This is the end for Ray Manzarek. Break on through to the other side, good sir…

• Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of The Doors, dies aged 74.
• The race is on to save Afghanistan's Buddhist treasures amid Chinese mining plans.
• Studies examine clues of prehistoric transoceanic contact.
• First evidence for another universe?
• Distortions of parapsychological history (part 1).
• Stem cell treatment restores sight to blind man.
• Glowing encounters of the 3rd kind: Australian man films bizarre UFO sighting.
• Bigelow Aerospace director addresses FAA UFO reports.
• How much would it cost to build the Starship Enterprise?
• When memories are remembered, they can be rewritten.
• Molecular trigger for Alzheimer's Disease identified.
• Viruses are our symbiotic partners, creating a second immune system.
• Professor David Nutt - the man taking on the world's 'moronic' drug laws.
• The 'crack baby' epidemic that never was.
• British man arrested with six roasted human foetuses covered in gold leaf for use in black magic ritual.
• The right to believe.
• Are we in the twilight of the scientific age?
• The ruins of super science.
• Alex Grey's 'Entheon' Kickstarter nears $100,000 (of its $125,000 goal).

Quote of the Day:

The world on you depends,
Our life will never end.

The Doors ('Riders on the Storm')

Can you smell a change in the wind?

• 1000-year-old coins found in Northern Territory may rewrite Australian history.
• Uncovering the secrets of North America's Ice Age giants.
• When you compare dogs to wolves in several problem-solving tasks, dogs look downright vapid. But if dogs see humans solve these same problems, dogs get it right away. It’s when dogs partner with humans that they become extraordinary.
• I, Robot Maker: Will Jackson wants his humanoid robots to behave like people.
• The robot threat: In the long run, we are telepathic androids.
• Corporations are manufacturing uncertainty about scientific findings. Now scientists are fighting back.
• Only elitists oppose Monsanto's global domination plan, says CEO.
• Inconvenient truth about GM: Genetic modification has done little to increase crop yields.
• Koch Carbon: North America's petroleum coke - the dirtiest residue from the dirtiest oil on earth - is sold to Mexico, South America, India, and China, which uses it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal to generate electricity, adding to their air-quality woes.
• New App lets you boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto and more by scanning your shopping cart.
• High methane levels in US found in cross-country drive.
• Can fracking be done safely? If so, will it be?
• Meet the career con man who made a fortune selling illegal pharmaceuticals online — and then helped the feds pull off a sting that forced Google to cough up a $500 million fine. *shiver* I feel sullied and unusual, Mr. Gibbs.
• Why do all the major table-saw manufacturers want you to keep mutilating and amputating your appendages, when they could just add SawStop?
• What 'self-regulated' factory farms are doing to your food.
• Pope Francis blasts 'dictatorship of the global financial system', and says the 'cult of money' is making life a misery for millions.
• Review on illegal drugs by the Organisation of American States is the beginning of the end of prohibition.
• Why marijuana and other drugs are illegal everywhere in the world: The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.
• How the 'war on drugs' has infringed on US civil liberties.
• Drug warriors and the 'war on drugs' fuel gun violence.
• Hear ye, future Deep Throats: This is how to leak to the press. (Go deep in the comments for more.)
• The New Yorker launches Strongbox, an anonymous inbox developed by Aaron Swartz.
• Did you catch Dr John Mack and several alien abductees on this famous talk show when it aired in the 90s? Part 1, part 2, and part 3.
• An uplifting talk with AP photographer David Guttenfelder.

Quote of the Day:

I could feel the weight of my lips and tongue, and I had to change how I was talking. I hadn't realized I'd learned to talk with a weightless tongue.

Chris Hadfield, on returning to Earth after five months on the ISS.

"In dreams begin responsibility.”

