”Keeping an eye on the world going by my window…”

• Immaculate black holes located near universe’s conception.
• According to NASA, “Earth’s are common.
• Martian avalanche, with stunning photo. Meanwhile, Martian atmosphere appears to have been wiped away by a solar super-wave -- yet there still appears to be proof of life on Mars.
• More on the changing spots of Jupiter.
• Solar storms and killer electrons.
• Rings of Saturn more unstable and violent than previously believed. More here.
• Star on near-collision course with the solar system (and by ‘the’, I mean ours).
• The danger of hacking the climate. More here.
• A witness to the 'Battle for Los Angeles' in 1942.
• Ion trap could open door to quantum computing.
• Relativity, the final test.
• Extinction looms for Bluefin and Polar Bears after failing to gain UN protection.
• Hiding gold, one invisibility cloak at a time.
• Moonwater, the growing mystery.
• Meet the Velociraptor’s cousin.
• F-35 makes first vertical landing.
• Did the ‘Colbert Bump’ create a new messiah?
• The buried, ancient rivers of the outback.
• Salt and power, not to be confused with Salt n’ Pepa.
• Concerns over proposed £20m visitor centre at Stonehenge.
• Hobbits had million-year history on Flores?
• Huffington Post removes 911 conspiracy theory piece by Jesse Ventura?
• Ufologist Jenny Randles asks: does ufology have a future?
• Man with virtually no serotonin or dopamine defies expectations.
• Astronauts return from the ISS via a Soyuz capsule. Leaving, re-entry, and landing, in images courtesy of Astronaut Soichi on the ISS (except the last one, unless he's got one hell of a telephoto lens).

Thanks to Perceval, Greg, RPJ and the almighty Beatles.

Quote of the Day:

“Running everywhere at such a speed, Till they find, there's no need…”

J. Lennon

Don't you just *hate* it when you are awaken from a dream, and you feel you were in the middle of something important... but you don't remember what?

• Happy St. Patrick's Osiris' day!
• Vatican announces commission to investigate the BVM apparitions at Medjugorge —something fishy about the timing here...
• Exhibiting at Oakland: A Golden Dawn (inspired) art show.
• Nick Pope pontificates on the recent Cleveland UFO sightings.
• The first reports of strange lights from lake Erie date back from earlier than you might guess.
• Almost, there baby! New exoplanet is near the habitable zone.
• Red in Jupiter's Spot not what Astronomers thought —BTW, check the name of the astronomer, and see if YOU can spot a Fortean coincidence ;)
• Hubble + IMAX = 3D Eye candy cocaine! Watch the trailer to get high... on science ;)
• Alan Boyle shows us the queer quirk tales from the quantum frontier —and you can quote me on that.
• The cat's out of the bag box: First quantum effects seen in visible object.
• Premonitory novelists? Micah Hanks explores when Truth is stranger than Fiction.
• In her recent diary entry, Anne Strieber deals with hummingbird synchronicities, near-death experiences, and car oracles.
• [Video] Ken Caldeira: Is Geoengineering our only option? [Full program] What's funny to me about this, is that if you take the 'i' from this guy's name, you get 'Caldera', and you know what caldera means in Spanish? look it up :)
• So you think yourself a better person because you consume green products? That's exactly the problem.
• "Elementary, my dear House": Bacterial trail may be next forensic clue.
• 40,000-year-old tools found at construction site in Tasmania.
• Tea leaves used by Chinese archeologists to rewrite the past, not peer into the future —open your miiinds!
• Look into my eyes: Gastroenterologists embrace the use of hypnotherapy.
• Smoking, not alcohol abuse, 'impairs mental function'. I'll drink to that, doc!
• Study links bullying to cognitive deficits & brain changes. It's the scars you can't see the ones that hurt the most.
• Banana component effective against HIV infection —so *that* was Cheeta's secret all along.
• The perfect gift for Greg Taylor's 80th birthday: a personal Rosetta grave stone —Twittering from the great beyond, mate!!

Thanks Kat, Rick & Micah.

Quote of the Day:

"You were once wild here. Don't let them tame you."

Isadora Duncan

Enjoy.

