Home  »  Headline News

On:

The Pentagon, which once saw eye-to-eye with the White House, seems to be fighting them lately, when it comes to the Bush administration’s embrace of junk science. First they issued a report on the military dangers of global warming, despite the administration’s denials that this is a major problem and its inaction on measures to solve it. Now they’ve granted $240,000 to Swedish scientists for embryonic stem-cell research to help find a cure for Parkinson’s disease, in a study that could not be done here due to government limits on stem-cell research.
read more

On:

We may not have noticed, but on Thursday afternoon an asteroid 100 feet in diameter, the size of a small office building, made the closest approach ever recorded to the Earth, missing us by one-tenth of the distance between here and the Moon. It was discovered only two days ago.

Jeff Hecht writes in New Scientist that the previous record for a near-miss occurred on September 27, 2003, when asteroid 2003 SQ222 missed the earth by about twice that distance. We didn’t know about that one until it already passed us by, since it came from inside the Earth’s orbit.
read more

On:

Some scientists are manipulating genes in bizarre ways that seem to have no practical use. Are they creating science or art? Or are they just making monsters?

New Scientist reports that Laura Cinti has created a cactus that grows human hair. She says, “Hair is a sign of reproduction, a sign of our bodies changing, becoming or being sexual. So the cactus with hair becomes a sexual symbol.” To create it, she combined human genetic material with cactus DNA. She says, “Bald men are particularly interested in the work.”

Alas, most of her genetically-modified cacti are not doing well. “They’ve been imploding, shriveling,” she says.
read more

On:

More UFOs are showing up in Canada. Diana Luca and her mother were sitting in her kitchen when they looked out the window and spotted a UFO. It was shaped like a Frisbee and red and shiny. Luca says, “It still freaks me out. I could see it flying behind the trees and on top of the shorter trees.” Luca called to her husband Mark Murphy to come look. When he saw the UFO, he grabbed his camcorder and filmed it. In The Vancouver Courier, reporter Naoibh O’Connor describes the tape: “From the right side of the screen, a small, shiny object moves towards the center, then heads rapidly towards the camera. As it gets closer, it becomes a round, black form that vibrates slightly, at one point turning on its side, giving it the cigar shape.read more