“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders."

• Testing the limits of space-time.
• The beginning of time, redefined.
• Not to burst your bubble…
• In search of the fifth force of nature.
• Massive sunspot takes shape.
• Nebulas go 3-D.
• Meteor strikes woman... in 1954.
• A spoonful of sugar helps Martian soil go down.
• New sentinel takes to the skies.
• India prepares first Mars mission.
• Siberia prepares for potential permafrost meltdown.
• Humans on Mars-- At what cost? Just ask the millionaires.
• Making it plasma rain.
• When mosquitoes became self-aware.
• Dinosaurs vs. binary asteroids…
• The asteroid that didn’t hit Earth.
• Methane on the rise.
• Bees get a charge from flowers.
• Deepest undersea vents offer hostile, welcoming environment.
• The touchscreen laptop has arrived.
• Learning to speak via song?
• Lego creationist myth, demystified.
• This week’s evidence of the looming robo-pocalypse… the cyborg heart.

Quote of the Day:

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading…”

Lau Tzu

Dan Brown's latest book Inferno is due out on the 14th of May, 2013. And as is usual with Mr. Brown, he can't resist having a bit of fun by hiding secrets and codes about the place for those willing enough to seek them out, well in advance of the book's release. As you can see from the video above, one of those appears to be that the publication date of the book (5.14.13) was chosen for a very specific reason: when flipped/read right to left it gives the first five digits of pi (3.1415).

To learn more about the mysteries, history and locations that Dan Brown will likely be exploring in Inferno, be sure to download a copy of Inside Dan Brown's Inferno from the Kindle store (just $2.99!), for reading on your eBook reader, iPad or iPhone, or home computer. Using some of these hidden clues that Dan Brown has left about 'for those with eyes to see', the book is an excellent primer that fills you in on the background information behind Inferno to allow you to enjoy the book to its fullest.

Click on the cover below to go get a copy:

Ay olita del alta mar

Díme si algún día tú volverás...

• Thanks to last year's discovery of the Higgs, scientists can now predict how we'll get wiped out by an alternative universe. Well that was money well spent!
• 'Big news' concerning dark matter coming soon, scientists say. Because those LHC dudes can't have all the fun.
• Scorching tiny exoplanet discovered. I propose we name it planet Yo-mama & lighten up astronomer students the world over.
• Curiosity ready to eat Martian dust after successful drilling. What's the binary code for Om Nom Nom?
• Colleges offering courses in Droning. Would it get you extra-credits if you ace Flight Simulator?
• This is what it looks like when you wear Google's augmented reality eyeglasses.
• Dolphins may call each other by name. I'm sure they also bully each other with nicknames like 'Mackerel breath' or 'Flabby fin.'
• No love for the jackalope in the US Senate.
• Chilean chupacabras startles suburban couple.
• Memento Monster: Minnesota Ice Man for sale.
• Watch Who Forted?'s documentary Bigfoot Hunter: Still Searching online for free!
• Chris Carter on Skeptiko: Scientific evidence for life after death is overwhelming.
• The Mystical Math of Rock. And that's the magic numbeeeer....
• Man who died in fire may have spontaneously combusted.
• The MIB at Edgar Allan Poe's grave.
• Red Pill of the Day: Muscovite crows frolic in the snow.

Thanks to Rick, Susan & Johnny Walker

Quote of the Day:

"Will you be able to sidle up next to a Google Glass wearer and say "ok glass, show me midget porn" or are they tied to wearer's voice?"

~Jason Kottke

(via @elakdawalla)

I'm filling some downtime in book-writing by doing some book-writing...

• American space monkeys covered up spy satellite launches. If you're not seeing this in your mind after that headline, I'm disappointed in you.
• Lightning may cause headaches.
• The true story of a 1967 'extraterrestrial contact' incident that changed our view of the cosmos.
• James Randi: Let Survival of the Fittest "act itself out" on those with low IQ and mental aberrations.
• Is it time to give up on skepticism?
• How to be a bad skeptic.
• Third-largest asteroid impact crater discovered in South Australia.
• The top 10 largest meteor craters on Earth.
• Neuroscientists hack into brainwaves to open new frontiers.
• The Singularity is not near.
• Software program could reconstruct the earliest human languages.
• Thousands of dolphins swarm into super mega-pod off San Diego coast.
• Yo dawg! Canines recognise each other in a crowd.
• Haunted house donated after failing to find a buyer.
• TV channel faces fine over psychic claims.
• The first bionic hand that can feel. As long as it can crush the skulls of my enemies, that's all I need.
• The universe may end in a 'Big Slurp'.

Quote of the Day:

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

Robert Anton Wilson

The latest issue (Vol 4, Number 1, Part A) of the free PDF journal Paranthropology ("anthropological approaches to the paranormal") is now available to download. In the new release:

• "Life is Not About Chasing the Wind": Investigating the Connection Between Bodily Experience, Beliefs and Transcendence Amongst Christian Surfers" - Emma Ford
• "Epistemological, Methodological and Ethical Aspects of Conducting Interviews About Anomalous Experiences" - Leonardo Breno Martins
• "A Visit to Point Pleasant: Home of the Mothman" - Simon J. Sherwood
• "Steve Abrams: Psychedelic Trickster" - David Luke
• "Turning to the Affective in Direct Experiences: An Interdisciplinary, Investigative Quest" - Christopher Laursen
• "Fireflies and Shooting Stars: Visual Narratives of Daimonic Intelligence" - Angela Voss
• "A Study of Several Reported Cases of Crisis Apparitions During the American Civil War" - Simon Alexander Hardison
• "Herbal Lore in Central and Eastern European Shamanic Traditions" - Henry Dosedla
• "Out of the Body and Into the Lab: Defining Dr. Alex Tanous' Abilities" - Callum E. Cooper
• "Recognition for Paranthropology and ARC" - Fiona Bowie

And in case you haven't read this great resource before, all of the previous issues remain available to download from the site as well. Don't forget to support the journal with a PayPal donation if you find it interesting and/or useful.

