Happy holidays to all! Today’s news is as rich as a Xmas lunch…take your time digesting it all.
- How we will terraform Mars. Hopefully in huge tripod-like devices…in your face Martians!
- Jupiter’s core may be liquefying.
- Comet captured by space station astronauts.
- The winter solstice at Stonehenge.
- The Turin Shroud is supernatural, say Italian researchers.
- The Turin Shroud is a fake, says British journalist.
- While Richard Dawkins just finds it “impossible to imagine such a warped view of reality”.
- Meanwhile, the modern Holy Shroud is a whole lot sadder.
- Dr Robert Kuhn, host of the wonderful Closer to Truth series, discusses his skepticism of the near-death experience on the latest episode of Skeptiko.
- The rise of anomalistic psychology, and the fall of parapsychology. Written by an anomalistic psychologist, notch.
- 2012 Watch: the countdown to doomsday begins.
- British media regulator sets down new rules on occult practices on television.
- Unexplained mysteries of 2011, and the ones to watch in 2012.
- Young Carl Sagan was skeptical of UFOs but not of aliens. Also: could totally have had Stifler’s mom.
- Researchers create mighty mouse by tweaking a gene to double muscle strength.
- How smart is a pigeon? Let it count the ways…
- Trials and errors: why science is failing us.
- The accidental universe: science’s crisis of faith.
- Quest for new inquest into the death of Dr David Kelly fails.
- DARPA’s spy satellite will stream real-time video from any spot on Earth.
- Guardians of the apocalypse: meet the tech-nerd legion bent on saving humanity from asteroids, contagions, and robot revolutions.
- Speaking of robot revolutions: Spider robot is awesome but also kinda scary, especially when it looks like it wants to feed on a cuddly toy.
- Weren’t the robots supposed to give us freedom from work?
- Nature mourns the death of Kim Jong-Il.
- Santa is a legend, not a lie.
Quote of the Day:
My basic premise is that human beings are amphibious, in the etymological sense of ‘two lives’. We have one life in the solid material world that is most perfectly measured by science. Science is the most exquisite tool that we’ve developed for measuring that hard, physical, material world. Then there is the world of ideas which is inside our head. I would say that both of these worlds are equally real – they’re just real in different ways.
Alan Moore