• Russians invade Georgia! TV hoax to rival War Of The Worlds.
• Soviet-era Lunar landers spotted on moon. Definitely not a hoax.
• Scientists find life beneath 600 feet of Arctic ice. Is Mars next?
• Mummies found in 4000-year-old boat-shaped graves in the desert of central Asia. Slightly let down by unimaginative Freudian analysis. Terrific documentary on the mummies of Tarim Basin.
• The Mummies Of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Amazon US & UK).
• In-depth PDF field report of Mongolia's stone circles & deer stones.
• Experts fight to save Cybele temple in Bulgaria.
• Giant red granite statue of Thoth in monkey-form unearthed in Egypt. No pics as yet -- have to wait for Zahi's photo op.
• Zahi Hawass in King Tut's tomb. With him leaning over like that, it'd be so easy to 'accidentally on purpose' bump him...
• Excavations in San Claudio reveal ancient Maya weapons and tools trade.
• Stunning photography of the far side of Phobos, without Glen Larson.
• 10 natural formations that look like they were created by aliens.
• Delhi unveils giant air filtration tech to combat pollution.
• Europe's butterflies face extinction. with 500 animal species in England gone forever because of humans.
• The moody octopus is the 'Jekyll & Hyde" of the ocean.
• A group of bees act like "pied pipers" to trigger bee swarms.
• Man who woke from coma has Foreign Accent Syndrome.
• Iggy the labrador returns home after missing for five years.
• Osama the cat has Allah written in his fur. Neva's giving me a funny look.
• Atheist's ridicule won't win friends & influence people. You can't expect mature debate at a kangaroo court.
• Great dicussion about the Phoenix Lights and the flare obfuscation this Friday on the Paranormal Radio Network. Hard to believe it's been over a decade already.
• Physicist Michio Kaku escapes to a parallel universe.

Thanks Greg and Kat.

Quote of the Day:

The lights of stars that were extinguished ages ago still reaches us. So it is with great men who died centuries ago, but still reach us with the radiations of their personalities.

Kahlil Gibran

Still prefer Mozart.

• Alan Sokal: my philosophy.
• Symphony in J flat: the curious quest to reinvent music.
• The euro crisis.
• Psychopaths' brains wired to seek rewards, no matter the consequences.
• 5 natural events that science can't explain.
• Can General Fusion bring about an energy breakthrough?
• Orange dwarf star set to smash into the solar system.
• Thomas Jefferson off the curriculum in Texas.
• Canadian scientists uncover poppy's painkilling power.
• Life, but not as we know it.
• Da Vinci predicted world would end in 4006.
• Catatumbo: Venezuela's vanishing lightning.
• Blind soldier able to see with his tongue.
• The Planck mission.
• The Iboga insurrection.

Quote of the Day:

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.

Nicola Tesla

Whatever I've done wrong, please believe me, it was the devil, the bacteria, and the faulty wiring that made me do it!

• NASA scientists are searching for an invisible 'Death Star' that circles the Sun and catapults potentially catastrophic comets at Earth.
• From aboard the ISS, astronaut Soichi Noguchi posts stunning videos of the Earth and Moon.
• What would YOU say to ET? Competition to see what messages Earthlings want to send to extraterrestrials has produced shocking results.
• Cro Magnon skull supports theory that human brains have begun to shrink.
• Headless man's tomb found under Maya torture mural.
• It's a mystery that would stump even Sherlock Holmes: Why on earth are we letting Conan Doyle's home fall into ruin?
• Deep beneath London's streets, visitors revisit the eighth wonder of the world. 'How they got the performing horses down there God only knows.'
• What the devil is going on at the Vatican? What echoes down the centuries is not only the longstanding belief in demonic possession, but the logic behind it.
• Our microbial overlords: Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette?
• The brains of psychopaths are wired to keep seeking rewards, no matter the consequences.
• Journey to the center of the Earth: The dangerous quest for deepwater oil.
• Human-flesh search engines: crowd-sourced online detective work that aims for real-world vigilante justice.
• Data, data everywhere: Information has gone from scarce to superabundant, bringing new benefits and big headaches.
• Making bricks from straw may soon be possible - even desirable - now that scientists have figured out how spider silk can make ordinary materials stronger than steal.
• Scientists find key to rattlers' infrared sight.
• Illegal fishing and climate change are decimating shrimp and lobster populations in Central America.
• Short blasts of exercise are as good as hours of training, scientists find.
• We're being poisoned by mercury! How to get this lethal toxin out of your body.
• Caltech Cosmologist Dr. Sean Carroll blogs about his recent appearance on The Colbert Report -- and clears up that whole cake-batter thing ...sort of.
• Bloody, yes, but freedom flourished in the Dark Ages.
• In Mexico, drug cartel violence has gotten so bad, news reporters and authorities have retreated into a separate reality. The latest case in point.
• Jesse Ventura's Censored 9/11 Commentary.