Valued at approximately $6,500 per gram, it's a safe bet that a whole lot of Russians are now looking for meteor fragments.

• Estimates raised for nuclear-sized asteroid blast that hit Russia.
• Meteor's random destruction was caused by infrasound waves, which have not previously been studied in a cityscape.
• 'Wake-up call' revives detection efforts.
• Ed Lu’s plan to save the world.
• Ancient asteroid strike in Australia changed the face of the Earth. More.
• Society's key to finding the next Earth: The Ars guide to exoplanets.
• Scientists studying a bulge on the Earth's surface where the crust is missing have found the exposed mantle contains more magnesium than usual making it lighter.
• Global health threat seen in overuse of antibiotics on Chinese pig farms.
• Laser intended for Mars now used to detect 'honey laundering'. More than a third of honey consumed in the US is smuggled from China and may be tainted with illegal antibiotics and heavy metals.
• Manuka is the best honey for stopping bacterial infections in wounds but not all honeys labelled manuka are the real thing.
• Cell phone tracking system reveals how traffic jams start.
• How neuroscientists are hacking into brain waves.
• Do colors look the same for all of us? A wide-ranging video on perception.
• Paranoid movie watches you watch it and changes to your liking.
• Chimps have better short-term memory than humans.
• Lab chimps successfully treated with anti-depressants.
• Sea bed to be mined for antibiotics.
• Refresher course needed: T. rex did NOT look like Barney. It looked like Jurasic Park's 9,000-pound animatronic T. rex.
• MIT's new nanocapsule medicine could sober you up in seconds.
• Mosh pit madness -- it's a gas.
• Environmental concerns dominate the media in China as newspapers warn of the dangers of toxic smog and polluted ground water.
• Nearly one fifth of all reptiles — turtles, snakes, lizards and crocodiles — are headed toward extinction. Cool photo!

Quote of the Day:

Wouldn’t it be silly if we got wiped out because we weren’t looking? This is a wake-up call from space. We’ve got to pay attention to what’s out there.

Edward Lu, former NASA astronaut who's leading one effort to detect Earth-threatening asteroids and comets.

In scenes reminiscent of the Hollywood movie Armageddon, a meteor shower has lit up the skies over Russia, with the shockwaves blowing out windows and injuring at least 250 people.

People in the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions reported seeing "burning objects" in the sky, which also fell on the cities of Yekaterinburg and Tyumen - a sparsely populated area of about 500km (310 miles).

About 600 sq m (6,000 sq ft) of a roof at a zinc factory collapsed, the Associated Press quoted an interior ministry spokesman as saying.

The Chelyabinsk region is Russia's industrial heartland, an area that has many factories, a nuclear power plant and the Mayak atomic waste storage and treatment centre.

The emergencies ministry said that thousands of rescue workers had been dispatched to the area to provide help to the injured.

Officials say that the shower began after a large meteorite disintegrated above the Urals mountain range and partially burned up in the lower atmosphere - resulting in fragments falling earthwards throughout the Chelyabinsk region.

Coming just hours before the close pass of 2012 DA14, some in the region may well have been thinking the end had come as a series of massive explosive sounds echoed around the region:

“Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

• LHC goes dark.
• After Higgs.
• Speed of supermassive black holes revealed.
• Tiny mutation helps us sweat the small stuff.
• Life… begins.
• How to work in a vacuum, redefined.
• Cosmic ray mystery solved by supernova.
• Unprecedented asteroid flyby.
• The first lunar family.
• It came from above… Asteroids!
• It came from the deep… Supervolcano!
• Wilbur receives sixth sense.
• A snapshot of photosynthesis.
• Teaching a man to fish for prozac perch will be a piece o' cake.
• The end of the forced restart?
• A rogue sun traveling at millions of miles an hour…
• This week’s proof of the looming robot uprising… garden ‘bots.

Many thanks to GT for filling in last week!

Quote of the Day:

“They must have seen ahead what now appears:
 They would bring empires down about our ears. 
And by the example of our Declaration, 
make everybody want to be a nation.”

R. Frost

Update: TED have pulled Graham Hancock's talk for being 'unscientific'. You can read more details about the this controversy here on TDG.

Our good friend Graham Hancock, author of best-selling books on historical mysteries including The Sign and the Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods and Supernatural, recently gave a TEDx Talk in which he discusses his exploration of the South American shamanic brew ayahuasca, and its impact upon his life:

Graham Hancock tells the story of how his 24-year relationship with cannabis was brought to an abrupt halt in 2011 after an encounter with ayahuasca, the sacred visionary brew of the Amazon. Along the way he explores the mystery of death, the problem of consciousness, and the implications for the human future of a society that wages total war on true cognitive liberty.