Legend holds that ghost haunts med school
One of the best known and most often repeated ghost stories from North Carolina concerns the tale of a young woman's spirit haunting a highly regarded medical school in the Tar Heel State. In his classic book "Ghost Tales of the Uwharries," author Fred T. Morgan wrote about the ghost of lovely Louise at what he calls Founder's College. A friend of mine told me that the tale happened at what is now Duke Medical School. At any rate, it is a tale worth telling again and again...
Psi-verts and psychic piracy: The future of parapsychology?
David Luke: I woke up this morning with a psychic advert left lingering in my dreaming mind. It was some kind of oneiric flyer for a new type of yoga, it even had a telephone number on it to call. This fanciful hypnopompic intrusion brought me back to the idea that if science can identify techniques for reliably producing psychic abilities (termed 'psi') then PR executives will soon be pumping millions into pumping adverts directly into our minds...
Dinosaur blood extracted from bone
Collagen, hemoglobin, elastin, laminin and cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells have been found in a dinosaur bone scientists still claim is 80 million years old, according to a report in Science magazine today. Paleontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University first claimed to have isolated soft tissues and collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone several years ago...
Evidence of the 'Lost World': Did dinosaurs survive the end cretaceous extinctions?
"The Lost World," Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million years ago, has no less appeal now than it did when it was written a century ago. Various Hollywood versions have tried to recreate the lost world of dinosaurs, but today the fiction seems just a little closer to reality. New scientific evidence suggests that dinosaur bones from the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin, USA, date from after the extinction, and that dinosaurs may have survived in a remote area of what is now New Mexico and Colorado for up to half a million years...
Swine Flu 2012: Is the curse of the Maya and 2012 upon us?
"Alien skull" spotted on Mars
UFO spotters are claiming they have spotted an alien skull on Mars after NASA beamed back satellite images from the planet...
Death and dying: what science tells us about the afterlife
Ever thought about what a different world it would be if we had hard, scientific proof of an afterlife? If you're local to the Rhine Research Center, Durham, NC, then you might want to jump into their newly formed Rhine Book Club. On May 13, beginning at noon, the group will discuss Dr. Julie Beischel's article, "Spirit Under the Microscope: What Science Can Tell Us About the Afterlife"...
Seven degrees of Sasquatch: giants, Nephilim and subterranean proto-humans
Every creepy old thing is new again
Over on the Gralien Report, Micah Hanks had a ruminative post yesterday about bigfoot in myth and history called Seven Degrees of Sasquatch: Giants, Nephilim and Subterranean Proto-Humans. Which was sort of a synchronicity for me since I was reading the essay "Medieval Monsters" by David Lyle Jeffrey, the fourth piece in Manlike Monsters on Trial. That essay spends a good bit of time talking about that terror of senior year in high school, Beowulf...
The mysterious Mr. Tesla
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 7 January 1943) was an inventor and a mechanical and electrical engineer. Tesla was born in the village of Smiljan near the town of Gospiæ, Austrian Empire, Croatian Krajina. He was an ethnic Serb subject of the Austrian Empire and later became an American citizen. Tesla is often described as the most important scientist and inventor of the modern age, a man who "shed light over the face of Earth". He is best known for many revolutionary contributions in the field of electricity and magnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries...