Quote of the Day:

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

Lewis Carroll, in Alice in Wonderland.

"One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea..."

• Einstein’s theory of gravity, confirmed? His handwritten works are on display in Jerusalem.
• Roger Penrose and the loops of time.
• The inequality aversion, explained.
• Recently restarted LHC shutting down for year to address design flaws.
• Ghostly accident or accidental ghost.
• Ghost-catching, one invention at a time at the Pump House Castle.
• Buzz Aldrin thanks the world for his birthday wishes.
• Was Pont-Saint-Esprit’s mysterious 'cursed bread' a CIA experiment with LSD?
• Vatican’s chief exorcist says Devil is in the Vatican.
• Dan Akroyd predicts the end of the world, sans Stay-Puft marshmallow man.
• Could some earthquakes be man-made?
• Meanwhile, it appears the Chilean quake may have shifted the Earth’s axis.
• Dozens of centuries-old shipwrecks discovered in Baltic Sea during construction.
• Has deforestation revealed an impact crater in Central Asia?
• Light in the California sky emits… smaller lights .
• Is Daylight Savings hazardous to your health?
• Titan’s slushy interior.
• It's Oyster vs. Anaconda in the battle for control of the waves.
• The mystery of thalidomide, unraveled.
• A mass grave of headless vikings.
• Brain scan experiment reveals what people are thinking.
• Past visions of science fiction’s science future .
• Australia’s buried rivers of antiquity.
• Are the Amazon rain forests stronger than we think?
• Archaeologists discover buried Mayan fountain.
• 15 photos from the 70‘s that raised awareness about preserving Mother Earth.
• Need a place to crash during the next polar upheaval-- try a Sea-skraper.

Many thanks to RPJ, Kat and Greg!

Quote of the Day:

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality-- the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape…”

Walter Bagehot

May your skies be full of vibrant iridescent clouds...

• Knowing the mind of God: Seven theories of everything —and 42 is a multiple of 7!
• 'Tis the question that has puzzled man since time immemorial: does Bigfoot have a bone in its penis? —and why am I suddenly humming 70's blaxploitation movie soundtracks??
• [Video] UFOs over lake Eerie Erie?
• Quick: under the desk! Regan Lee studies reports of strange beams of white light.
• Big Think video interview with the Big Kahuna of commercial space travel: Burt Rutan.
• Moa eggshells yield ancient DNA —Hmmm... Moa huevos rancheros *salivating*
• Chinese archeologists discover a new 137-km stretch of the Great Wall.
• The search for Zheng, ancient China's greatest mariner.
• An unearthed tomb on Crete reveals a dynasty of priestesses reigned on the isle during the "Dark Ages" of ancient Greece —proving also that Greek archeology is not very P.C.
• Archeologists find conduit designed to deliver pressurized water to the Mayan city of Palenque... or human blood —Bwahahahaaaa!
• World's southernmost site of early human life uncovered in Australia.
• Why the demise of civilization may be inevitable —may? you mean I spent my entire savings building an 2012-proof shelter for nothing?!
• Black tears from the sky: Japan confirms the exisence of a secret Nuclear pact with the US.
• Listen up laddies: "Non-scientific study" (their words!) says Scottish have red hair to endure bad weather —Melbourne weather might explain Rick's ginger beard... and his Scroogish temper :-P
• Richelle Hawks on the liminality of color, and why Red is the awesomest hue of them all ;)
• "My, what beautiful 64-bit RGB eyes you have": computer vision & how robots are taught to perceive images.
• Pentagon looks to breed immoral immortal ‘synthetic organisms’. In the words of the immortal quantum-leaping Dr. Sam Beckett: "Oh Boy!"
• Conspiracy Smorgasbord @ Zorgy-awarded BOA, with Kenn Thomas. Listen to the podcast and join the list of citizens surveilled by the NSA —just kidding! or am I?
• American lawmakers are considering a national biometric ID card to counter the hiring of illegal immigrants. Might be cheaper to just tattoo a codebar in every American's right cheek...
• Lula da Silva, Latin America's defacto majority leader, seeks peace in the Middle East, while failing to criticize the totalitarian regime in Cuba. Meanwhile, political dissident Guillermo Fariñas is on the brink of death.

Thanks to Rick, Kat, Greg & Moezilla. And also thanks to Corey, for teaching me how to recognize a master vampire —Very handy info y'all.

Quote of the Day:
"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal"

Albert Pike

I think I remember how to do this, it's like riding a bike... without the LSD.

