The world’s greatest health food gets even healthier:

Is High Fructose Corn Syrup Turning Us Into Mad Hatters?

In an attempt to reclaim its reputation a few months back, the makers of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) created a few sneaky commercials, which were really hard for us in the food community to take seriously.   But now HFCS is in the news again — and this time the reason is much worse. It turns out that many foods sweetened with HFCS contain mercury, left as a residue in the production of caustic soda, a key ingredient in HFCS.  And worst of all, the FDA and the industry have known about this potential toxin and has continued serving it up since at least 2005.

Side A: Comets did not kill off the mammoths.

Side B: If comets didn’t kill off the mammoths, why are all these mammoths peppered with space debris?

Okay this is somewhat glib, as the space debris peppered Side B mammoths are 30,000 years old and the not-killed-by-comets Side A mammoths are like 12,000 years old. I just want to point out that the Side A argument does not engage the Side B argument at all, and more like shows disdain for it - I think it may be in fact warring cliques of paleontologists presenting these contrary ideas.

In point of fact many mass extinctions are looking more and more complicated with multiple causes and so on. So there’s nothing craaazy about pointing out the, well, perfectly scientific indications that comet impacts were not at all helpful to mammoths.

Forwarded by Gonzo Informant princelumber, who adds, “haha Dubai.”

We’ve known this for a while. What exactly is the holdup?

Thought you all would enjoy this. Some wise words from Norm Stamper, former police chief of Seattle, regarding the “abysmal failure” of the war on drugs, calling it basically the worst idea since slavery.

Enjoy.

The latest study adds weight to the case for Hobbits.

… Doesn’t work for everyone, and may be dangerous if started later in life.

…not one at a time as previously supposed.

…adding, this seems to indicate new species could evolve faster than previously thought, dovetailing with our previous posts about “fast” speciation here, here and here.

I’m going to go ahead and give this post a “heresy” tag since it was the great heretic Immanuel Velikovsky who suggested that speciation could happen virtually overnight in response to a catastrophe, and, well, it was heresy then and it’s heresy now, except now there’s all this evidence for it. Just sayin’!

Can I undergo bodywide mutagenic changes and evolve mutant superpowers now?

Some indications that David Bohm was right and that we are living in a giant hologram.

Big fun from the 80’s version of ‘The Twilight Zone’.

Alien comes to Earth and laments our ‘Small Talent for War’.

By way of Dkos.

Fascinating follow-up about our modern-day D. B. Cooper, this guy has almost as much going for him as Hannibal Lecter on Mother’s Day.

p.s. there are rumors that D. B. cooper was actually ingenious film-maker David Lynch.

Wherein the ancient Persians gassed some Romans in the 3rd Century AD.

How did I miss this? From last May-

In a bizarre example of Second Life leaking into the real world, a political assembly on Saturday led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was disrupted by a flying penis.

Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia movement, a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government. Over 700 people showed up for the event in central Moscow, but Kasparov’s speech was interrupted when a large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room. The Moscow Times attributed the prank to “a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists.”

Wow. Thanks to Cracked.

This link to a diagram of Obama’s armored super-limo (found on Kos) is reassuring, given the growing list of Obama assassination plots.

Was surprised to find it can’t fly. I thought that was standard government issue.

Update: If this earlier, ever-expanding post listing Obama assassination plots is any indication, he’s gonna need that limo too.

On paper, every session looked like gold to me. Technology and the Warfighter. Neuroscience and Its Potential Applications. Lethality Technologies. Autonomous/Unmanned Systems. (Robots!)

But when I got to the luxury hotel in sunny Orlando, Florida, for the 26th Army Science Conference, all that potentially glittered, it often seemed, was nowhere to be found — except, perhaps, in the threads of the unlikeliest of military uniforms.

I expected to hear about nefarious new technologies. To see tomorrow’s killing machines in a dazzling exhibit hall. To learn something about the Army’s secret plans for the coming decades. To be awed — or disgusted — by a peek at the next 50 years of war-making.

What I stumbled into, however, seemed more like a cross between a dumbed-down academic conference and a weekend wealth expo, paired with an exhibit hall whose contents might not have rivaled those of a regional auto show. I came away knowing less about the next half century of lethal technologies than the last eight years of wheel-spinning, never-winning occupations of foreign lands.

Discover Magazine’s Weirdest Science Stories of the past year.

Now let us never speak of 2008 again.

