Summer Moon Illusion: “Sometimes you can’t believe your eyes. This week is one of those times.

Step outside any evening at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant moon rising in the east. It looks like Earth’s moon, round and cratered; the Man in the Moon is in his usual place. But something’s wrong. This full moon is strangely inflated. It’s huge!

You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion.

Sky watchers have known this for thousands of years: moons hanging low in the sky look unnaturally big. Cameras don’t see it, but our eyes do. It’s a real illusion.” (NASA)

Seeing Is Believing: “On Sunday, Newsweek magazine retracted an earlier report that U.S. interrogators at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had flushed a copy of the Qur’an down a toilet. The initial report is credited with sparking deadly anti-American riots in Afghanistan and, as a result, the retraction has received widespread attention. But new research suggests that, even with a very public correction of the record, readers of the original report may continue to believe the now-discredited story.

The research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the American Psychological Society, suggests that once you’ve seen a news report, you may go on believing it, even if later information shows it to have been false.”

“The laws of physics seem to permit time travel, and with it, paradoxical situations such as the possibility that people could go back in time to prevent their own birth. But it turns out that such paradoxes may be ruled out by the weirdness inherent in laws of quantum physics.” (New Scientist)

“An American journalist who sneaked into Nagasaki soon after the Japanese city was leveled by a U.S. atomic bomb found a ‘wasteland of war’ and victims moaning from the pain of radiation burns in downtown hospitals.

Censored 60 years ago by the U.S. military, George Weller’s stories from the atom bombed-city surfaced this month in a series of reports in the national Mainichi newspaper.” (Yahoo! News)

Republican senators challenge Bush’s Iraq optimism: “‘Too often we’ve been told and the American people have been told that we’re at a turning point,’ Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’ ‘What the American people should have been told and should be told … (is that) it’s long; it’s hard; it’s tough.’ ‘It’s going to be at least a couple more years,’ said McCain, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, was quoted by U.S. News and World Report as saying the administration’s Iraq policy was failing. ‘Things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse. The White House is completely disconnected from reality,’ said Hagel, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. ‘It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.'” (Reuters)

“Computer scientists in the US are developing a system which would allow people to ‘teleport’ a solid 3D recreation of themselves over the internet.

Professors Todd Mowry and Seth Goldstein of Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania think that, within a human generation, we might be able to replicate three-dimensional objects out of a mass of material made up of small synthetic ‘atoms’.

Cameras would capture the movement of an object or person and then this data would be fed to the atoms, which would then assemble themselves to make up an exact likeness of the object.

They came up with the idea based on ‘claytronics,’ the animation technique which involves slightly moving a model per frame to animate it.

‘We thought that a good analogy for what we were going to do was claymation – something like the Wallace and Gromit shows,’ Dr Mowry told BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

‘When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like it’s moving itself. That’s something like the idea we’re doing… in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the ‘clay’, as though the clay can move itself.” (BBC)

“American officials lied to British ministers over the use of ‘internationally reviled’ napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.” (Independent UK)

New York Times Magazine: “Abruptly, each in turn, they began to whip their arms around, hunching their shoulders, bending their bodies toward the sound and the violent lyrics, trancelike, as if some sort of battle was about to begin.

They shut their eyes then and let their heads nod. As the beats filled the room, the dancers started quivering and then caroming, at first delicately, then spasmodically, then picking up velocity in an alarming but strangely graceful way. They looked like rubber bands do when the tautened elastic is sprung.”

From the Wachowski Brothers: “In a rare concession, authorities here agreed to close down all of Whitehall, between Trafalgar and Parliament Squares, for a three-night film shoot earlier this month. The scene on the third night was wild. Hundreds of crew members and their equipment gathered in Parliament Square, flooded with light against the backdrop of Big Ben and the London Eye. Tanks patrolled the streets. More than 100 extras playing government commandos in army camouflage formed a line in front of Parliament, while some 400 others playing rebels marched en masse down Whitehall.

