…and New Year’s desserts. For your convenience, here’s a link to Sunday’s News Briefs. Hey, I figured after such a long break, you’d enjoy a double dose. 😉
- 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet reveals “Noah’s” ark was round.
- Beyond 1984: New device turns thoughts into speech.
- The real Frankenstein experiment: One man’s mission to create a living mind inside a machine. Please, not in The (elevator) Shaft — miserating through half the movie was bad enough.
- What happened to the hominids who were smarter than us?
- Scientists say dolphins should be treated as ‘non-human persons’.
- Clever species: Class of 2009.
- Earth’s most clever species might be the infamous one that’s so very good at hiding. On the other hand…
- Top ten worst Bigfoot stories of 2009.
- Sightings of the Winsted Wild Man began in 1895.
- Rapid changes in planet’s core have Earth’s magnetic north drifting toward Siberia.
- Oregon profs plan giant robotic space cockroach warriors.
- Newly-discovered moon hole might be suitable for a colony.
- A look at the science of Avatar.
- A new generation of cheap, free-swimming, automatic underwater vehicles (AUVs) is about to revolutionize the study the world’s 3 million shipwrecks.
- High-speed Chinese train kicks French, Japanese butt.
- How algal biofuels lost a decade in the race to replace oil.
- China’s last wild tiger has been eaten; human predator sentenced to 12 years in jail.
- Battle to save tigers intensifies with only 3,200 left on Earth.
- Virtual economy is set to make billions. Humph – virtual agriculture isn’t going to put food on your table. But I’m convinced virtual tomatoes would taste better than the tomatoes stocked by rw stores.
- Update: Virtual space station auctioned off for $330,000 in real money.
- No simple flight of fancy: It’s now 50 years since the best attested and least explained sighting of UFOs — by an Anglican missionary and 37 parishioners in Papua New Guinea.
- Alienating Aliens: Do Nukes Make Them Go Ballistic?
- Subterreanean secrets of Oz’s lost giants.
- Nova Scotia’s church star map mystery.
- Red Rock Lounge in Colorado Springs, CO, has an encounter with the unknown.
- Chicago-area cop tasered unconscious diabetic 11 times.
- ‘Biblical scholar’ declares the rapture will take place on May 21, 2011.
- Theories of the apocalypse.
Quote of the Day:
Let’s bid a not at all fond farewell to the decade in which we achieved nothing and learned nothing.
Paul Krugman, in The Big Zero.