You may be aroused, outraged, pissed-off, or amazed by today’s news, but at least you won’t be bored.
- Rat Scabies entertains Sauniere Society’s symposium with an account of his visit to Rennes-le-Chateau.
- Archaeologist in Jerusalem believes she has found the palace of King David. Others disagree. No log-in required for this shorter article.
- Radar pinpoints tomb of King Edward the Confessor, who died in 1066.
- Archaeologists who found tomb of Edward the Confessor under the mosaic floor at Westminster Abbey also found 13th and 14th century royal tombs in under-floor chambers.
- Newfound Greek sites are really ancient.
- Earliest known bird-like animal had dinosaur feet.
- No safe ground for life to stand on during world’s largest mass extinction.
- Scientists try to explain why impressions in volcanic ash just can’t be human footprints. Nice photo.
- Wollemi rock art shows Aboriginal Dreaming.
- Never conquered, damaged, or destroyed, St Catherine’s Monastery has been collecting manuscripts for 17 centuries – maybe longer, since some of its texts have proved to be older than the monastery itself.
- Modern tools to unlock Ancient Texts.
- Inventor James Watt: building up a head of steam.
- Possible miniature solar system may orbit red dwarf star.
- Data from Huygens space probe shows Titan to be an extraordinary world, but unlikely to support life.
- Hubble captures detailed view of Crab Nebula, revealing intricate epitaph of supernova explosion.
- Supermassive black hole spreads its sphere of influence.
- New optical vortex coronograph might allow astronomers to directly view extrasolar planets without annoying glare from the parent star.
- Did Huygens land on Titan just as the tide went out?
- European and American space scientists say nearly everything they thought they ‘knew’ about Mars is wrong.
- Saturn’s moon Enceladus is spewing fountains of highly pressurized water ice hundreds of miles into space.
- Buried craters and underground ice: first direct information about the deep subsurface of Mars.
- SOHO spacecraft survived at least three near-death experiences to reach the ripe old age of 10 years.
- When galaxies collide, what happens to the matter that gets spun off in the collision’s wake?
- Neutron stars – not black holes – at center of galaxies.
- Ocean floor geysers could hold key to understanding our evolution.
- Mother Nature thumbs nose at the official end of hurricane season by creating another storm.
- Flow of current in the Atlantic Conveyor has slowed 30% since 1957.
- Scores of countries meet to discuss way forward on climate change, but US stance poses hurdles.
- CO2: This time it’s personal, with proposed ‘personal permits to pollute’ being dubbed Domestic Tradable Quotas.
- We must cut demand to have any hope of solving the energy crisis.
- Need a job? Pack up your travel trailer and head to New Orleans, where even Burger King is offering a $6000 signing bonus. Here’s a little about what you’ll face in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Lower Ninth Ward, where you’ll definitely need a face mask, and where, yesterday, former residents finally got a chance to ‘look and leave‘.
- Three months after Katrina, Mississippi’s coastal towns are little more than desolate piles of debris. If you have broadband, check out the video.
- Sonar tests at site of New Orleans’ major levee failure confirm steel reinforcements aren’t nearly as deep as Corp of Engineers intended, and LSU modeling shows Corps levee design was flawed and doomed to failure anyway.
- Nano-cages ‘fill up’ with hydrogen.
- New nanotech theory could have radical implications for our understanding of life.
- Through millions of years of evolution, many species have come up with elegant solutions to problems that confront designers of traffic flow, electronic messaging, electricity transmission, and other network systems.
- Fruit bats may be acting as reservoirs of Ebola virus.
- Robot mouse has real whiskers.
- Growth hormone levels influence neurodevelopment and may underlie association of low birth weight and shorter height with lower I.Q.
- Men and women differ in brain use during same tasks.
- Even after years in a loving adoptive home, hormonal changes make bonding difficult for children neglected in early months. sign-in: dailygrail@aol.com pw: TDGreader
- In video games, not all mayhem is created equal.
- Scientists discover neurons in the mammalian brainstem that focus exclusively on new, novel sounds.
- Cannibis intoxication doubles risk of fatal road crashes.
- Imaging shows similarities in brains of marijuana smokers, schizophrenics.
- Why losing weight is easier than keeping it off for good.
- Second boom: How the web is likely to shape up over the next 10 years.
- Review: Firefox 1.5, now available.
- Internet addiction: Specialists say up to 10% of America’s 189 million internet users have dependency as destructive as alcoholism and drug abuse.
- Craving a virtual caress? Inventor of the cyber hug suit predicts high demand because children will want to hug parents who are away on business trips. Perhaps he hasn’t heard that, worldwide, porn rakes in $58 billion a year.