Such is the near future imagined in V for Vendetta, a forthcoming Warner Brothers movie, in which Britain is ruled by a band of brutal fascists, Natalie Portman is a rebel with a shaved head, and the hero-cum-vigilante, V (played by Hugo Weaving), spends the entire film shrouded in a costume that includes a black cape and a grotesque face mask.

But the most radical thing about the movie, written and produced by the brothers Andy and Larry Wachowski and based on a 1988 graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, is its climax. This is a story in which a dozy, passive populace wakes up and rises against its government oppressors – and then, in the name of freedom, blows up Parliament.” (New York Times )

Molester Suspected in 36,000 Abuse Cases: “Despite being arrested at least nine times for molesting boys, Dean Arthur Schwartzmiller managed to avoid lengthy prison terms, coach youth football, move in with another convicted sex offender — and be named by authorities as one of the most prolific child molesters in history.

Schwartzmiller’s criminal record began 35 years ago, but he never registered as a sex offender and spent just 12 years in prison. In his time on the utside, police suspect he molested children as many as 36,000 times in several states, Mexico and Brazil.

Wily, charismatic and ‘smarter than heck,’ is how James Kevan, one of his defense lawyers in the mid-1970s, described Schwartzmiller on Friday. ‘He could write up legal documents better than most lawyers.’ Often defending himself in court, Schwartzmiller got two of his four convictions overturned, even though the Idaho Supreme Court called him a repeat offender who ‘uses his intelligence to take advantage of the weak and oppressed and those who are in need.’

With Schwartzmiller, 63, being held without bail on charges involving two San Jose boys, police and the FBI are trying to retrace his movements over the last 30 years.” (Yahoo! News)

“There is painful irony in the fact that, during the same month that the confirmation of ‘Deep Throat’s’ identity has allowed the Washington Post to relive its Watergate-era glory days, that newspaper is blowing the dramatically more significant story of the ‘fixed’ intelligence the Bush administration used to scam Congress and U.S. allies into supporting the disasterous invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Last week, when the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Michigan Democrat John Conyers, chaired an extraordinary hearing on what has come to be known as the ‘Downing Street Memo’ — details of pre-war meetings where aides to British Prime Minister Tony Blair discussed the fact that, while the case for war was ‘thin,’ the Bush administration was busy making sure that ‘the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy’ — the Post ridiculed Conyers and the dozens of other members of Congress who are trying to get to the bottom of a scandal that former White House counsel John Dean has correctly identified as ‘worse than Watergate.'” (The Nation)

Romanian priest unrepentant after crucifixion of nun: “A Romanian Orthodox priest, facing charges for ordering the crucifixion of a young nun because she was ‘possessed by the devil,’ was unrepentant as he celebrated a funeral ceremony for his alleged victim.

‘God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil,’ Father Daniel, 29, the superior of the Holy Trinity monastery in north-eastern Romania, told an AFP reporter before celebrating a short liturgy ‘for the soul of the deceased’, in the presence of 13 nuns who showed no visible emotion.” (AFP)

‘Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who died in March after a fierce right-to-die battle that went all the way to the White House, was massively and irreversibly brain-damaged, pathologists announcing the results of an autopsy said on Wednesday.

The results supported clinical findings and the contention of her husband that Schiavo had been in a “persistent vegetative state” since collapsing 15 years earlier from a cardiac arrest that deprived her brain of oxygen, said Dr. Stephen Nelson, a forensic pathologist who assisted in the autopsy.

“She would not have been able to form any cognitive thought,” said Nelson, speaking with Pinellas County Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin at a news conference. “There was a massive loss of brain tissue.” ‘ (Reuters)

“I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office,” he said in a lengthy speech in which he quoted medical texts and standards. “She certainly seems to respond to visual stimuli.”

“American officials lied to British ministers over the use of ‘internationally reviled’ napalm-type firebombs in Iraq.” (Independent UK)