Hey, hey! It’s so good to finally be back! Being off the internet for a solid month was weird. For one thing, I discovered how awful tv programming has become. I still have a lot of catching up to do, so sorry if there are any repeats in today’s news.
- Ancient Greek computer had surprising sun tracker.
- How a ‘Jester god’ revealed oldest Mayan royal tomb.
- China’s clan citadels turning into ghost villages.
- How centuries of flooding turned the ancient Chinese into seafarers.
- Another mystery of Ancient Egypt: For a poor, malnourished, unmummified weaver, teenaged boy, Nakht, had an extensively personalised high-end coffin.
- This could be the first ever portrait of Jesus — on the cover of one of 70 lead books hidden in a cave for nearly 2,000 years.
- Is this the grave of the real Robin Hood? Historian claims farmer buried in an unmarked tomb is the man behind the legend. David Baldwin’s Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked is available at Amazon US & UK.
- A letter from Benjamin Franklin on calming stormy seas and the first English description of a cigarette being rolled are among documents released by the Royal Society.
- Archaeologists outraged as, with the help of the British Museum, new TV series endorses metal-detecting ‘plunderers’. Plunderers?! Metal-detector enthusiasts have uncovered some of Britain’s greatest treasures.
- Witch trial that convicted eight women 300 years ago is reinvestigated; new evidence shows ‘victim’ was an outrageous liar.
- Wiccan woman claims the TSA fired her for being a witch after co-worker accused her of casting a spell on her.
- How can rational scientists think their analysis of petroglyphs will ‘rock creationists’ claims’ that humans lived with dinosaurs?
- The Truth, Still Inconvenient: The climate deniers can’t handle it when one of their own goes off-script.
- Floods, earthquakes, landslides: 2011 has a been a year of disasters. Bill McKibben asks, are we to blame? Plus survivors’ stories.
- New research shows mangrove trees excel at storing carbon — two to four times more carbon than tropical rainforests. When they’re destroyed, they release as much as 10 percent of all worldwide deforestation emissions – even though mangroves account for just 0.7 percent of tropical forest area.
- Ever wonder why the red planet is red? About 180 million years ago, a naturally occurring nuclear blast may have wiped out everything on Mars.
- Same planet, same view, so why do Russian satellite images of Earth look so different to NASA’s?
- Backward stars point to galactic cannibalism.
- The artificial leaf researchers claim will turn every home into its own power station.
- YouTube: Hong Kong architect Gary Chang transforms a tiny 330-square-foot apartment into 24 rooms.
- How to fight fires with electricity. Forget the hose . . . firefighters of the future may be putting out fires with a wave of an electric wand.
- The mind-altering effects of cannabis have been teased apart its from pain-relieving action, pointing to painkillers that don’t get you high. Kill-joys.
- LSD trip gives magic squares a whole new dimension.
- Podcast: What is ‘the self’? And where exactly is it?
- FBI asks public to help them crack the code in a murder case.
- Masturbation calms restless leg syndrome.
- Decades after the Enterprise was mothballed, why is Star Trek still boldly going?
A big thanks to Russell S.
Quote of the Day:
Life is made up of the most differing, unforeseen, contradictory, ill-assorted things; it is brutal, arbitrary, disconnected, full of inexplicable, illogical and contradictory disasters which can only be classified under the heading of ‘Other news in brief’.
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), Pierre et Jean, 1888
