TDG FTW!! :-P

• Why did Buzz Aldrin back down from his UFO-spotting statement during Apolo 11? Is it perhaps because he's hanging out with Snoops?
• Close Encounters with the Pentagon: how the US government has tried to manipulate the public perception of UFOs through Hollywood movies (H/T to Nick Redfern).
• 8 Ways Scientists Look at —But Don't Yet See—Dark Matter. The same way politicians hear —but don't yet listen— to our complaints :-/
• How Einstein was coaxed to go to America by the Zionists —Oh Noes!— and his noble reasons to concede —Huh?
• "Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition" & "Lucy’s Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia" are both showing in the Big Apple right now. Can you imagine the Titanic movie with Lucy co-starring Leo DiCaprio? Is the fact that I actually can something I should worry about??
• Hoopla & disappointment in Schizophrenia research. But really, wouldn't that be best suited for Manic-Depression research?
• What do dreams mean? Whatever your bias says —personally I'm afraid of being a BIASexual...
• People unsure of beliefs are more close-minded. Hmmm... not sure what to make of this one.
• Hey atheists: send your skeptic kiddies to Uncle Dawkins' Happy Godless Summer Camp. It's great critical fun!!! :-D

• First there were snakes on a —motherf*%cking— plane. Now there's snakes on a —motherf*%cking— nervous system @_@
• "Billy!! chew with your mouth closed for Crissakes, you look just like an hadrosaur!"
• Dinosaur mummy yields its secrets —without a curse, I might add.
• The extinct moa reveals its true colors —it was no chicken y'all.
• Hug a tree today: they saved us from an icy fate.
• Global Warming: it's good for empires —at east in South America.
• It ain't no gator, but it's still pretty weird! 'Unknown' life form in North Carolina sewer.
• The ants want to take over the world. Damn! and all these time we thought the real enemy were the cockroaches.
• Robots have taken the jobs of the blue-collar workers. Now it's time for the egg-heads to know how it feels!
• Epigenetics: Beyond the Book of Life —because the Book of Love is a much tougher read.
• Was Michael Jackson a Transhumanist? Well, I dunno about the King of Pop, but when it comes to his plastic surgeon...
• New Michelangelo self-portrait found in the Vatican —I think he's pissed with all the attention Leo has been receiving lately.
• Email patterns can predict impending doom ...or compulsive Viagra sales ^_^
• You need to take those mini-mes out for a stroll every day so they can grow big & strong.
• Man uses nail clippers to circumcise himself —Oi! Oi!! Oiiiiiiii!!!!!!

Thanks to Greg, Rick, Kat, & my parents —for circumcising me when I was little :-P

Quote of the Day:

"Solitude & Silence are either the greatest gift or the worst punishment"

Guillermo del Toro

With my own appreciation of prog rock and metal, and generous linkage from the likes of the esteemed BMB at Tool's website, it seems the Daily Grail has built up quite an audience of music enthusiasts. What's more, there's a fair bunch of musicians out there as well. Case in point: TDG reader Ross Morgan, whose band 'Holloway' has just released their album Illusions. I hear aspects of the likes of Riverside and Opeth in there (not to mention a bit of Mike Oldfield's Exorcist theme). Here's the vid for Holloway's first single, The Visitor:

The samples sound pretty damn cool - to listen head on over to the band's MySpace page, and then go to the Holloway website for instructions on how to get hold of their album for not much more than the price of a coffee.

We also have our fair share of trance-heads and lovers of electronica - just this week we've got a banner at the top of TDG for Mystical Sun. Any other bands/musicians out there reading the Grail?

Sorry I haven't had a lot of time lately to discuss any news in-depth. Any free time has basically been going in to working on a redesign of The Daily Grail. Still a bit off, but making progress. I'll probably be posting a few short updates about things as I go on the Daily Grail Twitter account, if you're interested in keeping up with developments. You might even end up being a Beta tester...

You can hear the universe in her seashells oh yeah.