• Robin Hood & the Templars of Doom: hidden history in Sherwood Forest.
• Oxford mathematician & Wonderland explorer, The Mystery Of Lewis Carroll by Jenny Woolf (Amazon US & UK).
• Algebra in Wonderland; the science of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.
• Singalong-a sulcus: investigating how brains hear music & lyrics.
• Sputnik Observatory is a not-for-profit educational organisation dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. Guest features by Jacques Vallee, Colin Andrews, & much more. Looks brilliant.
• Lunar rock samples collected during Apollo missions suggest a wet interior. That explains this.
• Physicist claims warp speed will kill you. To timidly stay home & avoid strange new worlds...
• Ohio man films strange lights above Lake Erie over five nights.
• Unweaving the rainbow: beautiful photography, shame about the science proselytizing.
• Skeptic Ben Radford eloquently describes his visit to Machu Picchu. OMG, I actually agree with him -- and I don't have a fever! Even if he did misspell Machu Picchu.
• Excavated tomb reveals dynasty of priestesses on Crete.
• Sudan's forgotten pyramids: more mysteries than Egypt, without Zahi.
• DNA of extinct birds extracted from ancient eggshell.
• Experts seek 15th-century Chinese shipwrecks off the coast of East Africa.
• Trove of shipwrecks, one up to 800-years-old, found in Baltic Sea.
• The ultimate marine battle: great white shark vs giant squid.
• Crikey, that's not a yokai! Phantom kangaroos seen in Japan.
• In case Yokai Attack! please read (Amazon US & UK).
• The UFO Mystic tracks blue dogs & chupacabras in Texas.

Thanks Greg, Kat, & Joanne.

Quote of the Day:

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

Aw look, Zorgy #4 for the mantelpiece. Congrats to all nominated, and thanks to all who voted, even if you didn't listen to my advice…

• The return of Tron! And, the Dude abides! It's enough to make this grown man weep with nostalgia.
• Army's "mad scientists" study swarming mines and Facebook attacks. Hopefully combined.
• Chile earthquake moved the entire city of Concepcion 10 feet to the west.
• Does oarfish omen spell earthquake disaster for Japan?
• Who's the grown-up in the science vs religion debate? Maybe this guy?
• How the alphabet was born from hieroglyphs.
• Ancient texts present Mayans as literary geniuses. If they could just break out of that 2012 genre...
• Czech archaeologists find 150,000-year-old settlement in North Iraq.
• Time and Mind 3:1 has just been released with plenty of fascinating content on the ancient mind.
• The real canals of Mars are made from subterranean ice.
• Futurist Ray Kurzweil didn't like James Cameron's Avatar.
• Rupert Sheldrake and Richard Wiseman clash over parapsychology experiments.
• Erik Davis chats with Trickster and the Paranormal author George Hansen.
• Fortean and conspiracy researcher Jerry E. Smith passes away after battling pancreatic cancer.
• Tim Binnall talks to parapolitical researcher Kenn Thomas in the latest BoA podcast. Plus: here's Tim's interview with the late Jerry E. Smith.
• The biggest crop circle, ever.
• Missing persons and abductions reveal psychics' failures.
• What's in a name? Tumbling down the rabbit-hole while on the track of the Beast of White Lake Ontario.
• Even superheroes need their science.
• Cryptid colouring pages! And the best thing, as @TheDarkEngine said on Twitter, is that no-one can say you used the wrong colours.
• And you thought Michael Shermer's 'Skeptic' column in SciAm couldn't get any stupider…

Thanks Rick.

Quote of the Day:

Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

So much strange - and anti-strange - news, reading it all could make your head spin. But not to worry -- for me, a little aspirin and caffeine cast that demon headache right back out.

