When I moved to Boston, I joined a group called the World Sculpture Racing Society.

A lot of memory contest champions claim to use this technique to recall faces, digits, and lists of words.

Now, thanks to bad policies, and even worse politicians, it ranks among the world s also rans.

But only the extra worked treadmill runners were better in the avoidance task, a skill that, according to neuroscientists, demands a more complicated cognitive response.

Eric Moussambani Malonga is a swimmer from Equatorial Guinea. He gained fame when he won the heat although he had never raced more than 50m before the preliminaries, and was swimming by himself when the two other swimmers in his heat were eliminated for false starts.

Berlusconi and Prodi have ruled out a German style grand coalition an outcome that seems especially unlikely following an election campaign in which both contestants have strongly hinted that their opponent has no legitimate right to govern.