• Life on Mars?
• Life under Mars?
• Life... Elsewhere?
• Solar systems: The new normal?
• El Sol's busy week.
• Billion year-old water.
• The cause of climate change.
• Melting Everest.
• Threat of rising seas less dramatic-- Unless we lose Antarctica.
• NASA computers go quantum.
• Winds of change, Neptune edition.
• Black triangles in the sky.
• Beware the black knight and other ‘satellite killers’.
• Kepler telescope… Lost in space?
• Love me, love my clone.
• Fukushima’s seismic fault.
• Beneath the conspiracies of DIA.
• Microscopic flowers, assemble thyself.
• Shocking solution to math troubles.
• Smallest liquid droplets, created.
• Artificial leaves in the nano-forest.
• A new golden age?
• The color of music.
• New York skyline, from 8 otherworldly points of view.
• This week’s evidence of the looming robot uprising… A.I. lawmakers .

Quote of the Day:

“There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven't yet met.”

W.B. Yeats

Bought your tickets yet?

• Welcome home, Major Tom Commander Chris!
• Dream Chaser spacecraft arrives at NASA.
• (Video) According to this anonymous source's deathbed confession, Eisenhower was ready to invade Area 51 to learn the truth about UFOs.
• Micah Hanks takes a critical look on retired Lt. Col. Richard French --& his alleged Jell-O drinking habits.
• Who can find a link between Roswell, John Keel, & 'screaming monkeys'? Why Nick Redfern of course!
• The 1994 UFO-humanoid case at Silbury Hill.
• Massachusetts: Invasion of the USOs! (Unidentified Stinking Objects) --or is it just the ocean's fault?
• Witches are banned from flying their broom sticks above 150m in Swaziland. What if they are flying over a goat and/or completely naked? Too many loopholes!!
• Skeptiko interview with Miguel Conner, another Gnostic red pill dealer --& his name is Miguel too!
• Death can be a pleasant experience.
• Kickstarter campaign for a mask that promises lucid dreams. --oh, wait... there's already one available.
• A review on Dennis McKenna's book The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. [Amazon US & UK].
• "When computers are smarter than us, will they take our jobs?" asks Mother Jones. Clearly MJ is not a fan of Futurama...
• Cloning breakthrough with stem cells.
• Bigfoot shot in Pennsylvania... maybe. What happened to the 'city of brotherly love' rep, yo?
• Red Pill of the Day: Drunken man charges at wild elephant. Living proof that God favors the idiots.

Thanks to Rick, Susan, Kat & my Cosmic Compadre.

Quote of the Day:

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”

~Albert Einstein

Enjoy.

• Rupert Sheldrake explains why bad science is like bad religion.
• Show me the evidence! cry the skeptics, so Dean Radin does.
• Why did nature choose quantum physics as a way to behave?
• Scientists refuse to say telepathy, like Republicans & vagina.
• Why science is taking Near Death Experiences seriously.
• On owls & the ambivalence of the place they hold in human culture.
• Electrickery! How Georgians reckoned cats can see in the dark.
• Living consciously at the center of a multidimensional universe.
• Dairy industry sells snakeoil over milk's effects on sleep & dreams.
• There are real benefits to rituals, religious or otherwise.
• Have archaeologists found the lost city of Ciudad Blanca in Honduras?
• More on the Maya pyramid of Noh Mul, bulldozed for local road works.
• In Afghanistan, a 2600-year-old Buddhist city faces destruction.
• Filmmaker Brent Huffman's fighting to save The Buddhas of Mes Aynak.
• Mes Aynak is a treasure trove of Buddhist & Silk Road artifacts.
• In Tibet's capital Lhasa, China paved paradise to put up a parking lot.
• Meet the last remaining shaman of Nicaragua's Rama people.
• The genome of the sacred lotus may hold the key to anti-ageing.
• New app lets you boycott Koch Brothers, Monsanto & more.
• Miyoko Shida demonstrates the power of focusing your mind.
• Cornelia Funke on children's need for wilderness & shapeshifting.

A forest of thanks to Rob, Fiona, & the good folk at The Anomalist.

