Israeli archaeologists have discovered Jesus' Fortress of Solitude a massive stone structure at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee in Israel:

The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of "unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders," and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons the researchers said... Rising nearly 32 feet (10 meters) high, it has a diameter of about 230 feet (70 meters).

...The structure was first detected in the summer of 2003 during a sonar survey of the southwest portion of the sea. Divers have since been down to investigate, they write in the latest issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology.

"Close inspection by scuba diving revealed that the structure is made of basalt boulders up to 1 m (3.2 feet) long with no apparent construction pattern," the researchers write in their journal article. "The boulders have natural faces with no signs of cutting or chiselling. Similarly, we did not find any sign of arrangement or walls that delineate this structure."

They say it is definitely human-made and probably was built on land, only later to be covered by the Sea of Galilee as the water level rose. "The shape and composition of the submerged structure does not resemble any natural feature. We therefore conclude that it is man-made and might be termed a cairn," the researchers write.

Based on nearby megalithic sites, such as the monumental site of Khirbet Beteiha, 19 miles to the north-east of the submerged structure, researchers believe that the mysterious monument may date back more than 4000 years.

Livescience: Mysterious Stone Structure Discovered Beneath Sea of Galilee

What are you afraid of?

• An autistic Indian girl's seeming ability to read her mother's mind.
• Will we ever communicate telepathically?
• If so, 'passthoughts' might not be such a good idea.
• Is nonlocal consciousness research now forbidden territory for TED?
• Nazca lines ripped up by quarry.
• Erik Davis talks Exegesis of Philip K. Dick on Gnostic Radio.
• Scientists discover evidence of dark lightning.
• International Space Station set for 'spooky' quantum entanglement experiment.
• Long-awaited study questions the power of prayer: patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications.
• Archaeologists find 10,000 objects from Roman London.
• Mysterious structure discovered beneath Sea of Galilee.
• Shodan: the scariest search engine on the Internet.
• 'Haunted house' at site of unearthed skeletons.
• Man wriggles rat's tail with his mind.
• Sniffing Rosemary can increase memory by 75%.
• Beardyman presents the Beardytron_5000.
• Long-exposure neon waterfalls.

Quote of the Day:

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

W.B. Yeats

The first trailer for Neill (District 9) Blomkamp's new sci-fi movie Elysium has been released, and it looks excellent (see above). I love how the trailer features a melding of the utopian 1970s conceptual artwork of toroidal space colonies (which I posted about back in 2010) and the gritty battle vibe of modern game series like Mass Effect and Halo in the scenes on Earth (though given Blomkamp was originally said to be working on a Halo movie, not overly surprising I guess).

I'll also casually note that in my 2010 post I thought it would be great if someone could put a Hans Zimmer Inception foghorn over images of those toroidal space colonies...and the Elysium trailer does exactly that. Hopefully my royalty cheque is in the mail... *cough*

Come find refuge from all the boring political back and forth and have fun with today's Grail news:

• Galileo's mummified fingers, a lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, and a Renaissance UFO. Just some of the topics that could make an appearance in Dan Brown's impending next bestseller.
• Scientists can see what you're dreaming.
• Polynesian DNA mysteriously shows up in a Brazilian tribe…on the opposite coast of South America. I'm not saying it was aliens, but...
• The TEDx mess hits the mainstream media (and TED's Chris Anderson continues to dig himself deeper into a hole in the comments).
• Ghost and UFO sightings are down. Psychics are in decline. Are we more discerning now, or just afraid to trust anything?
• Druids and pagans to be allowed time off work for sacred rites under new guidelines.
• Are the New Atheists Islamophobic? Sam Harris responds.
• Consciousness research pioneer Charles Tart talks about atheism, spirituality and parapsychology.
• Thinking differently about thinking: neuroscience needs its Einstein.
• Magic mushroom study into treating depression hits red-tape stumbling block.
• I've got your uncanny valley right here. I'm now going to have nightmares about sentient computers murdering me while rambling about yoghurt parfaits being full of frozen fruit...
• NASA's secret plan to bag an asteroid.
• Rocket powered by nuclear fusion could send humans to Mars in just 30 days.
• Because, in case you didn't know, Mars is just a wee bit further away than the Moon, the most distant point humans have travelled so far.
• All those moments will remain, like tears in space.
• Kepler watches a white dwarf warp space-time.
• Scientists go underground in search of mysterious particles.
• Image of the Day: the hand of a corpse mummified by mesmerism.

