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News Briefs 28-08-2006

By Rick MGon

Feel free to comment or share news links. TDG is interactive.

  • Are crop circles that appeared in Illinois soybean fields connected to UFOs witnessed in the area days earlier?
  • A small independent publishing house in Vancouver Canada claims to have sensational evidence of alien spacecraft, but isn’t revealing it to the public just yet. I guess they’re waiting for the next version of Adobe Photoshop.
  • Is the Da Vinci Code a diversion from something more sinister? Historian Dr Paul Spice thinks so, in his book The Watchers.
  • If you’re old enough to remember The Smiths, you might be interested in the Princess Diana and Morrissey conspiracies. The biggest conspiracy is Morrissey’s hair hasn’t changed at all.
  • Can’t see the conspiracy? Scientists can replace your faulty lenses with plastic ones.
  • Scientists have erased memories in the brains of lab rats. I bet you one of the rats was named Philip K Dick.
  • Scientists have erased memories in the brains of lab rats. I bet you one of the rats was named Philip K Dick.
  • If you like your scifi, the Hugo Award winners have been announced.
  • Drinking tea is healthier than drinking tap water, according to a new study.
  • Stress is identified as a major factor in the cause of allergies. Are bubble habitats available to order from Amazon?
  • The bubble of Pluto’s status as a planet has popped, but many scientists are fiercely against the decision.
  • Somehow this row over Pluto could also see Neptune losing its status as a planet. The way we humans behave, Earth won’t be far behind either.
  • In the distant past, the Earth may have spun on its side to keep its balance; and is it about to do so again? To help out, we’re all urged to lean to the left a little.
  • Scientists have found that oxygen and the life that generates it might have enriched the Earth far earlier than supposed, with implications for extraterrestrial life.
  • The Observer has a few good articles about the free energy claims from a Dublin lab. Here’s an entertaining article from the Guardian Unlimited. U2 rack up a mighty power bill.
  • Speaking of Bono, some of you may have missed an excellent interview in last October’s Rolling Stone magazine. Bono could power a small city with his mouth.
  • Has evidence of a building linked to the myth of King Arthur been found at Windsor Castle?
  • The debate continues over whether King David was real or merely myth, with huge implications for Judaism and Christianity.
  • Often forgotten by mainstream academia, the enigma of China’s celtic mummies continues to baffle everyone.
  • I heartily recommend Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book The Mummies of Urumchi (Amazon US or UK).
  • An international team of archaeologists have unearthed a well-preserved blond-haired, tattooed 2500-year-old mummy frozen in the mountains of Mongolia. Here’s a nice pic of the grave before excavation.
  • Chinese archaeologists believe 35’000 bamboo-slips inscribed with writing must have been mass-produced in factory conditions. Not much has changed in China.
  • Five people have been detained in China for arranging strippers at funerals. So that’s why some people like to read newspaper obituaries …
  • Tony Blair has been urged to halt the construction of a highway near Stonehenge. He’s being urged to halt a lot of things.
  • The giant statue of Zahi … I mean, Ramses II … continues its slow march through the streets of Cairo to a new home.
  • Time Magazine calls the experts involved in the argument over the Flores Island Hobbit as snarky, squabbling fifth-graders.
  • The thrill of hunting for dinosaur fossils in the Montana wilderness.
  • Christian zealots have destroyed a 1500-year-old gallery of ancient Arctic petroglyphs. Where’s Iorek Byrnison when you need an angry, armoured polar-bear?

Thanks Debraregypt, Paul, David and Kat (as always).

Quote of the Day:

Everytime someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen – that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we’re still praying to their gods.

Whitley Strieber

Rick MG
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5 Comments

    1. erasing rat memories
      Maybe someone just fixed the link since you posted, but it’s there now – the sixth article from the top – and the seventh article from the top. (Is this just Rico’s weird sense of humour, or does he need those new surgically-implanted plastic lenses?) Or, you can just click here.

      I wonder if this ZIP stuff could be used as a treatment for phobias? To use a variant of Pavlov’s famous conditioning experiment as an example, if you conditioned a rat from birth to be afraid of a ringing bell, then gave it a shot of ZIP just after ringing a bell, would it lose it’s lifelong terror of bells?

      Assuming alien-abduction stories are true, the aliens’ reputed memory-erasing technology could be based on something this simple. Just give the abductee a shot of ZIP in the correct area of the ole hippocampus, and voila, they don’t form long-term memories of the experience.

      Didn’t we first hear about this research about a year ago – in relation to the military searching for a quick fix for post traumatic stress disorder?

      Kat

  3. Interesting selections!
    What is your take on the Morrissey phenomena? Clairvoyance/prescience put to music – but why? Did Morrissey think it would change the outcome?

    Is it just me, or are the Hugo winners becoming less interesting as the years go by?