- The number of UK men paying for sex has nearly doubled in the past decade.
- From Lord Byron to Dylan Thomas, famous arty philanderers may have mental illness to thank for their behaviour, psychologists report.
- How the brain builds body image.
- Coffee jump-starts short-term memory.
- The VA’s PTSD program has found that Native American veterans benefit from medicine mens’ traditional ceremonies.
- Nobel economist launches poverty research institute.
- World Unbalanced: Globalization’s Dark Side.
- As the rest of us struggle to get by on the meager remains, the wealthy class is splitting into two elites, one national and threatened by outsourcing, the other international and profiting wildly from globalization.
- Chinese spy case reveals interest in a “space-launched magnetic levitational platform”. Anyone care to speculate on what that might be?
- Police data unreliable source for identifying trends in violent crime.
- Newspeak: Iraq no longer has any ‘insurgents’.
- Al-Jazeera staff create new blog, Don’t Bomb Us, in response to a British memo documenting alleged remarks by Pres. Bush that he would like to bomb their workplace. Check out readers comments below article.
- British MP Boris Johnson says, “I’ll go to jail to print the truth about Bush and al-Jazeera.” Comments follow.
- Arab newspapers express anger and disgust over al-Jazeera ‘plot’.
- Bush administration characterizes the al-Jazeera memo as outlandish, absurd, a joke, but a senior official at 10 Downing St. says, ‘I don’t think Tony Blair thought it was a joke.’
- Pentagon pays Iraqi papers to print its ‘good news’ stories.
- Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, says Cheney ‘may be guilty of war crime‘.
- Behind the phosphorus clouds are war crimes within war crimes.
- Most senior US general has defended the use of weapons containing white phosphorus in Iraq.
- The CIA, accused of operating a covert network of interrogation centres in eastern Europe, has landed more than 300 flights at European airports. Condi says she’ll investigate.
- A culture of bribery exists in the US Congress.
- The plot thickens as Abramoff’s partner cops a plea, and Washington officials brace for what may be the biggest influence-peddling scandal in decades.
- Business as usual – corrupt: The moral arc of a Washington career used to have four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition and corruption. That’s still true today, only faster.
- Election boycott widens: A fourth Venezuelan party has withdrawn from Sunday’s election amid a row over electronic voting machines.
- Pakistani TV’s gutsy reporting of desperate quake victims has irked the government, already under fire for its slow response.
- The Godfather of India’s top syndicate controls a criminal network that reaches into 14 countries, with a small army of contract killers, smugglers, and extortionists at his command – and he’s thrown in his lot with al Qaeda and other jihadists.
- ‘What do you think this is – the Army, where you shoot ’em a mile away? You’ve gotta get up close like this, and – bada-bing – you blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.’: To finance worldwide terror, terrorist groups are transforming their operating cells into criminal gangs.
- Drawing on a trove of recently declassified documents, new book, Ultimate Sacrifice, links Mafia and plot against Castro to JFK assassination. Amazon US & UK.
- British diplomats lied about Indonesia’s 1975 invation of East Timor, and worked with the US and Australia to cover up atrocities.
- Zambia’s government bans an evangelical church after allegations that it was involved in satanic rituals.
- Scientists to check Nepal’s Buddha boy.
- Early Automobiles and Airplanes: Why Americans Didn’t Care About Henry Ford and Orville and Wilbur Wright Until After 1909.
- Bright idea: A U.S. farmer has painted his animals florescent orange.
- Dear, dear, not bread and beer: British Bakeries’ Bristol factory is baking up bread and mice.
- When deer attack.
- By truck from Milwaukee to Chicago, by ship to first Belgium, then France, and flying in style from France to Milwaukee: Emily the cat is finally back home, and perhaps a little wiser, as world travelers usually are.
- Window washers go on wild ride 12 stories above ground. With you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it video.
- There’s no outdoing this home’s Christmas display. Great video.
- The very un-merry sanitizing of the spirit of the season. I’m siding with the fundies on this one: No Christmas? Fine! Then I’m not buying Christmas presents. See how your bottom line likes them apples.
- The tragically short life and exorcism of the real Emily Rose.
- Iran’s president claims celestial green light descended on him when he addressed world leaders at the UN in September.
- John Lennon at his most honest: Taped 1970 interview with Rolling Stone to be aired on BBC Radio 4 at 1900 GMT, on 3 December.
Quote of the Day:
The hardest thing to convey, in writing history or teaching history, is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened.
Historian David McCullough