• Anti-alchemy boffins transmute gold into anti-strange anti-hypermatter.
• Glozal finder, Emile Fradin, who has died aged 103, was either one of the most productive archeological forgers ever known, or, as his supporters claim, the victim in France's archaeological equivalent of the Dreyfus case.
• Uri Geller is seeking Egyptian treasure on his own Scottish island.
• Virtual simulations demonstrate that Leonardo da Vinci's calculations for huge horse statue were on the mark. Leonardo da Vinci conceived, but never finished, this project -- a failure that has long puzzled scholars. Video.
• New radar map of Mars reveals remnants of a vast ice sheet hidden under the Martian rubble.
• Is there anybody out there? Scientists believe there could be 10,000 civilisations in our galaxy, and millions are being spent trying to find them.
• Jon Ronson speaks to the man who will welcome our alien overlords, Prof. Paul Davies.
• Russia to halt space tours.
• Snowball Earth: Glaciers, ice packs once met at the Equator.
• Major new inquest into the death of the dinosaurs: SciAm's report on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) mass extinction.
• Climate scientists hit back at the sceptics with new research they say has uncovered the 'fingerprint' of man-made global warming.
• A leading scientific institute allowed its evidence to a parliamentary inquiry into climate science to be influenced anonymously by an energy industry consultant who argues that global warming is a religion.
• The heat over bubbling Arctic methane is premature.
• The way of the dinosaurs: Skeptics ignore climate change at our own risk.
• Climate change skepticism a litmus test for Republicans.
• Organized climate-change skepticism traces back to the three founders of the conservative George C. Marshall Institute. You can preorder Naomi Oreskes' book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, due out May 25th, at Amazon US & UK.
• Creationists seek to stop the teaching of global warming.
• In a book of memoirs, renowned exorcist Fr. Gabriele Amorth says, in the Vatican there are members of Satanic sects. When asked if members of the clergy are involved, he responded, 'There are priests, monsignors and also cardinals!'
• For sale: Two captured ghosts, trapped by an exorcist inside bottles of holy water to make them sleepy.
• Update: Two 'bottled ghosts' have sold for NZ2830 (£1305, $1,954) in an online auction in New Zealand.
• Defectors say Church of Scientology hides abuse.
• Was Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist? Michael Prescott presents an interpretation of history through the writings of a medium who claimed to have been present at several seances held at the White House.
• Fish and frogs aren't the only weird things that have rained from the skies.
• Creepy crawlies: Amazing Scanning Electron Microscope pictures of insects and spiders.
• Nobel laureate Ahmed H. Zewail: The scientist with the fastest eyes.
• Did life on Earth begin twice? Could the Mono Lake arsenic prove there is a shadow biosphere?
• The world's most useful tree produces food, oil for lighting, cooking and biogas, and crop fertiliser; and now, it can also purify drinking water, thanks to free instructions posted online.
• Light keeps spinach fresh and producing new vitamins, even after it's picked. Uh oh, you know what this means: the light in the refrigerator should stay on all the time.
• HIV hides out in bone marrow cells.
• Survival instincts: Comparison of Titanic and Lusitania shows self-preservation is trumped by social pressure when there is time to think.
• Neuromarketing: MRI brain scans to be used to 'design' political candidates' -- as well as other, presumably more-reliable, products.
• Cyberwar declared as China hunts for secrets. In the past year, the number of attacks on US government agencies rose to 1.6 billion a month.
• Fighting the hackers: In a command centre a huge map of the world keeps a running log of global attacks in Tokyo’s Cyber Emergency Centre.
• Police arrest Mariposa botnet masters, seize sensitive data of 800,000. 12million+ host computers were compromised including the networks of 500 of the US Fortune 1,000 companies and more than 40 major banks.
• UK's Ofcom boss, Ed Richards, wades into Net Neutrality row. He sounds nutty as a fruitcake to me.
• Microsoft sends flowers to Internet Explorer 6 funeral. Meanwhile, IE 8 is still not mingling well with 2,000 highly-visited sites, and Windows users must patch their systems every five days, on average, to stay ahead of security vulnerabilities. More.
• Mozilla lays the foundation for the web's next 100 years.
• The shocking truth about Tasers: A commuter in a diabetic coma, an 89-year-old man and children as young as 12 -- just some of the targets of British police armed with skin-piercing 50,000-volt Taser guns.
• Police got teen drunk for confession.
• It's who you kill that matters.
• Acrobatic thieves hit N.J. Best Buy avoiding cameras, motion sensors, alarms in daring heist. Speaking of thieves...
• UK's bankster bailout may be paid for by new tax on food.

Big thanks to Baldrick and Greg.

Quote of the Day:

Imagine you are in a Toyota on the highway at 60 miles per hour approaching stopped traffic, and you find that the brake pedal is broken. This is CO2. Then you figure out that the accelerator has also jammed, so that by the time you hit the truck in front of you, you will be going 90 miles per hour instead of 60. This is methane. Is now the time to get worried? No, you should already have been worried by the broken brake pedal. Methane sells newspapers, but it’s not the big story, nor does it look to be a game changer to the big story, which is CO2.

Dr. David Archer's analogy, here, regarding the recent news about methane leaking from the Arctic seabed.