They say you shouldn’t believe anything until you’ve read the official denial. But you know the kind of things they say. There are no fnords in this news brief.
- A meteorite which residents described as a “huge ball of fire” was spotted yesterday over the eastern Spanish regions of Catalonia and Valencia. We at TDG do not claim responsibility for this phenomenon.
- The latest edition of New Scientist is now available online. Check it out here. This week’s feature article is on the new alchemy and the desceptive world of superatoms.
- Fossils of two new species of 250 million year-old crocodile-like amphibians have been discovered in the African desert in Niger. The TDG staff do not know who hid them there, it wasn’t us.
- Researchers have identified what may be the perfect place for a Moon base, a crater rim near the lunar north pole that’s in near-constant sunlight yet not far from suspected stores of water ice. We aren’t sure, but we don’t think Bill scouted the site.
- Three new beetles of the genus Agathidium have been named after members of the current US administration: A. bushi, A. cheneyi and A. rumsfeldi. “No Comment”.
- The strange case of a man who believed he was possessed by a spirit and was successfully treated by medication. Unusually however, the article mentioned that other people had seen the ghost.
- A Texas mother claims her son was involved in a teenage “vampire cult” that was recently planning to kill and bathe in their victim’s blood. No Grail staff are known to be members of the undead (although Kat keeps strange hours).
- Here are the top 10 myths about gurus. No TDG staffer claims to be a guru – we leave that to others who write in the obfuscatory verbiage that gurus like to use…
- In Ireland, an epidemic of animal mutilations leads to the deaths of over 300 sheep who all had their tongues cut out.
- There’s a medium in New York who says she talks to tomatoes and they talk back! No-one on the Daily Grail staff has ever had their dinner answer them back.
- Hi-tech spying methods will be used to pierce the Vatican’s thick walls next week when cardinals gather in the Sistine Chapel to name a papal successor. It would be beneath us to use such methods to get an inside track and place a huge bet on the outcome.
- The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture has officially denied that it covered up evidence of mad cow disease in U.S. cattle.
- Two women have filed lawsuits claiming a psychologist at an Illinois hospital used witchcraft during treatments and threatened patients. One suit also alleges that she said she was a superior being brought to Earth in a spaceship. We are fairly sure that no-one here at TDG is a superior alien being.
- Do you believe in unicorns? They were in the bible until the 19th century.
- Artificial intelligence and robotics expert Rod Brooks forecasts robots may take on an increasingly significant role in people’s lives in the next 50 years. You could never get a robot to do the Daily Grail news – it’s not science, it’s art.
- Stephen Hawking: ‘The universe has many alternative histories, but which is real?’ The one with no fnords in it, of course.
- DARPA wants a a “neurally controlled artificial limb” like the one Luke gets after Vader cuts of his hand within the next four years.
- Want a good reason to dislike RFID passports? Terrorists could use the signal to find you in a crowd.
- Oops – A burnt rubber doll has been mistaken for a badly injured alien and taken to a hospital in Brazil. It appears to be a practical joke and we had nothing to do with it.
- Michael Griffin, a physicist who has worked in space programs both private and public, was confirmed Wednesday by the US Senate as the 11th administrator of NASA.
Quote of the Day:
Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.
Gary Zukav
