Ghost researcher Richard Wiseman plans to build a “haunted house” in the English countryside. It won’t be haunted until it has ghosts, of course, but he thinks if he builds it the right way?with many rooms and staircases, creaking floors and lots of drafts?ghosts will soon take up residence there.
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When the supersonic Concorde was first created, passengers in the U.S. looked forward to quick trips between major cities on the East and West coasts. But that hope was soon dashed when it was discovered that the Concorde emitted an annoying sonic “boom.” But hope has been rekindled, because a modified version may be quiet enough to fly over land.
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While most of us were shocked and appalled by the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, some people made money?a lot of money?from them. A number of transactions in the financial markets indicated clear and specific knowledge about what was going to happen that day. And the reason may the large number of people who were once high up in the CIA and went on to dominate Wall Street and banking.
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The cosmologist Ken D. Olum, from Tufts University, after doing some computations, concludes, “We should find ourselves in a large civilization (of galactic size), but in fact we do not.” I want to explore the intriguing possibility of whether we could be immersed in a large civilization without being aware of it. Due to the fact that there are billions of stars much older than the Sun in all typical galaxies, we could be not typical among the intelligent observers of the universe. Typical civilizations of typical galaxies would be hundreds of thousands, or millions, of years more evolved than ours and, consequently, typical intelligent observers would be orders of magnitude more intelligent than us.
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