Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna say that people make lots of assumptions about sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at human faces - and we do it with cars as well.

They're not the first ones to come up with this idea; five year olds have been finding personalities in inanimate objects for thousands of years and my kid has been saying "Ka-chow!" ever since he saw Cars, but they are the first ones to tackle it in a systematic fashion.

How did they do it? They asked people to describe car grills anthropomorphically. Then they used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information, whatever that means. One-third of the respondents associated a human or animal face with over 90 percent of the cars and everyone noted eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grill), and a nose in 50 percent of the cars. Yep, that means people think cars have a personality.

When scientific terms become part of the cultural fabric they often lose their meaning. Biology has had its share of modern misunderstandings with 'evolution' becoming colloquial rather than scientific, along with the general term 'theory', which today is used by anyone with a crackpot notion about particle physics, math or the end of the world due to a tunnel in Switzerland.

So it goes. That's why today we have advertising claims like 'the next evolution in cars' and then press releases about the 'missing link' in comets.

Hey, we don't shape the culture, we just try to cut through it. So this time we will talk about the 'missing link' between an Oort cloud and Halley's comet and discuss the 'evolution' of these mysterious space bodies, which will make biologists here irritated. Later on we can use terms like 'genesis' and 'creation' in their place so religious folks can feel slighted also.

Why mention all that? Well, we run out of science terms to use when there is no previous explanation for an object, so we have to fall back on cultural ones in order to convey why something is important. In this instance, a team of scientists has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun is just baffling enough that it may tell us about the origins of some comets.

You heard me. Researchers from the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey project have discovered an object that orbits around the Sun -- backwards. And it is tilted at an angle of 104 degrees, almost perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. Take a look: