"The year I was born, in 1981, the US Government decided magick was real. Well, the “US Government” is of course an abstraction—specifically, Congressional Research Service was commissioned to do a report on psychic phenomena and offered the following conclusion: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplifi..."

"The word after "infinity" in my dictionary is "infirm," a definition of which is "weak of mind." This is how many of us who are not mathematically inclined feel upon contemplating infinity. (To see how mathematicians and similar thinkers regard infinity, see Working With Infinity: A Mathematical Perspective.) We feel weak because our finite minds can only go so far with the concept, and because every time we think we're on the verge of securing even a shadowy understanding, we're tripped up by something. A frien..."

"For generations, farmers and explorers have been finding what they assumed were random incisions on stones throughout the Northeast United States. Very little was thought of the odd rocks until archeologist and language specialist Barry Fell, the man singularly responsible for bringing the importance of these scratches to national attention in his monumental work America, B.C., recognized they were ancient writings and actually deciphered one of these inscriptions in 1967. This stone, found at what has come to b..."

"Was George Lucas on to something when he wrote, "May the force be with you?" Did he know something about the universe's mysterious machinations that physicists today don't understand? Sci-fi worlds are often a blend of mythology, fantasy and science, and a good writer can blur the lines between them to momentarily suspend disbelief. While it's true that a good deal of what comprises the universe is unknown to science - dark energy and dark matter, for example - these unknowns do not suspend the absolute truth of un..."

"In a sweeping critique made public Wednesday, an expert panel of the National Research Council said the federal government was not doing enough to identify potential health and environmental risks from engineered nanomaterials. It called for a sweeping new effort, involving key players in and out of government, to assess them. Nanomaterials are engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter, perhaps 1/10,000 the width of a human hair. They are turning up in a range of items including consumer products like to..."

"One night I saw a TV program, Einstein's Universe. I turned it on because it was narrated by Peter Ustinov, whom I admire, even though I'm tired of Einstein's universe. The program was well done. A great effort was made to make a clear and convincing dramatization of the universe according to Einstein; just enough mystique to sugar the dull sterility of science. What bothered me most was the subservient role of Peter Ustinov playing an average man who didn't know science, feeling privileged to be let in on the secr..."

"A newly discovered "minor planet" with an elongated orbit around the Sun may help explain the origin of comets, researchers said Monday. The object, known as 2006 SQ372, is starting the outward portion of a 22,500-year orbit that will take it 240 billion kilometres away from the Sun. The icy lump of rock is just over three billion kilometres from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune, researchers told a symposium on Monday. They will publish their findings in the Astrophysical Journal. The orbit of 2..."