10 Signs You Could Be The Chosen Savior
You may feel like just a regular person — but in a science-fictional world, that usually means you’re extra-special. Are you the Slayer? The One? The Last Starfighter? Take our quiz and find out for sure. It is your Destiny!
Finally, a Cure for Homophobia?
During a widely publicized press conference at the Boston University School of Medicine Friday, researchers announced a breakthrough new technique that cures homophobia by immersing patients in a large glass tank overflowing with gays. “Rather than avoid one’s fear of homosexual men, we believe it’s crucial to face it head on,” behavioral psychologist Dr. Dolph Kleineman told reporters…
Reality TV show: Six wealthy young fashion addicts never thought about who makes their clothes — until they were relocated to India, where they worked in cotton fields and clothes factories. Find out whether they could handle a sewing machine and meet the target of two garments a minute.
New Spiritual Technique [NSFW]
Rob says:
A lead actor in the CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother told The New York Times he’s reading my book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia. Looks like he’s making a very pronoiac movie, too; it’s called Happythankyoumoreplease.
He says: “I didn’t know the movie was going to be about gratitude, but that’s what it’s about: going from ‘What’s missing?’ to ‘Everything I see is a blessing.'”
The number of serial murders is dwindling, along with the public’s fascination with them. The golden age of serial killers is probably past.
Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn’t keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder, keeps a database of confirmed serial murderers starting in 1900. According to his count, based on newspaper clippings, books, and Web sources, there were only a dozen or so serial killers before 1960 in the United States. Then serial killings took off: There were 19 in the 1960s, 119 in the ’70s, and 200 in the ’80s. In the ’90s, the number of cases dropped to 141. And the 2000s saw only 61 serial murderers.
A Physicist Explains Why Parallel Universes May Exist
Recent discoveries in physics and astronomy, [Brian Greene] says, point to the idea that our universe may be one of many universes populating a grander multiverse.
“You almost can’t avoid having some version of the multiverse in your studies if you push deeply enough in the mathematical descriptions of the physical universe,” he says. “There are many of us thinking of one version of parallel universe theory or another. If it’s all a lot of nonsense, then it’s a lot of wasted effort going into this far-out idea. But if this idea is correct, it is a fantastic upheaval in our understanding.”
Nobel Prize winning biologist says DNA can electromagnetically teleport a duplicate of itself between test tubes.
A Nobel prize winning scientist who shared the 2008 prize for medicine for his role in establishing the link between HIV and AIDS has stirred up a good deal of both interest and skepticism with his latest experimental results, which more or less show that DNA can teleport itself to distant cells via electromagnetic signals.
New Forests Are Increasing Dramatically
For every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.
The First Solar-Powered Air Conditioner
China’s first solar-powered air conditioner that can also send excess electricity to the power grid began rolling off a Gree Electric Appliances production line Wednesday.
The first 50,000 units will be sold in the American market. After that, the units will also be available for purchase in China, according to company sources.
Activism for beginners. How three friends rescued hundreds of Uganda’s child soldiers.
In the future, your car may be made of mushrooms
Believe it or not, scientists who are trying to find more sustainable ways to build car parts believe the answers may be found in things such as mushroom roots.
Pretty music you’ve never heard – “We’ll dazzle them all — hold on”
The Emotional World of Farmer Animals
Jefferey Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and Dogs Never Lie About Love, leads viewers through the personal journey he underwent while writing his latest book, The Pig Who Sang to The Moon.
This journey into the sentient, emotional lives of farm animals brings Masson to animal sanctuaries around the country where caregivers and the animals themselves tell their harrowing stories of rescue and escape.
Masson delves into the rich ancestry of these curious and intelligent animals and interviews top experts in animal behavior who offer scientific perspectives on these amazing creatures.
Possibilianism is a philosophy which rejects both the idiosyncratic claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.
Reasons to be cheerful: Leaders in the business of books reveal what they are optimistic about
Every new year, John Brockman of the online intellectual powerhouse Edge (www.edge.org) asks its virtual community of scientists and social thinkers one question. In 2007, it was this: “What are you optimistic about?” To strike a less than despondent chord this January, I put the same question to a few people in the British book world who are best placed to know. Read their answers on these pages.
Pronoia Resources 