• NASA's most complete satellite map covers 99% of Earth's surface.
• After 18 years, the sun sets on the Ulysses probe.
• Zero-emissions cars to race around the world. Go, Green Racer, go!
• New tech allows disabled to steer wheelchairs by thought.
• Plastic household items can alter the DNA of unborn babies.
• Swine Flu virus resisting Tamiflu. More deaths in Australia.
• Darwin's silver bullet slew the werewolf. He fired blanks in the imaginal realm.
• Evolutionary theories of dreams, or just over-analysing?
• Review of The Secret History of Dreaming by Robert Moss (Amazon).
• Replica of a 1700-year-old Philippine boat sets sail.
• Underwater excavation of a 16th century Spanish shipwreck.
• Did the Pueblos people migrate along the 108th meridian?
• Has a stone circle been found in East Anglian village churchyard?
• Archaeologists uncover secrets of daily life among Giza pyramids.
• A woman's face on Mars is a real puzzle. So men are from Venus?
• Scientists believe they've found the Tunguska impact crater.
• Just how much can you trust Whitley Strieber? I think Anne's the trickster.
• Jeff Peckman, a billionaire, and ET disclosure in Denver.
• Two brothers watch cigar-shaped UFO hovering in Colorado. Er, Kat?
• Pencil-like UFO snapped in UK skies. Scottish caber tossing?
• More disturbing cattle mutilations in Argentina. With photo.
• Don't follow Black-Eyed Kids in Kansas down the yellow-brick road.
• What's in The Box? BEKs, boxes, MiB; I'll never open the front door again.

Thanks Greg and Kat.

Quote of the Day:

In our dreams -- I know it! -- we do make the journeys we seem to make,
we do see the things we seem to see"

Mark Twain

Taking a knife of gentle humour and cutting deep into some of the craziness of religious literalism:

Because sometimes deities should just not get involved...

Skynet a little closer to reality.

• Spooky computers closer to reality.
• Why microbes are smarter than you thought.
• Two wrongs make a double wrong.
• Unmasking the mysterious 7/7 conspiracy theorist. The video in question.
• Pope: scientific analysis done on St. Paul's bones.
• Eratosthenes and the radius of Earth.
• Sphere UFO reported by three witnesses in two states.
• How long ago? Part One. Part Two.
• Researchers describe a new hominid.
• Spacecraft finds uranium on the moon.
• NASA reacquires original Moon landing footage.
• World's first ever self-watering plant discovered.
• Carbon nanotubes continue to show promise in battle with cancer.
• Climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age.
• Give up, you'll never understand women.
• How chaos drives the brain.

Quote of the Day:

Only some people get what they want. Those are the people who show up to get it.

Dianne Houston

A popular news story doing the rounds this week is this Space.com item about how recent space shuttle launches may have solved the mystery of what hit Tunguska in 1908: a comet. Key to the new theory are 'noctilucent clouds', which were seen over Europe in the days following the explosion, and the fact that these clouds are also created by the Space Shuttle on take-off:

About 97 percent of the exhaust from a shuttle launch turns into water, a by-product of the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel. A single shuttle flight pumps 300 metric tons of water vapor into the Earth's thermosphere, and the water particles have been found to travel to the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

Noctilucent clouds were tied to the launch of Endeavour (STS-118) on Aug. 8, 2007. And high-altitude clouds were detected over Antarctica shortly after the fateful launch of Columbia, which along with its crew was lost during re-entry. Columbia's plume was 650 miles long and 2 miles wide and reached Antarctica in three days.

Cornell University engineering professor Michael Kelley figured the bright night skies after the Tunguska event must have been the result of noctilucent clouds. And since they require water vapor, Kelley assumed a comet was the culprit.

It's worth noting though that for the theory to work, a completely "new model of upper-atmospheric physics is needed" to explain how the water vapour traveled so far. Given that rather large leap, I found it quite ironic that the Space.com article begins by ridiculing the 'UFO theory' for Tunguska, then proceeds to explain how a spaceship leaving the Earth shows that the event was caused by a comet. Funny stuff.

