I’ve just been watching The Godfather movies – for the first time. And I think they’ve skewed my news interests.
- Music gets you high: New research on endorphins finds people have higher pain thresholds immediately after singing, dancing and drumming.
- Rare book on witchcraft discovered in Alberta library.
- Colombian evangelical Christians convert to Judaism, embracing hidden past.
- Gaze deep into any animal eye and you will find opsin, the protein through which we see the world.
- Zombie bacteria: Mycoplasma ‘ghosts’ can rise from the dead.
- Cambridge to open ‘Terminator centre’ to study threat to humans from artificial intelligence.
- Researchers develop robots that can work together.
- ‘Startling gains’ reported in the development of artificial intelligence.
- Scientists say cellophane tape is a shape-changing smart material.
- Acidic oceans are dissolving sea creatures’ shells.
- Famine the final wake-up call on global warming: Two sobering reports predict big economic shocks by mid-century. Will we be out of this ‘recession’ before then?
- Smoking cigarettes damages memory, learning and reasoning.
- BBC axes popular and award-winning science radio show.
- Namib desert beetle inspires self-filling water bottle.
- Jesus wept … oh, it’s bad plumbing. But pointing that out is blasphemy.
- ‘Black Friday’ descends into madness at Kansas Victoria’s Secret – and other places. Dying for a DVD player?
- Great graphic novels from 2012: Ten illustrated tales of love, war, crime, politics and sex, not to mention ghosts and mermaids.
Quotes of the Day:
Divest yourself of all your worldly possessions, your heirlooms and indulgences – you too can achieve zen via neoliberal brutality.
Spain dances with chaos.
‘Finance’ is a gun. ‘Politics’ is knowing when to pull the trigger.
Don Lucchesi, The Godfather, Part III
