A feast for both brains and eyes.
- Scientists find missing link – and it’s a fish finger.
- Culture fundamentally alters the brain.
- New contact lenses go bionic.
- Is plastic making us fat?
- Directionally impaired? Scientists discover why some people get lost more often than others.
- Do you want to live forever, or would 800 years be long enough?
- Lab creates ‘darkest ever’ substance known to science.
- Researchers challenge water-flow model. More interesting than it sounds.
- High tech mapping is redefining international borders. Dang – I want to see the rest of that photo!
- Nuclear revival rekindles waste concerns.
- Hundreds of medicinal plants are facing extinction.
- Honeybees may disappear completely from Britain by 2018, causing calamitous economic and environmental problems.
- Armada of robot submarines and marine sensors to warn of failing Gulf Stream.
- Antarctic melt may outstrip prediction.
- A powerful volcano erupted under Antarctica 2000 years ago, and may still be active today.
- Costly fuel means costly food: the cost of 60 internationally traded foodstuffs climbed 37 percent last year, on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006 — and the trend has accelerated this winter.
- An interview with author Philip Pullman who champions a new brand of environmentalism.
- Descent into darkness enlightening for Sydney.
- First global Earth Hour: 8 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, March 29.
- Cargo ship pulled by giant, parachute-shaped kite could herald age of greener commercial shipping.
- Radiation from mobile phones wrecks your sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to new research sponsored by the mobile phone companies themselves.
- Crazy new cell phone: big and stationary. So you won’t lose it?
- Big Brother’s Animal Farm: Gov’t program to track every beast.
- Mark Morford: Guess which drug is illegal? One deadens nerves, barely works, has foul side effects. The other helps you feel God.
- Spruce Grove residents speculate on cause of mysterious octopus-shaped hole punched through half-metre thick ice over a frozen pond.
- Ghostly activity picks up at resort in mountains.
- Bigfoot believers: Wildlife educator tours the country to share his theories.
- One-track mind in Bigfoot hunt: Sasquatch student prowls for ape-men proof.
- Who owns the moon? Shady moon peddlers look like lunar Donald Trumps, now that civilian space travel appears feasible. But are moon plots legal?
- If ET calls, let it ring.
- “We should resist the efforts of Russian scientists to contact aliens who could threaten our very existence.”
- Dowser says, ‘It’s amazing to me.’
- Two AI pioneers. Two bizarre suicides. What really happened?
- Extraordinary pictures of the alphabet – spelled out on butterflies’ wings.
- Weirdest and most endangered creatures. Now that’s a salamander!
Thanks, Rick.
Quote of the Day:
The women’s movement of the 19th century grew out of a huge thrust for social change that gripped America like a fever between about 1830 and 1880. Scores of new ideas seized the popular consciousness and found huge, fanatical followings: utopianism, spiritualism, populism, vegetarianism, socialism, women’s suffrage, black emancipation, tax reform, mysticism, occultism, second adventism, temperance, transcendentalism. People dipped into these social possibilities as if pulling sweets from a bag. One group, styling itself the Nothingarians, rallied behind the cry ‘No God, no government, no marriage, no money, no meat, no tobacco, no sabbath, no skirts, no church, no war and no slaves!”
Never before or since, in short, has there been a more confused and bewildering age. To read on one hand the New York Times castigating women for saying ‘what a cunning hat’ and on the other hand to read Angela Heywood publicly arguing for the right to say ‘fuck’, it is all but impossible to believe that we are dealing with the same people in the same country in the same century.
Bill Bryson, in Sex and Other Distractions
