SwayBlog

ResearchAs rare as hen's teeth? Not any more, say scientistsIf you thought hen's teeth were the rarest thing in nature, think again: researchers from Britain and the US have succeeded in growing teeth in a chicken. Far from being rarer than students who turn up at 9am lectures or lecturers who like giving them, a hen with teeth does occur naturally, scientists based at the universities of Manchester and Wisconsin have found.

Country diaryEnvironmentLlandrindod Wells, Powys: This one crawled up a lakeside bank with its looping gait, only to be dispatched by a herring gull Who loves a leech? Not me, for sure. Neither the black (in reality a speckled olive-green) horse leeches that undulate, swift and purposeful, across the muddy bottoms of ponds, nor the paler fish leeches that plague the carp that rise out of the green depths of Llandrindod Lake.

Lady Gaga This article is more than 12 years oldLady Gaga's Born This Way artwork provokes fan backlashThis article is more than 12 years oldSinger tweets new album cover, featuring her head built into a motorbike, and causes a stir among her Little MonstersWhen historians look back on the rise and fall of Lady Gaga, they may pin the beginning of her descent to the day she morphed into a motorbike and made it her album cover.

Ruger, a three-year-old Labrador retriever/German shepherd mix, has a keen nose, and is put to use sniffing out ivory, guns and ammunition. See him in action GuardianDogsRuger is a ‘hero’ responsible for dozens of arrests who has convinced many skeptics of his detection skills Ruger is a bad dog, and that’s why he does his job so well. Just ask Megan Parker, the director of research at Working Dogs for Conservation in Montana.

BooksObituaryPete McCarthyWriter with a rare gift for alternative theatre and comedy"If you travel in hope rather than with certain knowledge," wrote Pete McCarthy, "something interesting usually happens." If you travelled with Pete, who has died aged 52 of cancer, it always did. A writer, performer, broadcaster and comedian whose work combined a love of words with an interest in faraway places and having a drink with new people, he was best known for his books McCarthy's Bar: A Journey Of Discovery In The West Of Ireland (2000) and The Road To McCarthy (2002).

CitiesDerived from heavy metal album covers, São Paulo’s distinctive street writing is rooted in a desire to protest against inequality in Brazil’s largest city. But some pixadores now fear their work is being ‘sold out’. Photographs: Pablo Lopez Luz If Brazil is “not for beginners”, as the composer Antonio Carlos Jobim once said, then its great urban centre, São Paulo, is certainly not for the faint of heart. It’s not just the noisy streets, the extreme socio-economic inequality, the abandoned buildings and the drug addicts roaming notorious “Cracolandia” that give my home city its rough edges.

Action and adventure filmsReviewBehind the J-poppy storylines of this cartoonish samurai blockbuster gleams a well-shot swordplay spectacularWatch the trailer for Rurouni Kenshin Warner Brothers/Studio SwanIn 19th-century Japan, swordsman Kenshin (Takeru Satoh) wanders the land, eating sweets and defending maidens with a special blade that's only sharp on the inside edge so he cannot kill: a pledge to atone for his wartime past as the fearsome Battosai, a murderous slaughterer of samurai.

TsunamisIn 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala was enjoying a holiday with her husband, Steve, and their two young sons in Sri Lanka. Then the tsunami hit, and she lost everything. Now, she tells her storyI thought nothing of it at first. The ocean looked a little closer to our hotel than usual. That was all. A white, foamy wave had climbed all the way up to the rim of sand where the beach fell abruptly down to the sea.

‘He’d slam the doors, scream at us’: Ryan (on left) and Luke Hart. Photograph: Andrew Jackson for the Guardian‘He’d slam the doors, scream at us’: Ryan (on left) and Luke Hart. Photograph: Andrew Jackson for the GuardianDomestic violenceLast summer, Lance Hart shot dead his wife, daughter and himself, four days after the family had left him. His sons talk frankly about life before and after On a warm summer day last July, Claire Hart and her 19-year-old daughter Charlotte went for an early morning swim at their local leisure centre in Spalding, Lincolnshire.