I know exactly what you mean Rick…
- Speaker dies during lecture at UFO/conspiracy conference, and you can guess the resulting speculation. The organisers take a more cautious view.
- Is SETI looking for life in all the wrong places?
- Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (Amazon US and UK) holds off Richard Dawkins and Charles Darwin for the title of the best science book. Ever. Period even.
- Dr Zahi Hawass wins an Emmy. Heard to remark after the ceremony “it looks a lot like Khafre”.
- Nanotechnology helps save historical treasures.
- Grave robbers unwittingly help archaeologists discover three royal dentists at Saqqara.
- Hubble Space Telescope’s future hangs in the balance again, as NASA debates whether to fix it.
- Because they have far more exciting things to do, like figuring out how to burrow into a passing asteroid in order to hitch a ride to Mars.
- Viking landers may have missed Martian life.
- Lunar lander challenge ends with a bang. Literally, sadly.
- Phar Lap death mystery solved by new technology – it was poison! However, another expert has doubts. For the non-Australians, this is who Phar Lap was.
- A nice wet weekend is all it takes to set off an earthquake. No wonder we don’t have any earthquakes here in Brisbane.
- Researchers investigate bacteria which grows magnetic particles to help it navigate via magnetic fields.
- Mass extinctions caused by a ‘sick Earth‘?
- Is Ken Lay still alive? Hangin’ with Elvis no doubt.
- George Orwell’s vision of the future is fast becoming a reality, but the smell of apathy hangs heavy in the air.
- Not too cold, and not too hot. Why is the Universe just right for human life? A conversation with Paul Davies.
- Scientists use maths and physics to debunk Hollywood portrayals of ghosts and vampires. I’ll stop wearing this necklace of garlic cloves now…
- Perhaps the preceding news article is a revenge piece for the fact that “Hollywood is rabidly technophobic“.
- But the Pope hits back (on behalf of the vampires and ghosts, or Hollywood?), warning scientists not to suffer the fate of Icarus. I haven’t seen any scientists working with wax and feathers myself, but I guess it’s worth the caution.
- Bryan Appleyard takes a dim view of the future in his review of James Martin’s The Meaning of the 21st Century (Amazon US and UK).
- You call it Hallowe’en…we call it Samhain.
- Two ghost-hunting journalists take different approaches to investigating the supernatural in their books.
- Another black triangle sighting?
- Take science, the Internet and hand it to PR companies, and you get a lot of spurious news. It’s been a tough news day, so glad I have this refreshing Pepsi beside me to kick-start my day!
- Speaking of spurious news: Richard Hoagland finds a Face on the Moon. C3PO’s head actually.
Quote of the Day:
Today it is the fashion to talk of “drugs” in a monolithic sense, as if they were all the same, and as if they were all necessarily bad….our culture is out of step with the entire record of human experience; it is our culture which is eccentric, bizarre and deeply obtuse.
Paul Devereux
