News Briefs 17-12-2009

It's been a hard decade's night...

• The 80s were more than the foundation of today's movies. Alan Boyle reviews 10 scientific sagas of the top sider era.
• Video: Steorn's free-energy gadget Orbo on display, gathering energy from the Victorian ether... or not.
• Gold, frankincese and... MEarth? Earthlike waterworld found orbitting red dwarf.
• Organic matter found on the Moon —hope is not the mummified corpse of an unclaimed cosmonaut...
• Galileo Figaro —Magnificooo! Best ever atlas of the planet Mercury.
• Saving Earth from an asteroid will take diplomats, not heroes —and *definitely* not Aerosmith!
• Sorry Jean-Luc, but you were'nt number 1 in meeting aliens among your family.
• Bizarro Voronezh: children witness UFO landing in Texas, and two creatures coming out of it.
• Kiwi witness chronicles close encounter.
• Hell finally froze over? Famed cryptozoologist Loren Coleman & professional skeptic Benjamin Radford BOTH agree on the bogusness of a new Bigfoot trailcam pic showed in ABC news.
• Study says blue whales have been singing with increasingly deeper voices —I told you they were smart.
• Rare Ptolemaic artifact will be recovered from the seabed, off Alexandria's port. And guess who's gonna be present —come on, guess! :)
• Video: Mayas saving Maya culture.
• Scientists have cracked the genetic code of both skin & lung cancer —that should call for a celebratory Cohiba ;)
• Artists have the strangest muses nowadays: viruses as glass sculptures.
• Will the universal health care plan cover sex with robots as a longevity treatment?
• With still no flying cars or rocket packs in sight, the only two things that changed dramatically in this decade were travel & tourism, 'thanks' to terrorism & technology.
• Strange physical theory —reminiscent of ancient Buddhist art— finally proved... and it only took 4 decades!
• The leaked e-mails are just the tip of the iceberg in the broader battle for climate data.
• Data, Skepticism, Judgement: Whom to believe?

Thanks to Zach & Moezilla.

Quote(s) of the Day:

"By all means, we should apply our own powers of reason to every interesting problem. But when our reasoning leads to some conclusion at odds with the apparent consensus of a lot of smart people who seem to know what they’re talking about — whether it’s on the nature of dark energy, the best way to quantize gravity, the most effective route to health care reform, or the state of the environment — the burden is on us to understand the nature of that difference and try to reconcile it, not to take refuge in “experts don’t know everything” and related anti-intellectual piffle."

Sean Carroll

"A danger sign of the lapse from true skepticism into dogmatism is an inability to respect those who disagree."

Dr. Leonard George