Not sure how this TEDx talk is still alive, given recent events, but I'm glad it is. Award-winning writer Patricia Pearson describes a strange event that happened to her sister at the time their father died, and how it inspired her to research further into the mysteries of consciousness and the possibility of an afterlife:

When we found out...what had happened to my sister on this particular night, it instantly transformed the narrative of what was a really brutal shock of losing my father, all of a sudden it took on a kind of mythic resonance in fact, and it became the story of how my father somehow went to my sister and reassured her, and then went ahead of her, and was there for her when she died, as she did, two months later.

Now I'm a journalist and so I was immediately extremely preoccupied with the question of what the hell just happened?

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

• The dark side of the Milky Way?
• Hints of sunken history off the coast of Galilee.
• Unlocking new worlds, one particle accelerator at a time.
• The ghostly shadow of Saturn’s rings.
• Are your genes under patent?
• Mayan calendar, dated.
• Mayan collapse, documented.
• Doomsday clock outlasts designer.
• Have carbon, will travel.
• When the world is runnin' down, make the best of what's still around... and geoengineer.
• And when greenhouse gasses collide, said George Pal to his bride…
• Animal, heal thyself.
• Stressed? Try not to flare up.
• Flying the friendly, hacked skies?
• I’ll take my rice unleaded, s’il vous plait.
• Feeling the vibe, defined.
• Obama and the asteroid lasso.
• This week’s evidence of the looming robot uprising… ‘Bot Bands.

With thanks to U.U. Dave!

Quote of the Day:

“By denying scientific principles, one may maintain any paradox."

Galileo Galilei

Back in December I linked to a Kickstarter campaign for the game Consortium, being put together by a number of people who are also keen Grail readers. That campaign was put on hold not long after as the team felt the need to regroup and rethink their strategy, but has since returned with a vengeance with a new Kickstarter campaign that is kicking ass - they're now 99% funded with a week still to go. I've been a bit slow out of the blocks announcing the renewed fundraising campaign, but Grail readers now have the chance to push the Consortium campaign the last few hundred dollars into being a successfully funded Kickstarter. Head on over to Kickstarter and check out the packages available to see if there's something that takes your fancy.

The new game is a follow-on from the universe outlined in an A.R.G. that we linked to a couple of years ago - check it out if you want to get in on the ground floor and get a taste of Consortium:

Our flash-based A.R.G. started in 2010, and acts as the back story to everyone and everything happening in CONSORTIUM - and it is absolutely 100% free to play. Three years of A.R.G. updates (with the help of the public!) has helped us build the level of depth required to truly make the CONSORTIUM game world as immersive as possible.

To begin your own explorations of the other world – click “Experience” at INTERDIMENSIONALGAMES.COM and then wait for the Moon to eclipse the Sun on the space scene. Click the anomaly once it appears. This will take you to when we first connected to their world, back in 2010. The system will allow you to ‘play along’ as if you were with us at that time. NOTE: Keep an eye on the Progress Bar on the top right of the screen, as this will tell you how close you are to being caught up to present time.

Consortium at Kickstarter

The latest issue (Vol 4, Number 2) of the free PDF journal Paranthropology ("anthropological approaches to the paranormal") is now available to download (or you can read it via the embedded version above). The new release is a timely one, given the recent TEDx debacle, with a number of articles discussing Rupert Sheldrake's work. Here's the complete rundown of features in the latest issue:

• "The Para-Anthropology of UFO 
Abductions: The Case for the UTH" - Steven Mizrach.
• "Review/Commentary: Rupert 
Sheldrake’s Science Set Free" - 
John R. DeLorez.
• "Scientific Controversies 
Shaping the Worldview of the 21st Century: Sheldrake's 
Theory of Non-local Memory Revisited" - Mark A. Schroll.
• "An Idea Whose Time Has Come: 
Morphic Resonance and the Birthing of a New Paradigm" - Zelda Hall.
• "

Science Betrayed?: Rupert 
Sheldrake and The Science Delusion" - Margaret Gouin.
• "Critical Analysis of Culturally 
Intrusive Interpretations of Phenomenological and 
Parapsychological Scientific Studies" - Kaitlyn Kane.
• "Rehabilitating The Neglected 'Similar': Confronting The Issue Of Cross-Cultural Similarities In The Study Of Religions" - Gregory Shushan.
• "The Kardecian Spiritualist Movement in Argentina" - Juan Corbetta & Fabiana Savall.
• REVIEW: "The Voice of Rolling Thunder: A Medicine Man's 
Wisdom for Walking the Red Road" - Mark A. Schroll

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.

Tomorrow will mark my 6th year as a Grailer.

Thanks for putting up with me for so long ;)

• NASA on (a)steroids: Proposed $17.7 billion budget focuses on preventing that we go the way of the dinos.
• NASA's Pokemoning of an asteroid, in pictures.
• "Houston we have a problem... with poop!"
• USS Pew Pew: Navy laser cannon shoots down drone.
• Dark lightning: Just when you thought it was safe to travel by air again...
• A playground to commemorate a classic UFO sighting --and maybe incite them to land once again, using the children as bait...
• Radio 3Fourteen interview with Mike Clelland: Owls, UFOs & Stanley Kubrick.
• RIP Sir Robert Edwards, pioneer of In Vitro fecundation.
• Francis Crick's letter to his son, in which he explains the discovery of DNA's double helix, sells for a whopping $6 million.
• The Bitcoin Revolution.
• Cutest. Bat. Ever!
• Walking upside down: the telltale of a witch... or Spiderman.
• Shadow people also like to spend their holidays in the Mayan Riviera.
• Mind over matter: core body controlled by thought alone.
• At 87, Peter Byrne continues his search for Sasquatch (via Cryptomundo).
• Red Pill of the Day: Man hospitalized with live eel stuck up his rear end. Because gerbils are sooo 1980's.

