News Briefs 22-03-2010

Now what?!

• For Red Pill Junkie, by special request: Remember the Telegraph's SETI contest, 'So what would YOU say to ET?' -- with the winning messages to be beamed up to any space aliens lurking about? Finally, here are the top 50 winners.
• Rivers seen from space.
• IMAX's Hubble reminds us what awesome means.
• Cassini Provides Insights into Saturn's Rings, with More to Come. More.
• Today is World Water Day. Global water requirements will grow by over 50% over the next 20 years, or 40% more than what can currently be sustainably supplied.
• Is food the new distressed asset?
• Ancient glyphs and a Celtic connection theory.
• New finding puts first animal domestication - that of dogs - in the Middle East, and strengthens the link between the first animal to enter human society and the subsequent invention of agriculture about 10,000 years ago.
• Huaca Pucllana, in Lima, Peru.
• Hobbit island's deeper history.
• Velociraptor's cousin discovered: The fossilised skeleton is in almost perfect condition - with complete claws and teeth - despite being between 145 and 65 million years old.
• Ingredients of 'Maya Blue' pigment, beloved by Central America's ancients, may have been widely mined, not traded as previously thought.
• Giant bluestone sculture, with rock-wall mazes that swirl around a 9-ton monolith, for sale in the Catskills.
• Iceland prepares for second, more devastating volcanic eruption.
• World votes to continue trading in species on verge of extinction. I didn't get a vote. Did you?
• No more caviar: Hunters push sturgeon to the edge of extinction after 200million years.
• Death stalks the frozen land of Genghis Khan.
• Drought, refugees, revolution and war: World's militaries are secretly preparing for climate doomsday.
• Market For Military Robots Will Reach $9.8 Billion By 2016.
• Star Trek-style force-field armour being developed by military scientists.
• Rich get richer in 'Hot News' stock-tip fight.
• Former bond trader Michael Lewis traces the roots of the biggest financial crisis in history back to the decision of one man – and finds the few who made billions betting on the collapse.
• Tycoon in £470 million 'deal with God'.
• Evolution of Fairness Driven by Culture, Not Genes.
• CONTEST: Help Chatroulette Solve Its Penis Problem, And Make Billions!
• It seems like alchemy: a Silicon Valley start-up says it has found a way to capture the carbon dioxide emissions from coal and gas power plants and lock them into cement.
• Cold fusion moves closer to mainstream acceptance.
• Oz boffins develop a treatment which allows mice to smoke cigarettes without the usual negative health consequences.
• Reclusive Russian mathematician, Grigori Perelman, awarded $1million Millennium prize -- if he accepts.
• Professor of applied mathematics urges us to think globally, instead of staying mainly in the 2,500-year-old plain.
• UFOs buzz Northern Territory nuke site: Aliens could be the latest to weigh in on the nuclear waste storage debate after UFOs were spotted near the proposed Territory facility.
• All-too-real wizarding-world warfare sends Hogwarts castle up in flames.

Quote of the Day:

The willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grown-ups remains a mystery to me to this day. I was 24 with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. Believe me, I hadn’t the first clue. I’d never taken an accounting course, never run a business, never even had savings of my own to manage.

I stumbled into a job at Salomon Brothers in 1985 and stumbled out, richer, in 1988. I figured the situation was unsustainable. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to identify me, along with a lot of people more or less like me, as a fraud. Sooner rather than later would come a Great Reckoning, when Wall Street would wake up and hundreds, if not thousands, of young people like me, who had no business making huge bets with other people’s money or persuading other people to make those bets, would be expelled from finance.

Former bond trader Michael Lewis.