Catching Up: Recent Strange News

(WINK News)		Worshippers praise youth pastor for confessing to murder
		Girl -- worried that her ex-boyfriend was going to hurt her -- calls police so much, they threaten to arrest her. Less than one month later, she's the victim of a murder-suicide carried out by her ex-boyfriend

Woman dodges bullet -- literally -- and it's caught on tape. Then whips out her own gun and chases the robber out of her store

NZ society for the prevention of cruelty to animals are planning a U.S. release of a music CD which makes dogs turn beserk and violent when they hear it

"Not everybody signed the Declaration on July 4. Some patriots said, 'I'm going to have my people kick this around, and I'll get back to you.' Only they said it with all their s's looking like f's."

Couple sees UFO, nearly wreck car. "It was a clear night and I thought 'blinkin' 'eck, what's that?'"

• Leading thinkers ponder the greatest challenges of the next 50 years.


• Fragments of world's oldest Christian manuscript found in Egyptian monastery.


• Opportunity watches the clouds drift by -- on Mars. Cool videos.


• It's Bubble O seven: James Bond's underwater car becomes a reality.


• Magnetic Reconnection: Thunderblogger Donald E Scott says astrophysicists have no excuse for trying to reinvent the wheel.


• Gecko 'begs' insect for honeydew.


• Earth's oceans are vast, but not big enough to escape humans.


• Phytomining and the Biomass Backlash.


• Cannabis casualties, hybrid cars, and gamma rays in your brain.


• If you're wondering whether the media is actually this confused about science (to put it charitably), or trying to confuse us, read this ('cause such rare and pricey candor deserves a bigger audience).


• Nonsense, dressed up as neuroscience, is being peddled to school children by their 'credulous and apparently moronic teachers'. (Right up there with video game doping.) A better explanation of the research the first article talks about can be found here...


• How extended explanations in refutations affect their acceptance, or, what negative political campaigning has to do with Pride and Prejudice.


• Evolution in the classroom: Willful ignorance is the product of more than just 'a change over time'.


• Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? The Age of American Unreason is available at Amazon US & UK.


• What have we become?: Thoughts on Some Lessons From The Underground History of American Education.


• New research shows that humans flock like sheep and birds, subconsciously following a minority of individuals.


• When and why did languages become untranslatable? A proposed answer.


• Study finds some thoughts really do require language.


• Cognitive Dissonance: A recent example brings the original case study to mind.


• How the 'engineering mentality' produces terrorists.


• Wired's Lore Sjöberg recently discovered that 'the mind is a cruel, lying, unreliable bastard that can't be trusted with even an ounce of responsibility.'


• Dopamine and Orgasm.


• Australian scientists are developing a remote-controlled contraceptive implant for men. Guys and their gadgets...


• Jonah Lehrer on the psychology and neuroscience of back pain.


• How to get smarter, and (incidentally) save the world.


• The Peace Drug: Post-traumatic stress disorder had destroyed Donna Kilgore's life. Then experimental therapy with MDMA, a psychedelic drug better known as ecstasy, showed her a way out. Was it a fluke -- or the future? Editor's Note. Ironic, don't you think, considering this next article...


• One thousand lives a month: A renowned researcher estimates that 22,000 patients could have been saved if the Food and Drug Administration had removed the heart surgery drug Trasylol two years ago, when his study revealed widespread death associated with it. (Video segment from '60 Minutes'.)


• Spiritual healing: More hokum, or the 'missing link' in medicine?


• Paranormal investigator called in after sewage workers are stalked by 'zombie' in underground tunnels.


• Officials mystified by three bodyless right feet, each in a sneaker, that have washed up on the shores of British Columbia over the past six months.


• Man says he's found long-lost civil war gold, but the state won't let him dig.


• Newly-found documents related to JFK assassination expected to be grist for conspiracy theorists.


• China: From basket case to superpower in 30 years.


• How Attila the Hun, aka 'The Scourge of God', ground the whole of Europe to dust. If you're into historical fiction, try William Napier's Attila trilogy (books one, two & three) at Amazon UK.


• We were stardust, we were golden: Memories of Australian rock festivals past.


• The Wiki History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less. Why am I suddenly humming the melody to We Didn't Start the Fire?


• How imperfect symmetry shaped the universe we know.

• Illegal trade of tiger parts and poaching is rampant in Indonesia.


• In Montana, a rare albino moose has been shot... by a photographer.


• A white stag that passes between worlds in celtic mythology is roaming the Scottish highlands.


• Gorgeous Celtic-French musician Cecile Corbel is touring Australia (Amazon).


• Brittany's ancient menhirs; erected by giants and haunted by faeries?


• Please don't look at fairy tales like a hardcore scientist, just enjoy them as the entertaining Jungian archetypes and moral allegories they are.


• Artifacts found in a 2000-year-old burial could be the first archaeological evidence of Druids.


• One of the world's oldest and widely feared superstitions is the evil eye. A new angle to the Greek myth of the Cyclops?


• Amazing photo of the world's largest statue of Jesus Christ in Brazil struck by lightning. It's raining here so I won't make a joke.


• There's a resurgence of exorcisms in Poland. A poll told me that.


• Catholic officials plan a retreat center for exorcisms. They also host discounted wedding receptions and Bar Mitzvahs.


• The Pope backs exorcism squads to fight the Devil. Who ya gonna call?


• From exorcisms to the jail cell of a hillbilly serial killer, it's America's fringe that fascinates Professor Michael Cuneo. American Exorcism: Expelling Demons in the Land of Plenty (Amazon US).


• Mindblowing video of a lecture on the CIA's psychological torture techniques.


• Controversial new book claims media is a puppet of shadowy intelligence agencies. Flat Earth News by Nick Davies (Amazon UK, out of stock).


• Speech by Davies at last November's War, Truth and the Media Today conference. And another review of his book.


• Broadcasting the third kind: a big bite of the reality sandwich that is the Stephenville UFO controversy.


• Billy Cox needs more data on the Stephenville UFO media brouhaha.


• Dr Michael Salla's eloquent letter to the Stephenville Herald-Tribune.


• Guillermo Del Toro to make a Doctor Strange movie? It'll be a marvel if nobody reports it's Dr Strangelove.


• Yar, raising the wreck of Queen Anne's Revenge, flagship of Blackbeard.


• Next week the USA and Canada will witness a total lunar eclipse, most unaware that an eclipse saved Columbus.


• 85-year-old Loch Ness Monster doyen Robert Rines thinks Nessie is gone. Gone like the dolphins in a Douglas Adams novel?