According to Robin McKie writing for The Observer in “Clever raven proves that it's no birdbrain“ scientists have discovered an unexpected candidate for the title of the world's second smartest creature: the raven

An essay by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian shows why it is important to have good friendship rings as well as strong social/business networks and how to tell the difference.

Yesterday Google announced a new premier edition of its Google Apps online collaboration suite, combining GMail, Google Talk, Calendar. Page Creator, Startpage, Google Docs and Spreadsheets under a hosted subscription service. Robin Good offers an excellent review of the components, pricing and the support package.

James Thornton in “You Have Three Brains” reports on research that we each have, not one but, three brains nested within our skulls – a lizard brain, a dog brain, and a human brain. This got me thinking – if teams are really living systems then they might have 3 brains too?

For those of us still working in offices New Scientist Magazine suggests a number of excellent ways to reduce your workplace stress. Full of good practical ideas plus some less practical ones such as visiting an oxygen bar, relaxing by sniffing your colleague’s armpits and strolling across to the animal therapy centre.

Sometimes knowledge management is more about finding the person than the knowledge according to Sandra Higgison's profile of Ken Thompson and Bioteams for Inside Knowledge Magazine .

In a Harvard Management Update Virtual Teams: Palaeolithic Insights About the Art of Cyber-Managing, the authors propose a delicious irony about today’s teams: to succeed we need to recover the long-forgotten instincts of our ancestors.

About a year ago I wrote about US Department of Defense plans to develop a lie detector that can be used without the subject knowing they are being assessed. It now looks like Skype may be getting in on the lie detector game too.

The UK guardian, reports that business meetings in the UK have become so boring that most participants totally mentally check out.

Humans and other animals share a heritage of economic tendencies - including cooperation, repayment of favours and resentment at being short-changed according to an article by Frans B. M. de Waal in Scientific American, April 2005 issue