Today’s news is so chockfull of teh fascinating I had to jam it in with a stick before posting. If you can’t find anything interesting in this lot, there’s no hope for you…
- How the attempt to sequence “Bigfoot’s genome” went badly off track.
- On the flip-side of the dangers of a belief system: Skeptics shouldn’t have lined up with the Mail to call Psychic Sally a fraud. Which is basically what I said when this happened two years ago (“Skeptics: Anecdote *is* Evidence!“).
- Esquire’s exposé of the near-death experience story of Eben Alexander seems to have its own issues with creative writing…
- After 66 years, the Roswell UFO incident belongs to the ages.
- Voynich Manuscript found to have valid linguistic structure, suggesting it may not be gibberish after all.
- The mysterious journey of Billy the Kid’s trigger finger.
- Scottish band Mogwai fight to save stone circle in Glasgow.
- Mysterious toe rings found on ancient Egyptian skeletons.
- Lasers reveal ancient city of Angkor is much bigger than thought.
- ‘Holographic duality‘ hints at hidden sub-atomic world.
- 35 of the most shocking science facts that are totally wrong.
- Turing’s Error: if you really had an intelligent machine, it would not reveal its intelligence to us.
- Hawk moths use sonar-jamming genitals in fight against bats. In related news, ‘Hawkmoth’ is now the name of the super-villain in my spec script for the next Batman movie…
- Electric world: spider webs reach out to grab insects.
- 23-million-year-old lizard found trapped in amber.
- Tiny robotic cubes could rule the Solar System. And I for one welcome our tiny polyhedric masters.
- The morality of meditation.
- You’d have to be crazy to buy that product! Advertisers to sell products using voices in your head?
- Solving the mystery of the spinning Egyptian statue.
- Jenny Randles on finding needles in the haystack that is the UK Ministry of Defence’s UFO document dump.
- Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found the Schlong on Mars. So don’t believe this common-sense explanation, please.
- Will this bring the David Kelly conspiracy theories to an end?
- Individuals who watched a news report about the adverse health effects of exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMF) were more likely to experience symptoms after a 15-minute sham exposure to a WiFi signal than those who watched a control film.
- Are Loch Ness Monster reports caused by a geological anomaly?
- Whatever Nessie is, if there’s one rational investigator who I trust to get to the bottom of the mystery, it’s Charlie Sheen. Wait, what…
- Ten mind-glowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s.
- ‘Dead’ patient wakes up as New York doctors prepare to remove her organs.
- Examining the evidence for Jesus Christ, the man.
- In today’s ‘ZOMG awesome!’ film and TV news: Charlie Kaufman adapting Slaughterhouse Five for Guillermo del Toro, while David Fincher and HBO may do a US remake of the UK’s fabulous conspiracy series Utopia.
- And in today’s comic selection: Three Wishes, and Cameras vs The Paranormal.
- From the Grail archives: autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire accurately sketches the entire cityscape of Rome FROM MEMORY! X-Men are a reality folks, and they walk among us.
- Image of the Day: the spectacular view from the nose-bleed seats on the Great Pyramid. Added to bucket list.
Quote of the Day:
I’m a guy that lives with a lot of questions. I say “What’s out there?”, and I try to resolve that. And I never can. I don’t think anybody can. Who’s got the answers? I sure would like to hear the ultimate one. But I haven’t yet. And so I live with a lot of questions.
And I find that entertaining… If my life were to end tomorrow, it would be fulfilled in that manner. I would say, “The questions have been terrific.”