Mysterious World News: The Man with an Iron Bar in his Brain, an 'Angel' in a Pizza Parlour, on the trail of a 'Rogue Planet' & Can Censorship be Beautiful?

Phineas Gage may not be the most familiar figure to have graced Almanack's pages, but he is certainly one of the most curious. A reminder of the story so far: Gage was helping to build the Rutland to Burlington Railroad in Vermont, U.S.A, in 1848 , when he managed to shoot a heavy rod into his skull while blasting a rock. He was lucky to survive, but not so fortunate that the injury had no permanent ill effects. People who had known him before the accident were astonished to see how greatly his personality had changed overnight. His doctor, John Mairtin Harlow, confirmed the worst. 'He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operations, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man. Previous to his injury, although untrained in the schools, he possessed a well-balanced mind, and was looked upon by those who knew him as a shrewd, smart businessman, very energetic and persistent in executing all his plans of operation. In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was "no longer Gage".' While the friends shook their heads sadly and worked out how to deal with a damaged and volatile personality, the doctors did their best to work out exactly where Gage's brain had been injured. This was a difficult task in the mid-19th century, of course, (Gage's doctor did try to feel his brain with a finger), and neurologists only got the kit they needed 150 years later. And then there was another complication: although Gage's brain has been preserved at Harvard Medical School, it is now too fragile to be handled by researchers. The good news was that quite sophisticated visual data had been recorded in 2001; but then came the bad news, since no one could find them. Now that they have been retrieved, researchers at the University of California Los Angeles have been able to make their little map. It shows that the rod penetrated Gage's left frontal lobe, resulting in the 'widespread interruption of white matter connectivity throughout his brain'. And it is this last finding that is of real interest to neurologists. The ways in which the brain's pathways are connected are now seen as the key to providing treatment for today's patients with brain trauma. So there is a chance, at last, that old Phineas, who was forced to seek employment from that king of the freak shows, P.T. Barnum, may be recognized as an important figure in the history of medicine, and that a sad story may at last have a happy ending.

BLOOMFIELD, PENNSYLVANIA: Strangest Pizza the Action

Seeing is believing: or is it? How nice it would be to know for certain that Bob Usner of Adrian's Pizza of Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, was visited in his hour of economic need by his late father, now an angel. Sadly, the cctv picture is far from clear, and the winged creature it recorded may simply be an earthly bird or a spider's web. No matter: it is surely a good thing for Bob's business, in these straitened times, to grab an extra slice of the pizza market in the form of a little custom from the local nunnery. Some things, of course, have to be taken on faith, until technology improves. Rodney Gomes of the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro presents a plausible case for the existence of an unknown 'rogue planet' in our solar system. Something seems to be affecting objects in the Kuiper Belt, and the most likely explanation is a large celestial body. But it will have to remain conjecture for the time being: Gomes admits that he has not got a clue where to look. 'It could be anywhere,' he admits. A closer look at the Easter Island Moai, on the other hand, has proved revelatory. For years, archaeologists believed that their creators were interested only in sculpting heads. Not so, according to Jo Anne Van Tilburg of the University of California. Excavations are revealing that they also have elaborately carved bodies. Van Tilburg believes there is a message in this for archaeologists. 'It is always important to get beneath the surface of things,' she says.

TORONTO, CANADA: Cutting & Pasting 16th Century-Style

Annoyed that a comment to an online story has been blocked by the site's monitors? Well, that's nothing to the censorship that the 16th century Dutch humanist Erasmus had to endure at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church. One question arises from this tale: can censorship ever be 'beautiful'? Something for today's 'Big Thinkers' to ponder, perhaps, over the weekend.