Quote of the Day:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider

Francis Bacon

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation.

Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it?

...An Austrian astrochemist Christian Koeberl had established that the glass had been formed at a temperature so hot that there could be only one known cause: a meteorite impacting with Earth. And yet there were no signs of a suitable impact crater, even in satellite images.

...In 1908, a massive explosion flattened 80 million trees in Tunguska, Siberia. Although there was no sign of a meteorite impact, scientists now think an extraterrestrial object of some kind must have exploded above Tunguska. Wasson wondered if a similar aerial burst could have produced enough heat to turn the ground to glass in the Egyptian desert.

(h/t Inannawhimsey)

Sirius -- available online and in theaters April 22, 2013. The Citizens' Hearing on Disclosure -- April 29 - May 3.

• Over four millennia ago, the fortress town of Gonur-Tepe might have been a rare advanced civilisation in remote western Turkmenistan.
• Magic mushrooms' psychedelic ingredient could help treat people with severe depression.
• How best to define, diagnose and treat 'mental illness'? Like trying to climb rain.
• Why living in the present is a disorder. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now is available at Amazon US/Kindle & UK/Kindle.
• This British doctor specialises in resurrection and insists outdated resuscitation techniques are squandering lives that could be saved. Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death is available at Amazon US/Kindle & UK (under a slightly different title).
• Scroll down here to several research links which show scientists' confusion over calcium's role in heart attacks, strokes and more. Perhaps the explanation is in research ignored for 70 years: Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox (Amazon US & UK).
• Ban the killer robots before it's too late.
• The cost of reporting Mexico's drug wars: Author of celebrated Blog del Narco speaks for first time about the dangers – and reveals she is a woman. An excerpt from Dying for the Truth: Undercover Inside the Mexican Drug War by the Fugitive Reporters of Blog del Narco (Amazon US & UK).
• Paranormal bloggers explain their interest: Science as propaganda. Is there a moral to the paranormal? Noticing the cat in the hallway.
• YouTube superstars: the generation taking on TV – and winning.
• NYC pay phones transformed into time machines.
• Last Shadow: Voracious aerial predator is the most brutally effective hunter in the animal kingdom.

Quote of the Day:

We haven't started the [psilocybin-for-depression] study because finding companies that could manufacture the drug and who are prepared to go through the regulatory hoops to get the licence is proving very difficult. The whole field is so bedevilled by primitive old-fashioned attitudes. Even if you have a good idea, you may never get it into the clinic, it seems.

David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London.

Volume 3 of The Heretic Magazine is now available for sale, and returns with another stellar line-up of material from the likes of Robert Schoch, Tim Wallace-Murphy, Mark Oxbrow and Robert Eisenman. The Heretic is a magazine project created by two of our good friends, editor Andrew Gough and designer Mark James Foster (Mark has worked on Darklore with me, and was also the designer behind Sub Rosa, so you'll definitely get a similar vibe to some of TDG's own projects).

Our current edition contains 16 lushly designed articles written by a variety of cross disciplinary experts and subject area enthusiasts in the fields of Alternative History, Lost Civilisations and Technologies, Mysteries and Conundrums, Rennes-le-Château, the Occult, Politics, Science and more. No magazine offers more specialized esoteric content than The Heretic.

Edited and collated by Andrew Gough, Volume 3 features (alphabetically) Sol Aris, Dawn Bramadat, Miguel Conner, Peter Cresswell, Robert Eisenman, Ralph Ellis, Robert Feather, Brien Foerster, Mark Foster, Andrew Gough, Mark Oxbrow, Jack Minier, Tim Wallace-Murphy, Madlen Namro, Margaret Robertson, Robert Schoch and Richard Webster. Once again we have compiled a bumper crop of thought-provoking articles and features.

