Dr. Albert Hoffman has died. Hoffman was the discoverer of LSD.

Read the rest of this entry »

Six hundred over the past ten days.. “unlike anything scientists have heard..” [Associated Press]

Cool stuff at Discovery News.

Whenever I hear about a poll telling me what a group of Americans think, I generally write it off. Now, folks, I don’t think everyone is stupid - I just think the average American is too distracted or preoccupied or apathetic to pay attention to the stuff that some of us feel is important.

Read the rest of this entry »

Years ago, I read Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, and found it to be a good and interesting book, even if somewhat inconclusive.

Somehow I missed Rolling Stone’s profile of him over a year ago. It’s a really interesting story - his influences and where they took him. I saw Pinchbeck on the Colbert Report a few months ago talking about his new book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl and I was quite confused.

Read the rest of this entry »

NASA has some cool new shots from the MRO.

Check out this little dude.

Researchers teaching a creepy baby robot to talk - while others warn that automated killer robots pose “a threat to humanity.”

Enjoy.

Very, very cool - and soon to be.

An interesting piece about James Woolsey and his odd relationship with the CIA community.  Bonus: A Rutgers report on the CIA’s role in the study of UFOs.

First, a piece at BBC about an active glacier that ESA’s Mars Express has identified on Mars. [Thanks, Jay.]

Second, apparently an asteroid is on a collision course with the red planet as well. Experts say there’s a better than 1% chance of an impact. Last time we saw anything similar was in ‘94 with Shoemaker-Levy with Jupiter. But this would be a “scientific bonanza,” say experts.

This article over at c|net covers some of the real-world uses of ultrasonic sound technology.

Now here’s a fuel source we’re not likely to run out of.

Japanese researchers say they’ve engineered “fearless mice.”  I’d like to see this technique applied to the Democrats ASAP.

Cool piece of news resulting from NASA’s Themis missions.

Those crazy South Koreans have cloned some cats that happen to glow in the dark.

This Reuters article is interesting for many reasons. One of them is the apparent evolution regarding diet - because many arguments for low-carbohydrate diets have (as one of their bases anyway) the idea that humans have not evolved to accommodate the relatively new arrival of agriculture. I’ll have more to say about this later - I’m reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by science journalist Gary Taubes after being extremely impressed by him on NPR.

Me babbling in an Iowa newspaper (far prouder than my “top tier” babbling, which has gotten me into much more trouble) - and the Clinton camp desperately jumping on Obama for same.

And, some morsels of eye candy:

[Chuck Anderson]

[A Pythagoras Tree]

My friend David Gelles wrote contributes some lift to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.