    Steorn is not the first company to offer free energy (Jasker Power Systems International, etc.), but they may be the first not to be bought out.

    The following article by Steve Ouellette sums up what lots of us think about the Pluto demotion:

    “Let’s change the laws of physics while we’re at it” by Steve Ouellette
    August 27, 2006

    It was a fact. Like the sky is blue, water is wet, and there’s no cure for the common cold:

    The solar system has nine planets.

    I can name all nine, as can any school kid of the last seven decades. They color our science books and rotate menacingly over our classrooms.

    Now, however, scientists are telling us “Oops, we were wrong.” First they said there could be 12 planets, with three orbital objects — a moon, an asteroid and Britney Spears’ pregnant belly — joining the fray. Now it’s down to eight, with tiny Pluto tossed on the scrap heap. There sure as heck, however, aren’t nine.

    Assuming that this isn’t just a global marketing promotion (how many billions would Wal-Mart pay for the right to rename soon-to-be planet 2003 UB313? That would be WAY better than just some crummy ballpark), what does the new planetary alignment say about science?

    Don’t trust it, that’s what.

    How many times have we discovered that something we were told by the scientists was completely wrong? That something bad for us is now actually good? That a new breakthrough is actually a fraud?

    I would like to encourage students to boycott their science classes. Kids, they’ll just fill your heads full of “facts” that will eventually not be true. A waste of time.

    As far as we know, your other classes are still valid. A noun is still a person, place or thing; the square root of … um, two plus two is still four. Benjamin Franklin was still the third U.S. president. When it comes time for science though, take a cooking class or auto shop or learn to play an instrument.

    I apologize if I sound like an extremist, but I’d been perfectly happy in my nine-planet galaxy, confident that dolphins were the smartest non-human animals and that oil was composed of dinosaur remains. Then this whole Pluto thing happened and, suddenly skeptical of everything, I turned to the Internet. There I found more shocking scientific travesties.
    • The Earth is flat. The nonsense about the Earth being round has been bouncing about for a few hundred years. But if it was round, wouldn’t we fall down? And what proof do we have other than photos from outer space?
    • Man has never visited outer space. The whole Apollo thing was a fraud, perpetrated by the government and performed by actors after it was discovered that any object leaving earth’s atmosphere was immediately disintegrated by the sun’s rays. To this day, the space station is actually a sound stage in Vancouver.
    • Gravity is just a theory. One nitwit’s explanation for why things don’t fall off the rounded edges of our planet. An equally valid theory is that friendly ghosts push us down every time we jump up. If you can work a deal with the ghosts, they’ll ease up on the pushing a little, thus explaining Michael Jordan.
    • Dinosaurs aren’t so old. Come on, 100 million years? I remember, during a religion class in my youth, they told how John the Baptist slayed the mighty T-rex, then used the jawbone to smite the devil. I thought it was some kind of allegory at the time, but now I see that as just one very real possibility.
    • Dinosaurs were not killed by a giant asteroid. It might have been a giant comet. Or an alien hunting expedition. Or John the Baptist. Or, facing unexpected climate change, it could be the dinosaurs found a way to avoid the sun’s disintegration ray, overpower the gravity ghosts and relocate to another planet.
    • Thunder is actually the God Thor pounding his mighty hammer against the side of the highest mountain.
    • Strands of complex DNA don’t determine who and what we are. This is actually determined by time of day the baby was conceived and the amount of cologne worn by the father. Can be further affected by the songs sung by the mother to her pregnant belly. Hint: Nothing by Alice Cooper.
    • Bloodletting is the cure for rabies. This is true. Also the cure for cancer, dandruff and carpal tunnel syndrome. Save on prescription drug costs.
    • Cameras are dangerous. They actually do steal the souls of their subjects. And if the photos are digitized, the souls will be locked in cyberspace forever.
    • The earth’s core is composed of marshmallow. No, not molten rock. If we can reach the core, we have an endless supply of Fluffernutters.

    E There is life on Mars. The supposedly lifeless Red Planet is teeming with activity just below the surface, in air-conditioned comfort. Could be the dinosaurs.
    • Cigarettes are healthy. Turns out all the cancer comes from the packaging. Keep your cigarettes in a Tupperware container and you’ll live to be 150.
    • Time travel is possible. In fact it’s going on right now, in the future. Or the present and past. It’s just that when the travelers make their changes, the entire world shifts and we don’t remember past realities.

    I tattooed myself a note yesterday, however, just like on “Prison Break.” It says something about “deadly plague of eels; mole people have eaten the Statue of Gravity; 2+2=7.” Ring a bell with anyone?
    • Killer asteroid will destroy Earth. Sadly, this information is being kept from us, but life as we know it will end sometime in 2012 when an enormous asteroid (it could be 2003 UB313, aka Wal-Martica) crashes into the planet. Who will be left to change the science books then?”

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