The giant panda's distinct black-and-white markings have two functions: camouflage and communication, a new study has foun

A dog is being hailed as a hero in the US for laying down his own life to save an eight-month- old girl by lying on top of

A brave guide dog jumped in front of a fast moving school bus here to save its visually impaired woman owner from being hi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a delightful Australian welcome when he was charmed by a cuddly koala bear during a break

In a heartwarming display of communal harmony, a Muslim man in a village near here made the arrangements for the cremation

China today announced the birth of rare Panda triplets, stated be a miracle in the history of breeding programme of the en

Pandas are famous for being fussy eaters, but a new study says there is method to their madness, with the animals switchin

Animal lovers of the city are pledging their vote for Rahul Gandhi, after an animal shelter volunteer claimed to have spot

All right, so this apparently is old now, as it went viral in December, but it came to my attention only last week since when I had been wanting to put it up here.

The five-year-old from Japan, dubbed “Ukulele Boy,” has close to 14.25 million hits on one page on YouTube. And this of course is not counting other posts and embeds all over. His version of Jason Mraz’s hit song, “I’m Yours” is clearly better than the original:

And there's some Beatles too:

As for what can be competition at close to 162 million and counting?

Photo Courtesy BBC

As part of its Hunger to Learn series, BBC has this amazing story of a teenager, Babar Ali, whose remarkable education project is transforming the lives of hundreds of poor children. He tresk to school in the morning and then teaches what he has learnt in school to others in the afternoon. He is 16, and since the age of 9 has been running his own, unofficial school giving lessons just the way he has heard them from his teachers in the morning:

Now his afternoon school has 800 students, all from poor families, all taught for free. Most of the girls come here after working, like Chumki, as domestic helps in the village, and the boys after they have finished their day's work labouring in the fields.

"In the beginning I was just play-acting, teaching my friends," Babar Ali says, "but then I realised these children will never learn to read and write if they don't have proper lessons. It's my duty to educate them, to help our country build a better future."

Including Babar Ali there are now 10 teachers at the school, all, like him are students at school or college, who give their time voluntarily. Babar Ali doesn't charge for anything, even books and food are given free, funded by donations. It means even the poorest can come here.

Read the full story at BBC

John Freeman, the acting editor of Granta magazine in WSJ:

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.

Read the full piece: Not So Fast

Via Manoj Kapur, on, er, e-mail, of course