Thanks to Alan Boyle, for helping me find my online family back in 2007.

Quote of the Day:

"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."

~H.P. Lovecraft

Israeli archaeologists have discovered Jesus' Fortress of Solitude a massive stone structure at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee in Israel:

The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of "unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders," and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons the researchers said... Rising nearly 32 feet (10 meters) high, it has a diameter of about 230 feet (70 meters).

...The structure was first detected in the summer of 2003 during a sonar survey of the southwest portion of the sea. Divers have since been down to investigate, they write in the latest issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

"Close inspection by scuba diving revealed that the structure is made of basalt boulders up to 1 m (3.2 feet) long with no apparent construction pattern," the researchers write in their journal article. "The boulders have natural faces with no signs of cutting or chiselling. Similarly, we did not find any sign of arrangement or walls that delineate this structure."

They say it is definitely human-made and probably was built on land, only later to be covered by the Sea of Galilee as the water level rose. "The shape and composition of the submerged structure does not resemble any natural feature. We therefore conclude that it is man-made and might be termed a cairn," the researchers write.

Based on nearby megalithic sites, such as the monumental site of Khirbet Beteiha, 19 miles to the north-east of the submerged structure, researchers believe that the mysterious monument may date back more than 4000 years.

Livescience: Mysterious Stone Structure Discovered Beneath Sea of Galilee

What are you afraid of?

• An autistic Indian girl's seeming ability to read her mother's mind.
• Will we ever communicate telepathically?
• If so, 'passthoughts' might not be such a good idea.
• Is nonlocal consciousness research now forbidden territory for TED?
• Nazca lines ripped up by quarry.
• Erik Davis talks Exegesis of Philip K. Dick on Gnostic Radio.
• Scientists discover evidence of dark lightning.
• International Space Station set for 'spooky' quantum entanglement experiment.
• Long-awaited study questions the power of prayer: patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications.
• Archaeologists find 10,000 objects from Roman London.
• Mysterious structure discovered beneath Sea of Galilee.
• Shodan: the scariest search engine on the Internet.
• 'Haunted house' at site of unearthed skeletons.
• Man wriggles rat's tail with his mind.
• Sniffing Rosemary can increase memory by 75%.
• Beardyman presents the Beardytron_5000.
• Long-exposure neon waterfalls.

Quote of the Day:

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

W.B. Yeats

The first trailer for Neill (District 9) Blomkamp's new sci-fi movie Elysium has been released, and it looks excellent (see above). I love how the trailer features a melding of the utopian 1970s conceptual artwork of toroidal space colonies (which I posted about back in 2010) and the gritty battle vibe of modern game series like Mass Effect and Halo in the scenes on Earth (though given Blomkamp was originally said to be working on a Halo movie, not overly surprising I guess).

I'll also casually note that in my 2010 post I thought it would be great if someone could put a Hans Zimmer Inception foghorn over images of those toroidal space colonies...and the Elysium trailer does exactly that. Hopefully my royalty cheque is in the mail... *cough*

Come find refuge from all the boring political back and forth and have fun with today's Grail news:

• Galileo's mummified fingers, a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, and a Renaissance UFO. Just some of the topics that could make an appearance in Dan Brown's impending next bestseller.
• Scientists can see what you're dreaming.
• Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe…on the opposite coast of South America. I'm not saying it was aliens, but...
• The TEDx mess hits the mainstream media (and TED's Chris Anderson continues to dig himself deeper into a hole in the comments).
• Ghost and UFO sightings are down. Psychics are in decline. Are we more discerning now, or just afraid to trust anything?
• Druids and pagans to be allowed time off work for sacred rites under new guidelines.
• Are the New Atheists Islamophobic? Sam Harris responds.
• Consciousness research pioneer Charles Tart talks about atheism, spirituality and parapsychology.
• Thinking differently about thinking: neuroscience needs its Einstein.
• Magic mushroom study into treating depression hits red-tape stumbling block.
• I've got your uncanny valley right here. I'm now going to have nightmares about sentient computers murdering me while rambling about yoghurt parfaits being full of frozen fruit...
• NASA's secret plan to bag an asteroid.
• Rocket powered by nuclear fusion could send humans to Mars in just 30 days.
• Because, in case you didn't know, Mars is just a wee bit further away than the Moon, the most distant point humans have travelled so far.
• All those moments will remain, like tears in space.
• Kepler watches a white dwarf warp space-time.
• Scientists go underground in search of mysterious particles.
• Image of the Day: the hand of a corpse mummified by mesmerism.

Quote of the Day:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider

Francis Bacon

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

...An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of a suitable impact crater, even in satellite images.

...In 1908, a massive explosion flattened 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia. Although there was no sign of a meteorite impact, scientists now think an extraterrestrial object of some kind must have exploded above Tunguska. Wasson wondered if a similar aerial burst could have produced enough heat to turn the ground to glass in the Egyptian desert.

(h/t Inannawhimsey)