News of the weird

Chair of little brain: researchers at the Henry Ford hospital in Detroit have discovered evidence that the male human brain shrinks faster with age than the female brain, according to a paper in the journal Archives of Neurology. Dr C Edward Coffey, the chairman of the hospital's psychiatry department who led the study said: "My wife say's it's no surprise to her."

Free lunch: Police in Bangkok are looking for members of a gang who conned a Japanese professor into buying them lunch. When Kenji Sanekata, a professor at Hokkaido University, arrived at Bangkok International airport, he failed to make contact with the people who were supposed to meet him. After a long wait, he saw a Thai man holding a sign with his name on it. The man drove him to join others at a restaurant, where he was cajoled into paying an inflated bill of almost pounds 800. Police think he was targeted because he had his name in big letters on his suitcase.