For those looking to read the original paper, it can be found in Geophysical Research Letter, and is titled “Two-dimensional turbulence, space shuttle plume transport in the thermosphere, and a possible relation to the Great Siberian Impact Event.”

Geeks rule!

• NASA wants your ideas for digitizing Wernher von Braun's notes - literally discovered in boxes six months ago.
• The panopticon economy: NSA’s new data-mining facility. James Bamford's The Shadow Factory is available at Amazon US & UK.
• UK's new cyber security command center employs formerly naughty hackers to combat network intruders - and forge offensive attacks. Humm... Gary McKinnon's talents could well be vital to UK national security.
• In October 2006, Netflix offered a million dollar prize to the first contestant that could improve on the company's movie-recommendations software by more than 10 percent. A multinational team - made up of statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from America, Austria, Canada and Israel - claims it's succeeded.
• Space shuttle exhaust causes clouds that may explain the Tunguska event.
• The future of NASA's manned spaceflight program now rests with a 10-member committee which only has 11 weeks to evaluate... well, practically everything.
• Buzz Aldrin weighs into NASA: Cancel Ares, reprieve shuttle, colonise Mars.
• The next step in space exploration? Minimize the downtime before NASA's next big project, says former astronaut, Bob Crippen.
• Former astronaut Jay Apt says NASA should be testing plasma rockets (scroll down), and planning missions to land on asteroids.
• NASA trainer heads to Arctic base for simulated Mars mission.
• The International Space Station is soon to have a room with a view.
• All on one page (warning for the bandwidth-challenged), 35 spectacular photos taken by astronauts aboard the ISS over the past few months. Many have Google map links.
• A review of For All Mankind, one of the best documentaries yet made on the Apollo missions to the moon, composed almost entirely of film footage taken by the Apollo astronauts themselves during the actual missions. Available at Amazon US in DVD & Blu-ray (July 14th release).
• NASA has found the missing moon landing tapes. But they don't sound pleased that the UK's Daily Express is ruining their big surprise for next month's Anniversary celebration.
• Wedged between dashboard and window, and refusing to budge, a rogue knob could ground space shuttle Atlantis for six months - or permanently.
• In theory, advanced geothermal power could produce 60,000 times the US's annual energy usage. Unfortunately, it can also cause earthquakes.
• Grains of sand reveal possible fifth state of matter.
• Whales might be as much like humans as apes are. Respect for whales' cultural diversity may be essential to saving them.
• Stone Age wells, 9,000 to 10,500 years old, found in Cyprus.
• While devising a writing system for the Cherokee language, Sequoyah often visited caves for inspiration. An archaeologist has found what he thinks are the earliest known examples of the Sequoyah syllabary, in a cave in southeastern Kentucky.
• Prehistoric European cave artists were female.
• Archaeologists uncover secrets of daily life among the great pyramids of Giza: An interview with Mark Lehner.
• Is this the earliest image of St Paul? Sensational 1,600-year-old icon of saint found in a Roman tomb.
• Tests 'seem to confirm' remains of St Paul are genuine in second major discovery of saint in days.
• No Smiting!: In his controversial new book, The Evolution of God (Amazon US & UK), Robert Wright tells the story of how God grew up. According to the reviewer, 'There is something here to annoy almost everyone.'
• In the Andes, La Oroya, Peru has been named one of the world's 10 most polluted places. The fate of thousands now rests on the possible clean-up of a toxic smelter which is owned by a US billionaire who is fighting the clean-up.
• A review of Gavin Weightman's The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World 1776-1914 (Amazon US & UK), which focuses on a large number of inventors, architects, engineers and visionaries you've, quite possibly, never heard of. Chapter One: Spies.

Quote of the Day:

With conventional rockets, a one-way journey to Mars would take six months; plasma propulsion could cut that trip to a month. And a quicker trip wouldn't just be easier for the astronauts aboard; it would make the entire mission easier because the crew would need to take along far less food and water, which would mean far less mass needing to be propelled across space to the Red Planet. The U.S. has what it takes to do that.

