(For all you at the cutting-edge intersection between privacy/conspiracy concerns and space-exploration fanaticism): Spy Agency May Have Located Mars Polar Lander: “The Mars Polar Lander may have been
found — intact — by a top-secret spy imagery agency.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has been
quietly scanning Mars pictures, looking for the Mars Polar
Lander since early December 1999. According to a source
close to the NIMA effort, photographic specialists at NIMA
think they’ve spotted something. But NASA officials say it’s
too early to tell.

The Mars Polar Lander (MPL) dove into the Martian
atmosphere on Dec. 3, 1999, heading for a soft landing on
the planet’s south polar region. But contact was never
reestablished after the probe was to have touched down. On
Jan. 17, 2000, after a series of efforts to communicate with
the spacecraft failed, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who
managed the mission, declared it a loss.” space.com [thanks, Abby] More about NIMA can be found here.

Martin Klein, who like myself posted the story about the massacre of the monarchs to his weblog, sent me a link to this LA Times story refuting the claim: “The Mexican environmental watchdog Profepa announced that a scientific
analysis of 300 butterfly corpses from the Cerro San Andres sanctuary in central
Michoacan state showed no traces of toxic substances from pesticides.
It concluded that the butterflies had died from the cold.” Klein, as a result, deleted the original post from his weblog. I, being the querrulous sort that I am, wonder instead whose interests Mexico’s environmental protection agency actually serves and what political power the Mexican timber concerns wield, and thus whether its announcement is credible or should be taken as a coverup. Googling on “Profepa AND Mexico” comes up with this. Here, incidentally, is last year’s coverage of concerns about the monarchs’ wintering grounds from ABC News. Klein’s blog is here. As a self-described “environmental bureaucrat” for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, perhaps he has a line on the credibility of Profepa that I don’t, but all I could think about were the scenes in Traffic about the gullible Americans’ cooperation with their corrupt Mexican counterparts in drug enforcement. Not to stereotype or anything, and why should I have any greater faith in the righteousness of, say, Whitman’s EPA?

Sydney Morgue Investigated Over Corpse Experiments: ”virtually a body parts supermarket for medical researchers.” Reuters

Claire Field wins Harry Potter Web site case: “Warner Brothers has backed down on its legal threats against
15-year-old Claire Field – owner of the Web site
www.harrypotterguide.co.uk.

In a fax sent to Claire’s lawyer, Matthew Rippon of Prettys Solicitors,
Warner Brothers said that in view of the facts that Claire had
registered the URL in good faith and was not using it for commercial
means, there was no need for it to continue in its action.

Previously, Warner Brothers claimed that Claire’s site infringed its
trademark as it had the rights to the forthcoming Harry Potter film.” The Register

Schizophrenia ‘helped the ascent of man’. ‘Tiny mutations in our ancestors’ brain cells triggered mankind’s
takeover of the world 100,000 years ago. But these changes
also cursed our species to suffer from schizophrenia and
depression.

This is the controversial claim by biochemist David Horrobin in a
new book, The Madness of Adam & Eve: How schizophrenia
shaped humanity, to be published by Bantam Press next
month.

Horrobin – who is medical adviser to the Schizophrenia
Association of Great Britain – argues that the changes which
propelled humanity to its current global ascendancy were the
same as those which have left us vulnerable to mental disease.’ Horrobin lists families sharing great creativity and madness — Jung, Einstein, Joyce, etc. — and geniuses considered to be mentally imbalanced. I’d love to see his statistical reasoning, without which it feels like sampling bias to me. Most dicey, however, seems his assertion that the critical mutation involved the fat content of human neural tissue. He argues that the transition to an agriculturally-based diet altered the fat content of our food and left us vulnerable, as our hunter-gatherer ancestors hadn’t been. Although I haven’t read the book, and am arguing only with the blurb, there appear to be several problems with his thesis. First, he appears to lump together all major mental illnesses, not explaining their very real differences. Second, this doesn’t explain why some people get the illnesses and others do not; why no one has ever found the association between a high-fat diet and relative immunity to schizophrenia (or an inverse relationship between vulnerability to heart disease and mental illness…) his theory would seem to predict; or differences across populations with very differing diets. But, then again, until recently he was the managing director of a company promoting essential fatty acid natural dietary supplements. The Guardian