Cannibals, presidential alien abduction, and clowns in space

By Lili Ladaga

On the menu for the latest edition of Weird Science: Cosmic cannibals, a presidential alien abduction and clowns in space. Bon appétit!

You gonna eat that? The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest neighbor in space, turns out to have a nasty appetite. Using a telescope scan, astronomers have found evidence of Andromeda's galactic meals. From the AP:

"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said study lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. "We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."

Earth's galaxy, the Milky Way, is next on Andromeda's snack list. John Dubinksi, co-author of the project, says the two galaxies are headed toward each other at a rate of 75 miles per second. But not to worry: We won't be dinner for another few billion years.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

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PHOTO: M31: The Andromeda Galaxy
Credit and Copyright: Jason Ware

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Trouble getting up in the morning?

The best morning alarm in the world is a sneaky elbow in the ribs – but if you are a singleton or have a partner even more sleepy-headed than yourself, you will be the owner of a digital waking assistant, better known as an alarm clock.

The first thing you want to do with your alarm clock when it starts warbling is, of course, batter it to a pulp. (You’re only human). This alarm – called Smash – encourages such “percussive maintenance” by having the switch buried underneath a deformable top. Hammer it with your fist and blessed tranquility will return. Go to WebUrbanist to see more alarm clocks.

(Image via: Hometone)

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Desert Rats and other Folk

“Clearly I remember it was in early December of 1983, when I met an old Desert Rat named Harry who took a liking to me. 
He lived in Wonder Valley
and was a WWII veteran naval captain whose name was Harry Malley.
We drank ouzo on his back porch watching the sun slowly slip into bloody orange hues on hot desert nights when he turned the clock back with his tales of tanker ships and whales.
One day Harry walked into a dream and forgot who and where he was.
And all the doctors and his two friends, Ralph and I, watched his brain slowly die.
In the end there was no one.
Only one sister who lived in Greece and who sent back any correspondence from him unopened, unloved…
Years of sad letters left behind unopened never told the story why A mystery about Harry.

Poor old Harry, who to everyone’s amazement left behind over a million dollars in three banks!
I sometimes wonder why Harry was so alone and why he had to die
by his own hand with a gun Ralph and I
didn’t know he had.
So damn sad.
A lonely old man who built a house that had a circular hall
who also must have had a story he didn’t want to share
and by pulling that trigger he no longer had to care.”

Dave Stancliff 

-excerpt from my unpublished book - “Desert Rats and other Folk” 

ABOVE PHOTO: Old Gold by Alan Brown

Accepting Emptiness

´All form is empty´. These words of the Buddha are not a philosophy. It is not some sort of postmodern credo avant la lettre, meant to show that there is no meaning, no value or purpose in life; that in the end there is only a mere nothing as life is concerned.

The Sunyata, the Emptiness, which is at the center of the Buddhistic doctrine, is often not adequately understood.

It is not a pessimistic or fatalistic doctrine, coined by a depressed mind prone to heavy drinking and on the verge of suicide. No, it is the total and deep experience of a very healthy consciousness. For Sunyata is one of the deepest realizations of meditative consciousness. It is what we all experience when we close our eyes and study the interiority of life.

Click here to read the rest at Home Planet

Scientists say plutonium shortage could stall space exploration

by NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE

NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the USA urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.

But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.

Nuclear weapons use plutonium-239, but NASA depends on something quite different: plutonium-238. A marshmallow-sized pellet of plutonium-238, encased in metal, gives off a lot of heat. Click here to read the rest at npr.

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Food for thought: the 20 FUNNIEST RESTAURANT PUN NAMES

Posted by Jillian Madison of Food Network Humor

Click here to see the other 18 “punny”names!

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Secrets of the brain: The grey matter that makes us who we are

From shyness and moral judgment to creativity and sexual preference, a fascinating new book shows how our personalities and human traits are written on our brains. Jeremy Laurance reports

The brain is our most complex but least understood organ. We can name its parts but our knowledge of what each part does, or how, is rudimentary. In The Brain Book, journalist Rita Carter has assembled what is known about the nerve centre of each individual and explains with the aid of images and graphics its structure, function and disorders. Click here to read the rest at The Independent

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Iran flips off the world

Iran missile test by J.D. Crowe, Mobile Register

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Spider Wranglers Weave One-Of-A-Kind Tapestry

by CHRISTOPHER JOYCE

This week in New York, the American Museum of Natural History unveiled something never before seen: an 11-by-4-foot tapestry made completely of spider silk.

Weavers in Madagascar took four years to make it, and the museum says there's no other like it in the world.

A stunning golden tapestry woven from spider silk is unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City after four years of work — and the help of more than 1 million spiders.

i

Photo by R. Mickens/AMNH

It's now in a glass case at the museum. The color is a radiant gold — the natural color of the golden orb-weaving spider, from the Nephilagenus, one that's found in several parts of the world.

Simon Peers, a textile maker who lives in Madagascar, conceived the project. Weaving spider silk is not traditional there; a French missionary dreamed it up over a century ago but failed at it. The only known spider silk tapestry was shown in Paris in 1900 but then disappeared. Click here to read the rest at npr

PHOTO ABOVE: by Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley

Two Nephila madagascariensis spiders that were used to create the golden tapestry.

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5 Things the Corporate Media Don't Want You to Know About Cannabis

Recent scientific reports suggest that pot doesn't destroy your brain, that it doesn't cause lung damage like tobacco -- but you won't hear it in the corporate media.

Writing in the journal Science nearly four decades ago, New York State University sociologist Erich Goode documented the media's complicity in maintaining cannabis prohibition.

He observed: "[T]ests and experiments purporting to demonstrate the ravages of marijuana consumption receive enormous attention from the media, and their findings become accepted as fact by the public. But when careful refutations of such research are published, or when later findings contradict the original pathological findings, they tend to be ignored or dismissed."

A glimpse of today's mainstream media landscape indicates that little has changed -- with news outlets continuing to, at best, underreport the publication of scientific studies that undermine the federal government's longstanding pot propaganda and, at worst, ignore them all together.

Here are five recent stories the mainstream media doesn't want you to know about pot: Click here to read the rest at AlterNet.

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History shows why we should get out of Afghanistan

By Dave Stancliff/For the Times-Standard

Posted: 09/27/2009 01:30:17 AM PDT

Here we are. A country immersed in other nations' affairs for all the wrong reasons. We're deeply mired in wars with no clear-cut exit plan from either country we invaded, and now occupy. What happened to learning from history?

Remember Vietnam? The obvious similarity seems to escape our politicians and military. Historians agree that Vietnam shouldn't have happened and someone should have reined in McNamara before he led our military and country into the quicksand.

There are men and women in our military who remember helping the Taliban fight the Russians during their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan. We looked upon the Taliban as nationalists back then, people fighting for their freedom.

To prove we haven't learned our history lesson, we invaded Afghanistan and chased the Taliban out, calling them terrorists. They let our enemy Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qa'eda terrorists train there. Our politicians needed some measure of revenge for the 9/11 attack to show Americans, and the world, that we would not tolerate international terrorists. Click here to read the rest.

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