News Briefs 15-10-2012

Your loyal news admins are still running on fumes.

• Faster-than-light travel may be possible.
• NASA working on faster-than-light drive capable of WARP TEN.
• New exoplanet is twice Earth's size and made largely of diamond.
• Incredible cosmic spiral helps unravel details of stellar evolution.
• Curiosity Rover finds rock type that’s never been seen on Mars.
• The surface of Saturn's moon Titan has the consistency of soft, wet sand with a fragile crust on top.
• Shiny asteroid Vesta once had a magnetic field.
• The Triptych Enigma: Freemasonry's forbidden ancient 'universal religion' rediscovered.
• Kennewick Man: Scientists unravel 9,300-year-old skeleton's past.
• Egypt reopens pyramid at Giza after revamp. Nice photos.
• Immense elk-shaped geoglyph found in Russia's Ural Mountains. Images.
• The woman who came back from the dead.
• BBC film crew held at gunpoint after trying to sneak into Nevada's Area 51 military base.
• Extended consciousness: Grant Cameron on the connection between ESP, telepathy and UFOs.
• The Stranger Within: Hollywood's foreshadowing of the recent flood of claimed UFO abductions, unexplainable pregnancies, and alien-hybrid children.
• US Navy builds robot modelled on Star Wars' C-3PO to fight fires on board warships.
• In a stunning reversal, the operator of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant says it knowingly avoided implementing some safety measures for the nuclear plant out of fear of causing lawsuits, protests, or the need to close the plant.
• Dogs that went through the Fukushima disaster had post-traumatic stress disorder.
• 25 primate species reported on brink of extinction.
• Reducing the risk of extinction for threatened species and establishing protected areas for nature will cost the world over $76bn dollars annually - just a fifth of what the world spends on soft drinks annually.
• Modern wheat, created by genetic research in the '60s and '70s, is a 'perfect, chronic poison,' doctor says.
• Armageddon zoonoses: Based on historical patterns, experts fear a virus that leaps from animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years.
• Has our war on microbes - and on parasitic worms - left our immune systems prone to dysfunction?
• A hydrothermal marine worm - 525 times its normal size - and other ugly little stars of U.S. microscope firm’s photograph contest.
• The Kraken's Cousin: Searching for the mysterious jumbo squid.
• Weird traits that make octopuses and squid loveable.
• Neural stem cells successfully implanted into brains of four boys.
• How our powerful memories can also bias our decisions.

Hat Tip to GC, Red Pill Junkie, and Graham Hancock.

Quote of the Day:

Parasitic worms also seem to be significant regulators of the immune system, able to elicit just the right balance of ferocity and temperance. Deworming campaigns the world over are promptly and predictably followed by increases in asthma and allergy, and the degree of allergy in a society is inversely proportional to how wormy and dirty it is. Hence, people suffering from allergies and autoimmune diseases are now infecting themselves with hookworms, which—on an anecdotal level at least—has alleviated maladies ranging from MS to autism to celiac disease.

War on microbes (and worms) article.