Quote of the Day:

Each plant is a library. When men destroy the jungle, they've burnt a library of books without even having been able to read them."

~ Pablo Amaringo

Happy reversed Pi day folks...

• Skylab was launched 40 years ago today. So why aren't we living in space yet?
• Three X-class solar flares erupt from our Sun within 24 hours. Somebody sacrifice something quickly dammit.
• Pulsar planets: strange worlds orbiting undead stars.
• 2012 Canadian UFO Survey released: twice as many UFOs reported in 2012 as 2011.
• Vanity Fair on the 'alien abduction' phenomenon, and the life and death of Dr. John Mack.
• Inner and outer space meet: Carl Sagan's letters to Timothy Leary.
• How many prime numbers come in pairs? See: angels dancing on the head of a pin.
• The Vatican doesn't like the cult of Santa Muerte. You can add that one to a very long list of things the Vatican doesn't like.
• Mayan pyramid bulldozed by construction crew. Now I understand the X-class solar flare problem.
• Noted religious scholar Geza Vermes passes away. More here.
• The Hanging Gardens of Babylon…now sans Babylon!
• Ogham Stones digitised digitised for 3D project. Visit the website.
• One of the first cities in the world, Uruk, too, has been resurrected in 3D.
• Our Australopith ancestors wouldn't have been able to hear our words.
• While Neanderthals would have shook hands with us with their right hands. Or smashed our puny sapien skulls with them.
• U.N. urges people to start eating insects to fight world hunger.
• In Dan Brown's Inferno, numeric riddles and controversial science mix. Warning: contains me.
• The WaPo verdict on Dan Brown's new book Inferno. Have just finished it myself, and will discuss it here on TDG tomorrow (muuust sleeeeeep now).

Quote of the Day:

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.

Werner Heisenberg

'Hardest OCD decision of my life.'

• A new theory about why Egypt stopped building pyramids.
• Have humans been abducted by extraterrestrials? A prestigious Harvard psychiatrist, John Edward Mack, thought so. His sudden death leaves behind many mysteries.
• Man and Wunderkammern: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Ripley.
• In an excerpt adapted from his new book, A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert “Believe It or Not!” Ripley, author Neal Thompson retraces the brilliant and belief-beggaring career of a man whose name lives on in American culture as a symbol of wit and wonder.
• The inscrutable proof of Japanese mathematician Inter-universal Geometer Shinichi Mochizuki.
• Up to 40 percent of patients with chronic back pain could be cured with a 100-day course of antibiotics rather than surgery -- a medical breakthrough 'worthy of a Nobel prize'.
• New pill which makes alcoholics want to drink less gives addicts fresh hope.
• Frequent marijuana use tied to reduced bladder cancer risk.
• Factories around the world are churning out synthetic recreational drugs, which have no history of human use, on an industrail scale. You'd probably be better off eating rat meat.
• The future of a globally warmed world has been revealed in a remote meteorite crater in Siberia.
• Melting Arctic prompts race for routes, resources.
• Our algorithms can predict future disasters. Now what?
• Why so many people - including scientists - suddenly believe in an afterlife.
• The trailer for Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity will turn your knuckles white.

Hat tip to @ClaudiaLives, and thanks to Rick and RPJ.

Quote of the Day:

In this issue of JAMA, Eappen et al1 reach the troublesome but not surprising conclusion that hospitals in the United States can profit handsomely from postsurgical complications, even if the hospitals could avoid them. The authors note that “Effective methods for reducing surgical complications have been identified. However, hospitals have been slow to implement them."

Although the authors do not expressly say so, readers may infer that the associated financial losses may discourage hospitals from reducing avoidable postsurgical complications as vigorously as they could. This brings to mind Shaw's famous lament in his play 'The Doctor's Dilemma' that “[i]t is not the fault of our doctors that the medical service of the community, as at present provided for, is a murderous absurdity. That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity."

Uwe E. Reinhardt, PhD, in his editorial on 'Making Surgical Complications Pay' (JAMA, April 17, 2013).

