Christmas leftovers…
- Google Earth confirms Dreamtime meteor legend.
- DNA of a 30,000-year-old European hunter-gatherer analyzed.
- Vatican reveals Secret Archives.
- Jurassic Park accidentally anticipated a recent dinosaur discovery — venomous raptors. I’m not so sure Michael Crichton‘s ‘anticipation’ was accidental.
- Found: The clue to Van Gogh’s ear.
- Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with an asteroid. Five years ago, the Aerospace Corp. ballparked the cost of such a mission at $80 billion (USD).
- Climate change is on the move.
- Glaciers feed the ocean’s food webs.
- An inside look at DARPA, the secretive defense agency that’s changing the way we use machines — and the way they use us. Belfiore’s The Department of Mad Scientists is available at Amazon US & UK.
- Star Trek’s synthahol is in the works.
- ‘Lifeless’ prions, devoid of all genetic material, found to evolve.
- Scientists discover a new way to alter human DNA.
- Scientists start a genomic catalog of Earth’s abundant microbes.
- Cosmic Log: Teenaged DNA detectives find lots of mislabeled food products, a pesky invasive species, and what appears to be a new breed of cockroach.
- Women found to have an amplified sense of touch.
- Monogamouse: GM prairie voles may provide the key to understanding human bonding, trust, and even decision-making.
- How often does ‘radical regeneration’ healing occur? What happens when medical science confronts miracles?
- Tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells could revolutionize solar power.
- Why do so many terrorists have engineering degrees?
- Onwards and upwards: Why is the modern view of progress so impoverished?
- Make that Sir Patrick and Sir Peter, if you please!
- JibJab video: Never a Year Like ’09.
- Why 31-12-2009 was not New Year’s Eve — or the end of the decade.
Thanks Randy.
Quote of the Day:
To say that one had ‘seen the light’ is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. … The new light seems to pour across the skull. … There is now an answer to every question. Doubts and conflicts are a matter of the tortured past—a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don’t know.
Arthur Koestler, who came by this insight the hard way.
