Unbelievable amount of fascinating news (and videos) today – and I even tried to avoid all the usual crappy Halloween stories floating about. I hope you have *lots* of time up your sleeve…
- Seeing the light in Rosslyn Chapel. Rosslyn Revealed by Alan Butler and John Ritchie is available from Amazon US and UK.
- CSICOP debunks the Halloween spirits. Although a surprisingly moderate tone on the origin of the Universe and the possibility of an afterlife. Someone’s going to get a talking to…
- Dr Peter Fenwick discusses his research on survival of death, and the recent controversy at the BAS meeting which he was involved in.
- What is this mysterious gelatinous ball?
- Was Harry Houdini a spy? The Secret Life of Houdini is available from Amazon US and UK.
- Disgraced South Korean stem cell scientist says he paid the Russian mafia for mammoth tissues for cloning purposes. The Russian mafia: drugs, weapons, and now mammoth DNA smuggling. Keep quiet about it or you might wake up next to a mammoth head.
- Scientist finds a 100-million-year-old bee trapped in amber.
- Are Florida’s mysterious jumping sturgeon just doing it to carry on a conversation?
- Perhaps being called a ‘bird-brain’ isn’t so bad after all. Check out these clever ravens (video). Hat tip to Post Human Blues.
- New species of glowing mushrooms. And that’s before you eat one!
- Al Gore says Earth is in full-scale planetary emergency.
- Study finds that football referees really do favour the home team.
- Jeff Han demonstrates one possible way we could be interacting with computers in the near future (video). So cool, can’t wait for this sort of gear to be a commercial reality.
- New technology points to a biometric future in which our bodies become our passwords.
- New satellites use artificial intelligence to pick new ‘targets’ autonomously. Someone tell these guys to watch the Terminator movies…
- US Department of Defense says that by 2015 one-third of its fighting forces will be robotic. See above comment on the Terminator thingy.
- Mystery boom damages UK houses.
- Could Ecstasy be a brain booster for Parkinson’s sufferers?
- Minerals in Martian soil suggest there was once a planet-wide ocean.
- Before Roswell, there was Aurora.
- Move over Dan Brown, the latest buzz in publishing is getting atheists to attack religion.
- Speaking of: is Richard Dawkins delusional?
- Artifacts from the First Temple period have been recovered from dirt removed from the Temple Mount.
- How about sifting through the dirt at a few of the locations listed by Sean Kingsley in his new book God’s Gold: The Quest for the Lost Temple Treasure of Jerusalem (Amazon US and UK)?
- Scholar’s discredited theory on the Dead Sea Scrolls may be correct after all.
- War of words erupts over sale of ancient gospel texts.
- Ancient Egyptian festival celebrated with sex, drugs and (Egyptian) rock’n’roll. Are those party-goers snorting Nymphaea caerulea?
- India enshrines the remains of the Buddha after nearly 2000 years.
Oops, I almost forgot… Thanks Kat.
Quote of the Day:
Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.
Thomas Jefferson
