It's a big world and it has many surprises.

Today's surprise #1. A man named Daniel Tammet supposedly recited from memory the first 22,514 digits of pi, learned the basics of a new language in a single week, and beat Las Vegas at blackjack recently without ever having played before. Before the reader gets too jealous, it should also be noted that he supposedly can't do algebra, can't play a DVD, and can't call a taxi.

But what if scientists can one day unlock that potential in all our minds?

Surprise #2. When Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1519 the population was about 22 million. By 1600 only about 2 million were left. Historians have long thought that the vast majority of these deaths were due to germs the Spanish brought with them, germs the native population had no immunity against, such as smallpox and typhus.

But Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuna-Soto has boldly proposed a new explanation: an Ebola-like virus native to Mexico. The Spanish are still responsible for horrible brutality against the native population, but they might not have been the cause of all those millions dead.