This cute little snowman survived a 5,314 mile journey from Japan to the desert of Bahrain without any refrigeration. The only things keeping him alive in his cardboard box were some new vacuum insulation panels designed by Panasonic.

Basically, the folks at Panasonic had this clever new product sitting around and needed a way to show it off when they just happened to get “a message on their Facebook page from a Bahraini girl named Amna al-Haddad, who wanted her younger brother Saleh to see snow for the first time.”

Karen Byrne woke up after an operation to control her epilepsy to find she had no control of her left hand – a rare condition known as Alien Hand Syndrome.

Her surgeon had cut her corpus callosum, a band of nervous fibres which keeps the two halves of the brain in constant contact. She told Dr Michael Mosley she was very frightened at the time, but now her hand has been controlled by medication.

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim are among the investors financing an $8 million round of funding for Qwiki, a startup that aims to, in its own words, “forever improve the way people experience information.”

Saverin, who is the lead investor in the startup’s latest round of financing, has kept a low profile in recent years, but his role in the founding of the world’s largest social network was brought to the fore by the movie The Social Network, which pitted the entrepreneur against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

NASA doesn’t know yet where it will get the money, but on Thursday the space agency officially added another space shuttle launch to its schedule — the final one for the fleet.

The space agency set a target launch date of June 28 for the shuttle Atlantis and started preparations for the 135th and last shuttle flight. The four-member crew will take up supplies to the International Space Station, make one spacewalk, and return a faulty pump that has bedeviled engineers.

Now three missions remain before NASA retires its shuttle fleet this year. The shuttle Discovery’s last mission is slated for Feb. 24, and Endeavour’s is set for April.

McDonald’s Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets are served the world over, but only in Vermont can diners at the fast-food giant now get pure maple syrup with their oatmeal.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin announced Thursday that McDonald’s USA has agreed to offer pure Vermont maple syrup or sugar with its Fruit and Maple Oatmeal menu item, beginning in February.
Vermont is the nation’s largest producer of maple syrup, and it upholds strict maple laws.

The state previously said McDonald’s use of maple in its advertising for its oatmeal did not meet regulations because it did not actually contain maple.

For now, the pure Vermont maple syrup will be offered only in-state, but Shumlin said he would encourage McDonald’s to use the state’s prize crop elsewhere.