“It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.”

• The future of our solar system?
• When comets and planets… collide.
• H2O, H2O everywhere.
• The science of bubbles.
• I stop the world and melt with you.
• Paper goes hi-tech.
• Ancient crater reveals distant future.
• We are family.
• Armchair eclipse.
• The UK’s Atlantis?
• From Indus with love.
• Stonehenge, where the demons dwell-- 5,000 years earlier.
• Sailing the seas of cheese and chocolate hills.
• Wheel, reinvented.
• Gravity… the trailer.
• This week’s proof of the 'bot revolution... 2100-- Robo-pocalypse start-date announced!

My endless and sincere gratitude to GT, RPJ and Perceval for their tireless assistance the past few weeks. Huge props!

Quote of the Day:

“Things do not change; we change.”

H.D. Thoreau

Once more into the breach...

• The Paracast: Citizen Hearing on Disclosure special edition.
• Former members of Congress who formed the panel on Basset's Hearing were "unanimously impressed" with the testimonies given during the 5-day event.
• The Night Ravagers: Cattle Mutilations in Argentina, by Scott Corrales.
• Video: A 2008 Canadian TV show featuring the late Mac Tonnies.
• Secret Sun's Chris Knowles explains why the members of Heaven's Gate were the ultimate Trekkies.
• io9 shares an excerpt from Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns the Future? [Amazon US & UK].
• The age of the 3d-printed gun... has come.
• Israel's not amused by Google Palestine.
• British Indiana Jones claims the Lemba tribe in Papua New Guinea has Jewish origins --but with a name like that, I suspect Elves were involved too...
• Rocks found in Brazil were part of a hidden continent buried beneath the Atlantic 100 million years. But THEN the geologists decided to call it 'the Brazilian Atlantis', thus ensuing the ire of the Skeptoid blogosphere.
• Aging: It's all in the brain --Srsly.
• Flame retardants linked to low IQ & hyperactivity in children --even if exposed before they were born.
• A man whose brain was literally leaking out of his nose!
• Anne Strieber: Dog is an anagram for God.
• To get in the mood of Inferno, the people in charge of translating Dan Brown's new novel were submitted to hellish conditions.
• Red Pill of the Day: A serious contender for the greatest car commercial of all time —& I *am* being logical about it!

A huge thanks to Susan.

Quote of the Day:

"The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena."

~Jaron Lanier

Thanks to the mighty Tool, and the esteemed Blair MacKenzie Blake, for a music treat last night…

• Oldest Mayan Sun observatory hints at origin of civilisation.
• Stunning astronomical alignment found at Peruvian pyramid.
• European and Asian languages emerged from a single mother tongue just 15,000 years ago.
• Bizarre 6-inch long 'alien' skeleton shown to be human.
• Something noisy this way comes: after seventeen years, hundreds of millions of cicadas are about to emerge from beneath the soil.
• The apocalyptic 'colony collapse disorder' of honeybees has happened before - 18 times in the last 150 years.
• 'Magic mushrooms' could transform cancer treatment.
• Has the internet killed the Loch Ness monster? One blogger says…no!
• Iran cracks down on Sufi mystics.
• Lost Egyptian city revealed after 1200 years under the sea.
• The visionary notes of rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard.
• Meet the thousands of people ready to die on Mars.
• The mystery of John Titor: Hoax or time-traveler?
• Government lab reveals it has been running a quantum internet for over two years.
• It has begun: bizarre 'organism' appears after lightning strike, while weird 'bubble creatures' invade nature preserve during full moon.
• After a decade missing, three women escape from their alleged captor. Surprise, surprise, 'psychic' Sylvia Browne was wrong, telling one girl's mother that she was dead.
• Your fragmented self, reconstructed: artist collects DNA from discarded objects, and uses it to create 3D portraits.

Thanks Kat.

Quote of the Day:

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

Robert Anton Wilson