A glance at the week that was
The numbers
13Number of London apartments owned by Brendan and Asta Kelly, the couple who were evicted from their Killiney home on Wednesday
9.3Percentage of the world's email spam that now comes from India, making it the world's worst offender.
35mThe number of iPhones sold in the last quarter, a record for a non-Christmas quarter
0.2The percentage decline in the UK GDP, the first double-dip recession there since the 1970s.
49Percentage fall in nationwide residential property prices since the peak in 2007
10,000Age of a skeleton stolen from an underwater cave in Mexico – the remains of one of the first humans to inhabit the Americas
73Percentage of possession that Barcelona had in their Champions League semi-final second-leg match against Chelsea on Tuesday. It ended 2-2.
We now know
Regular exercise makes us smarter, according to US research.
The disgraced Chinese politician Bo Xilai allegedly wiretapped the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, according to the New York Times.
Ice-cream headaches are caused by a rapid dilation of the anterior cerebral artery, which pushes more warm blood into the brain to keep it warm.
Make mine an asteroid
Sending miners to the surface of an asteroid might have seemed silly back when Armageddon hit the cinemas, but an ambitious company plans to do something similar in the near future. Unlike in the film, the company, Planetary Resources, hopes to save Earth – not from a calamitous collision but from a shortage of precious minerals and metals. A cofounder, Peter H Diamandis, announced that it will launch satellites to identify resource-rich asteroids, and hopes to begin mining within a decade. The firm’s wealthy backers include Larry Page and Eric Schmidt of Google, and the film-maker James Cameron.