Our latest edition is available NOW in two digital formats: firstly as a multi-touch iBook for iPad and secondly as a Kindle edition. The two versions are very different and the richest experience will be gained from the iPad version. We have designed the magazine primarily for the iPad, but are also offering the Kindle edition for those readers who are interested in our content, yet do not own an iPad.

The Heretic's website has direct links for purchasing the magazine from both the iTunes store and various Amazons around the world.

[Visit The Heretic Magazine]

Poets and space opera writers take note: tears don't fall in space.

Eight fascinating topics that should be in the next Dan Brown book

Dan Brown and his publishers have released a limited amount of information about his upcoming novel Inferno, most notably that it will be set in the Italian city of Florence, and that it will involve one of the great pieces of literature, the Inferno by Dante Alighieri (the first part of his Divine Comedy). Florence is a fantastic location for a novel: Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo, da Vinci and Machiavelli all hailed from the city, and as the 'birthplace of the Renaissance' under the patronage of the Medici family, it is filled with architectural and artistic treasures. But beyond some of the obvious locations, such as the great cathedral that dominates the city sky-line, the Duomo, a little detective work can unveil some other fantastic elements that would make great topics to explore in a Brownian type novel. I've done exactly that in my ebook, Inside Dan Brown's Inferno, from which I've selected just eight topics below that I think Dan Brown will likely feature in his book – if he doesn't, you'd almost have to feel that he hasn't done his homework…

Galileo's Fingers

Dan Brown's novels are often seen as 'giving the bird' to the Catholic Church, and in Inferno he has the opportunity to use the middle finger of one of the greatest scientists in history. If Dan Brown's main character Robert Langdon ends up at the Galileo Museum, bordering the Arno River, he could point out a number of historical treasures, including Galileo's telescope, through which the genius Florentine discovered the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, both of which offered support for the (at the time) heretical Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun. But perhaps more fitting of a Dan Brown novel are the three fingers of the great man, preserved within elegant egg-shaped glass containers, that are on display in the museum. Will Galileo point the way for Langdon to solve a puzzle?

Sacred Geometry

The publication date for Dan Brown's Inferno is May 14, 2013, or 5.14.13. Turn that around, and you get 3.14.15, the first five digits of pi.* Add to that the fact that a cryptic clue on Dan Brown's website is comprised of the words 'Tarty Sect' and we definitely start wondering whether Pythagoras and sacred geometry are going to feature in some way: 'Tarty Sect' could be rewritten Pie Sect, a pun suggesting the Pythagorean cult, and what's more 'Tarty Sect' is an anagram of 'Tectractys' - the symbol of the Pythagoreans, a triangle made of subsequent lines of 1 point, 2 points, 3 points and 4 points.* A number of the great Renaissance minds of Florence held Pythagoras in great esteem, so there's definitely a link worth exploiting there for Dan Brown. Additionally, the number 33, often linked to the Pythagoreans, ... Read More »

“The higher the sun ariseth, the less shadow doth he cast…”

• The heartbeat of el Sol.
• The coming solar storms.
• 1600 years of ice... Gone in 25 years. More.
• Science versus Conspiracy.
• Something from nothing.
• Red dwarf validates Einstein.
• Quantum cryptography, courtesy of Heisenberg.
• The next bird flu.
• 'Y: The Last Man' takes on new relevance.
• To save the bees…
• Breathing life into computers.
• Giant tarantula added to nightmare cache.
• Dreamscape, realized.
• The Big Bang, in hi-fi.
• Touching the Milky Way.
• The mystery of Tiwanaku.
• Building living tissue, one 3-D printer at a time.
• New UFO documentary makes bold claim.
• Past voices still haunt present day.
• Breaths as unique as fingerprints.
• Watch Star Wars I-VI, unspool simultaneously. Untrained Jedi minds be forewarned.
• This week’s evidence of the looming robo-pocalypse… Killer ‘bots.

Quote of the Day:

“…Even so the greater is the goodness, the less doth it covet praise; yet cannot avoid its rewards in honours.”

Lao Tzu