In the News

Gardeners and farmers are well aware of aphids as a sap eating pest of various crops and flowering plants. They suck up a sugary sap

Catastrophism has many tentacles and far reaching affects, not least human and animal migrations. At http://westerndigs.org/800-year-old-camp-found-in-oregon-sand-dunes-pose... ... an assemblage of pottery, stone points, a gaming

Winter Warmers usually come in the shape of bottles of strong ale or mulled wine or even in warm jugs of cider laced with ginger,

The recent earthquake in Nepal caught the headlines around the world but it does not appear to have been anything particularly special in the grand

A Swedish study has found domestic water pipes are crawling with bacteria. However, this is not your bad kind of bacteria but your good kind

At www.q-mag.org/the-german-sun-machine-is-on.html ... posted by Anne Marie de Grazia at her web site. Greens don't like fusion it seems as they are raising a storm

At http://anthropology.net/2015/12/18/14000-year-old-bone-found-in-red-deer... ... we learn that analysis of a 14000 year old femur bone and skulls bones found in 1989 at the Red Deer cave

Joy sent in a link to https://eos.org/articles/human-radio-transmissions-create-barrier-to-kil... ... and at first I thought it was a spoof, then realised they were being serious. The claim

The Toronto Conference has now got a nice list of speakers - see www.planetamnesia.com/toronto-conference/featured-speakers/ These include Anne Marie de Grazia who will focus on Quantavolution

Robert Farrar has sent in a link to www.thethirdwayofevolution.com ... which he came across as a link from another web site he was looking at.

At www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/stonehenge-bluestones-were-moed-fr... ... and variously at locations such as http://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/stonehenge-blueston... A week ago archaeologists were cock-a-hoop as they claimed they had found the quarry where

A surprising number of article have been written on the Star of Bethlehem that suggest a comet as a possible candidate - see for example

Our Autumn speaker in Watford, Mark Bailey, is in the news - see http://phys.org/print369576018.html As the director of the Armagh Observatory he has reported on

There is an old saying that science only goes forward one funeral at a time. Senior scientists in a position of power over upstart theories

A press release from the University of Aolberta informs us of a paper published in the Dec 11th 2015 issue of Science Advances that is

At http://phys.org/print369284339.html ... a potentially important study on the spread of ancient millet crops has just been published. It is a cereal nowadays more commonly

Robert Farrar sent in four links, the first of which concern findings from the DAWN spacecraft visit to the asteroid Ceres - now written up

At http://phys.org/print369482077.html ... we are told Comet C/2014 S2 PanSTARRS will be visible in binoculars in late December, as it crosses the circumpolar northern skies.

At http://phys.org/print369509807.html ... Russian, American and European scientists are claiming they have found a warm layer in the atmosphere of Venus, the nature of which

Gna is the Nordic god that has the attribute of being swift. Swedish astronomers think they might have spotted a swift moving object at the