So much strange – and anti-strange – news, reading it all could make your head spin. But not to worry — for me, a little aspirin and caffeine cast that demon headache right back out.
- Anti-alchemy boffins transmute gold into anti-strange anti-hypermatter.
- Glozal finder, Emile Fradin, who has died aged 103, was either one of the most productive archeological forgers ever known, or, as his supporters claim, the victim in France’s archaeological equivalent of the Dreyfus case.
- Uri Geller is seeking Egyptian treasure on his own Scottish island.
- Virtual simulations demonstrate that Leonardo da Vinci’s calculations for huge horse statue were on the mark. Leonardo da Vinci conceived, but never finished, this project — a failure that has long puzzled scholars. Video.
- New radar map of Mars reveals remnants of a vast ice sheet hidden under the Martian rubble.
- Is there anybody out there? Scientists believe there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy, and millions are being spent trying to find them.
- Jon Ronson speaks to the man who will welcome our alien overlords, Prof. Paul Davies.
- Russia to halt space tours.
- Snowball Earth: Glaciers, ice packs once met at the Equator.
- Major new inquest into the death of the dinosaurs: SciAm’s report on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction.
- Climate scientists hit back at the sceptics with new research they say has uncovered the ‘fingerprint’ of man-made global warming.
- A leading scientific institute allowed its evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into climate science to be influenced anonymously by an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion.
- The heat over bubbling Arctic methane is premature.
- The way of the dinosaurs: Skeptics ignore climate change at our own risk.
- Climate change skepticism a litmus test for Republicans.
- Organized climate-change skepticism traces back to the three founders of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute. You can preorder Naomi Oreskes’ book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, due out May 25th, at Amazon US & UK.
- Creationists seek to stop the teaching of global warming.
- In a book of memoirs, renowned exorcist Fr. Gabriele Amorth says, in the Vatican there are members of Satanic sects. When asked if members of the clergy are involved, he responded, ‘There are priests, monsignors and also cardinals!’
- For sale: Two captured ghosts, trapped by an exorcist inside bottles of holy water to make them sleepy.
- Update: Two ‘bottled ghosts’ have sold for NZ2830 (£1305, $1,954) in an online auction in New Zealand.
- Defectors say Church of Scientology hides abuse.
- Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Michael Prescott presents an interpretation of history through the writings of a medium who claimed to have been present at several seances held at the White House.
- Fish and frogs aren’t the only weird things that have rained from the skies.
- Creepy crawlies: Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope pictures of insects and spiders.
- Nobel laureate Ahmed H. Zewail: The scientist with the fastest eyes.
- Did life on Earth begin twice? Could the Mono Lake arsenic prove there is a shadow biosphere?
- The world’s most useful tree produces food, oil for lighting, cooking and biogas, and crop fertiliser; and now, it can also purify drinking water, thanks to free instructions posted online.
- Light keeps spinach fresh and producing new vitamins, even after it’s picked. Uh oh, you know what this means: the light in the refrigerator should stay on all the time.
- HIV hides out in bone marrow cells.
- Survival instincts: Comparison of Titanic and Lusitania shows self-preservation is trumped by social pressure when there is time to think.
- Neuromarketing: MRI brain scans to be used to ‘design’ political candidates’ — as well as other, presumably more-reliable, products.
- Cyberwar declared as China hunts for secrets. In the past year, the number of attacks on US government agencies rose to 1.6 billion a month.
- Fighting the hackers: In a command centre a huge map of the world keeps a running log of global attacks in Tokyo’s Cyber Emergency Centre.
- Police arrest Mariposa botnet masters, seize sensitive data of 800,000. 12million+ host computers were compromised including the networks of 500 of the US Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks.
- UK’s Ofcom boss, Ed Richards, wades into Net Neutrality row. He sounds nutty as a fruitcake to me.
- Microsoft sends flowers to Internet Explorer 6 funeral. Meanwhile, IE 8 is still not mingling well with 2,000 highly-visited sites, and Windows users must patch their systems every five days, on average, to stay ahead of security vulnerabilities. More.
- Mozilla lays the foundation for the web’s next 100 years.
- The shocking truth about Tasers: A commuter in a diabetic coma, an 89-year-old man and children as young as 12 — just some of the targets of British police armed with skin-piercing 50,000-volt Taser guns.
- Police got teen drunk for confession.
- It’s who you kill that matters.
- Acrobatic thieves hit N.J. Best Buy avoiding cameras, motion sensors, alarms in daring heist. Speaking of thieves…
- UK’s bankster bailout may be paid for by new tax on food.
Big thanks to Baldrick and Greg.
Quote of the Day:
Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.
Dr. David Archer’s analogy, here, regarding the recent news about methane leaking from the Arctic seabed.
