinosaurs, this animal, the Titanoboa, was the largest predator on the surface of the planet for at least 10 million years,” says Dr Bloch. “This was a major animal in any sense of the imagination.”

Case in point is Irv Gordon of East Patchogue, New York, who holds the Guinness world record for racking up the highest mileage in the same vehicle. At last count he’s clocked over 2,900,000 miles on the Volvo 1800 S coupe he purchased back in 1966 and is aiming for a cool three million. If you’ve ever seen it, it looks like a museum piece, which is a testament to Gordon’s meticulous care.