“(D)o we know how to identify the child whose brilliance might change the world? And do we really want to?” (New York Times Magazine)

“Scientists in Bulgaria say they have unearthed a 1700-year-old vampire graveyard. The skeletons found in Bourgas had nails driven through their bones to stop them rising from the dead.” (dailyrecord.co.uk)

“A giant white radish that won the hearts of a Japanese town by valiantly growing through the urban asphalt was in intensive care at a town hall in western Japan on Thursday after being slashed by an unknown assailant.” (Yahoo! News)

“A new walk-through airport lie detector made in Israel may prove to be the toughest challenge yet for potential hijackers or drug smugglers.

Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyzer requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.

The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.” (CNET)

Group wants to see humans extinct: “Make no mistake about it, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement isn’t anti-child, it’s more like anti-human.

The VHE is dedicated to phasing out the human race in the interest of the health of the Earth, founder Les Knight told Wednesday’s San Francisco Chronicle.

With 16,000 people born per hour and a current global population of 6.5 billion, there are already more than enough people on the planet, Knight said.

A 1994 study concluded a single person born in the 1990s would be responsible during a lifetime for 22 million pounds of liquid waste and 2.2 million pounds each of solid waste and atmospheric waste, the newspaper said. He or she will have a lifetime consumption of 4,000 barrels of oil, 1.5 million pounds of minerals and 62,000 pounds of animal products that will necessitate the slaughter of 2,000 animals.

‘Wherever humans live, not much else lives,’ Knight said. ‘It isn’t that we’re evil and want to kill everything — it’s just how we live.'”

“Why They Don’t Hate Us, the latest book by University of California professor Mark LeVine, is his attempt to ‘figure out how to get out of the mess the Muslim world and the West have gotten into since 9/11,’ says the author. LeVine writes that ‘Why do they hate us?’ is the wrong post-9/11 question for the West to ask. He argues that although an ‘axis of arrogance and ignorance’ has produced the violence that defines global politics, there are models for empathy and understanding emerging in youth culture and the world music scene. LeVine recently spoke to Beliefnet senior editor Alice Chasan about his book.”

Bee Season–movie review by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner: “Sometimes a movie can be important for its inaccuracies. Take Bee Season, for example. The story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and ricochets off the foibles of the members of the Naumann family: Eliza, a grade school girl with a gift for spelling; Aaron, her older brother, who is a spiritual seeker; their mother who, it turns out, is basically bonkers; and their father, who is a religion professor and failed Kabbalist (Jewish mystic). It is a beautifully photographed but unsatisfying rendition of Myla Goldberg’s beautifully written but unsatisfying novel of the same name. Despite its disappointments, however, Bee Season inadvertently offers some highly instructive insights into the state of religion–and, specifically, Kabbalah–in America today. ” (belief.net)

“For all the shambles Congress has made of this year’s public agenda, the reigning politicians of Washington are diligently attending to their own private wish list, which emphasizes ever greater protections for incumbents like themselves.

Waiting like a ship in the night for a quick, opportunistic vote is a Republican proposal that could devastate existing campaign controls by allowing politicians to collude with big-check donors from corporations, unions and lobbying blocs to finance unlimited amounts of campaign ads on the Internet. This would signal the return to unregulated soft-money politicking that a wiser and warier Congress outlawed three years ago.” (New York Times editorial)

Molly Ivins: “Today’s fun challenge is ‘Spot the Next Brownie.’ In this fab game for the whole family, review a list of Bush administration cronies in office and see if you can pick the next Michael ‘Heckuva Job’ Brown, another disaster waiting for a hurricane to happen.”

“Florida tested ‘Celestial Drops’ to see if they warded off citrus canker. Florida’s citrus crop contributes billions of dollars to the state’s economy, so when that industry is threatened, anything that might help is considered. Back in 2001, when citrus canker was blighting the crop and threatening to reduce that vital source of revenue, an interesting — if not quite scientific — alternative was considered.

Katherine Harris, then Florida’s secretary of state — and now a member of the U.S. House of Representatives — ordered a study in which, according to an article by Jim Stratton in the Orlando Sentinel, ‘researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test ‘Celestial Drops,’ promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its ‘improved fractal design,’ ‘infinite levels of order,’ and ‘high energy and low entropy.”” (MSMBC)

“The average person sees tens of thousands of images in the course of a day. One sees images on television, in newspapers and magazines, on websites, and on the sides of buses. Images grace soda cans and t-shirts and billboards. Internet search engines can instantly procure images for practically any word you type. The question is not merely rhetorical. It points to something important about images in our culture: They have, by their sheer number and ease of replication, become less magical and less shocking—a situation unknown until fairly recently in human history.” (The New Atlantis)

…for those who can stomach it: “If you’re bald, we have some good news and some bad. The good news is, a cure has been found. The bad is what this cure involves: it means – and squeamish readers should look away now – having your scalp sliced open and repositioned on your head.” (Independent.UK)

“Sometimes you’ve just got to forget all your troubles and buy some shoes. At least that’s what the American consumer appears to be thinking right now.

For the past two months, sales of shoes have been up sharply, for a host of reasons. Department stores, specialty chains, high-end retailers and low-end retailers are all reporting big sales increases, often in the double digits.” (Washington Post)

“A new walk-through airport lie detector made in Israel may prove to be the toughest challenge yet for potential hijackers or drug smugglers.

Tested in Russia, the two-stage GK-1 voice analyzer requires that passengers don headphones at a console and answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ into a microphone to questions about whether they are planning something illicit.

The software will almost always pick up uncontrollable tremors in the voice that give away liars or those with something to hide, say its designers at Israeli firm Nemesysco.” (CNET)