--BBC filmmakers announced in June that they had captured, for perhaps the first time ever, an episode of pandas mating in the wild, for the "Wild China" TV series. A male is shown fighting off other males to coax a female down from a tree. What follows that, said producer Glenn Maxwell, are "loud calls which will make viewers think instantly of the Wookie character from the 'Star Wars' movies. I liken it to Chewbaccas in a pub brawl." Eventually, the female descends, and the pair get to work, "breathing hard and panting," said Maxwell. "You can see the steam coming out of their mouths."

Animals in Trouble

-- China's Xinhua news agency reported in March that a farmer in Jilin province had been found with a tortoise that is addicted to nicotine. The farmer, a smoker himself, said he was surprised when the pet puffed on a cigarette he had playfully stuck in its mouth, and since then, he occasionally shares smokes with it.

--Magistrates in Sunderland, England, accepted a guilty plea in June from Samantha Pearson and David Step for animal cruelty. The couple had relocated quarters last October but left behind a pet, Milly, to starve to death. Milly was a pet rat.

Coaches gone wild

--High school soccer coach Sanford Kaplan, 57, was arrested in Lincoln, Neb., in May and charged with having imprisoned several underage boys in sessions in his garage in which they were bound, gagged and suspended from the rafters.

--Track coach Lawrence "Poppy" Vincent, 74, of Bracken Christian School in Bulverde, Texas, was arrested in May and charged with indecent exposure to an undercover police officer; Vincent was wearing floral women's panties and a bra.

-- Football coach Steve Halpin, 52, was permitted to retire quietly in June from Mesquite High School near Dallas after officials discovered that he had pawned 270 items since January 2007, including school equipment (which, in each case, he had later retrieved from the pawnshop).

Fetishes on Parade

-- "There's really no way to explain people's fetishes," said University of Cincinnati campus police Capt. Karen Patterson, describing the arrest of Dwight Pannell, 43, for allegedly crawling under a library table, squirting liquid from a syringe on a female student's shoe, and photographing it. Pannell told police he was just trying out his new camera.

-- In February, police officer Michael Curtin, 36, was removed from the force in Munhall, Pa., and in April was charged with offering two underage girls $1,000 each to let him suck their toes.

Update

-- Methane's longstanding menace as a climate-altering greenhouse gas is closer than ever to being controlled, said New Zealand scientists in June after genome-mapping found the source of flatulence in ruminant animals, and the researchers said they thought they could vaccinate against it. While livestock accounts for only 2 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas, it causes over half of New Zealand's. Unless the vaccination is successful, farmers will face a huge tax on methane by 2012 brought on by the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol.

-- In January, Dr. Steve Paulk announced that he would commence offering breast augmentation procedures and would be working out of Moundview Memorial Hospital in Friendship, Wis.

--Cardiologists at Hartford (Conn.) Hospital, writing in the June Annals of Emergency Medicine, described a patient suffering from irregular heartbeat whose rhythm was restored to normal following a Tasering by police.