Former astronaut Jay Apt, as paraphrased in this article in today's News Briefs.

The website for Dan Brown's upcoming book The Lost Symbol has gone live, though at the moment it just features a countdown clock to the release of the next blockbuster. More interesting though, is that there are also pages on Twitter and Facebook devoted to the book - and the Twitter page is featuring clues to the content of The Lost Symbol.

Seems from the Twitter clues so far that the change of title *does not* mean that the content has changed - already there have been mentions of Freemasonry and Washington, D.C. Also, other things that I covered that weren't so well known - such as the influence of Francis Bacon - have turned up in the clues after just a few days, so I'm feeling good that I was on the right track with a lot of my research. I've noticed a few other things of interest as well, but I'll post about them separately at a later date.

I'll be posting solutions to some of the puzzles, and linking to other content of interest, via my own Twitter account: @LostSymbol. Warning: spoilers!

(cross-posted from The Cryptex)

A week's worth of news in a mere 24 hours...

• Could a liquid ocean hidden beneath Enceladus’ icy crust be harboring alien life? More here about Saturn’s beguiling moon.
• Then again, does Enceladus really have an ocean? Science in conflict.
• In today’s final installment of Enceladus news, watch here as it eclipses another one of Saturn’s Moon’s, Mimas.
• Journalist drops bombshell accusation against WHO and UN over bioterrorism and ‘greatest crime in history of humanity’.
• The odd connection between the Tunguska Event, a comet and the Space Shuttle.
• Volcano punches a hole in the sky. 3D glasses required to maximize effect.
• The Milky Way’s particle accelerators, demystified in new ‘ballistic study’.
• The Ozone Hole may be affecting the Southern Ocean’s ability to absorb CO2.
• Need proof of the effect of high CO2 levels, just ask the giant-eared fish.
• Should we be worried that wind speeds have been decreasing since 1973?
• Architects of the Underworld author, Bruce Rux, delivers the first chapter of an extensive three-part interview over at B of A (that’s Binnall vs. bank).
• Earthquakes and the extraction of geothermal energy.
• Ancient Buddha statue from 5th or 6th century discovered in Afghanistan.
• The war on drugs is over. Guess who won?
• 11,000 year-old granary reveals prehistoric predilection for planning ahead.
• Are those strange cosmic, gaseous blobs really just adolescent galaxies coming of age? Pomp & Circumstance fades in over the PA…
• What strange cosmic blobs, you say? Why the one’s being powered by black holes, of course.
• Ranking the most powerful forces in the Universe. Oddly, stupidity did not make the list.
• Saving the world’s vulnerable buildings from earthquakes, one invisible earthquake cloak at a time.
• How piranha got their bite. Not just another ‘just so’ story.
• Great Whites and Hammerheads threatened by extinction. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water... it is (because it's empty).
• Is a superpod of dolphins in the UK proof that shifting climates are pushing wildlife northward?
• Reverse-engineering the quantum compass of birds.
• New solar-powered plane to fly around the world (and in the dark).
• The green revolution, coming soon to a refrigerator near you.
• Will recycled corn plant waste make for leaner, greener biofuels?
• Ice on fire. Not to be confused with fire and ice.
• Theft FAIL: Berlin man arrested after trying to sell stolen goods back to owner.
• Finally! A robot that feeds on flesh and bone. Not to be confused with the Pentagon’s new cyber command.
• Newscast from the future reveals outcome of the coming robot revolution.

A mighty tip o’ the hat to Greg, RPJ, Perceval and RMG

Quote of the Day:

“Access to the holographic reality becomes experientially available when one’s consciousness is freed from it’s dependence on the physical body. When one is freed from the body, one experiences it directly. That is why mystics speak about their visions with such certitude and conviction, while those who haven’t experienced this realm for themselves are left feeling skeptical or indifferent.”

Kenneth Ring, ‘Life at Death’