Fascinating presentation ‘Controlling the Human Mind’ by Dr.Nick Begich. He is an interesting cat, being both the son of Congressman Nick Begich Sr., one of the disproportionately high number of Democrats to have died in mysterious plane crashes, and the brother of Mark Begich who recently defeated convicted felon Ted Stevens to become the junior Senator from Alaska.

I missed the opportunity to hear Nick Begich speak at Conference on Altered States last year where I also missed the opportunity to witness Rupert Sheldrake get stabbed in the leg by a Japanese fanatic. Oh well.

Capuchin monkeys demonstrating their stone-age technology and upright walking.

I could have told them this link existed.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - For immediate release

Sequim, Wa – Noted astronomer Thomas C Van Flandern succumbed to colon cancer on January 9, 2009.  He graduated from Xavier University in 1962, briefly attended Georgetown University in 1963 and received his PhD in astronomy from Yale in 1969, specializing in celestial mechanics. Dr. Van Flandern’s early work is well regarded within his field, but he was more broadly (and controversially) known for his later scientific contributions.

Fascinated with astronomy from a very young age, Dr. Van Flandern made his first contribution to the field at age 19.  In 1959, Tom and his friend Dennis Smith (age 17) set the world record for number of artificial satellites tracked during a month as part of project Moonwatch in Cincinnati.  Tom made his observation from his personal telescope purchased with money earned from his paper route.

Dr. Van Flandern worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory for 21 years and became Chief of the Celestial Mechanics Branch of the Nautical Almanac Office. His team contributed to the regular production of The Nautical Almanac, among other projects. After retiring from the civil service, Van Flandern served as a Research Associate at the University of Maryland Physics Department, and as a Global Positioning System (GPS) consultant to the Army Research Laboratory.

In his book “Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets”, Dr. Van Flandern presented the case for several controversial theories, most notably that the speed of gravity must propagate significantly faster than the speed of light; both comets and asteroids are remnants of an exploded planet; back-ground radiation is not caused by an expanding universe and therefore the big bang is invalid; Mars is an escaped moon of an exploded planet formerly located in the asteroid belt; and that some structures on Mars are artificial.  Dr. Van Flandern successfully predicted the discovery that asteroids with satellites, co-published peer reviewed papers on the speed of gravity with J.P. Vigier, and collaborated with Esko Lyytinen in improving the model for predicting meteor showers. Unfortunately detractors frequently use his claims of artificiality on Mars to marginalize both him and his work.

We have lost a courageous titan of scientific free inquiry.

[Tom Van Flandern helped us out a lot. He gave us an exclusive interview which appears in our book Gonzo Science. We also used to publish an online column at the Anomalist (column since defunct), and one of their regulars, an editor over there I think, publically got mad at us for saying the big bang theory sucked, and for showing a fondness for Van Flandern’s idea that black holes do not exist after all. This editor guy tried to nail us on some very finely parsed technical astronomy questions that, being generalists, we couldn’t answer. So we emailed Tom Van Flandern and basically said, “we don’t want to run crying to you every time someone bloodies our nose on the playground, but this guy over at the Anomalist is pressing us on these very technical matters and we wonder if you’d want to take a crack at it.” Sure enough, Tom emails a reply over and the guy backed down citing his deference to the master. It was awesome. We also have a rap about Tom on our CD (click here and select track #4 “Menace 2 Tha Orthodoxy”), which we sent to him, but he begged off making any comments saying he “didn’t like rap.” I think he was mortified. At any rate, it was always fun to interact with him, albeit by email, and as gonzo blogger Matt can attest, Tom always seemed to have time to spend answering questions and explaining complicated things. Tom Van Flandern was a gentleman and a scholar, and we will all miss him here. -Jim]

Web-surfers everywhere will recall the eerie power of Garfield Minus Garfield.But it turns out there are more bizarre permutations of the cat who would not die…

I saw this news story and immediately thought, “This needs to go on Gonzo Science!”

‘Horror frog’ breaks own bones to produce claws

“Amphibian horror” isn’t a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. Harvard biologists have described a bizarre, hairy frog with cat-like extendable claws.

Trichobatrachus robustus actively breaks its own bones to produce claws that puncture their way out of the frog’s toe pads, probably when it is threatened.

David Blackburn and colleagues at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, think the gruesome behaviour is a defence mechanism.

The researchers say there are salamanders that force their ribs through their skin to produce protective barbs on demand, but nothing quite like this mechanism has been seen before.

The feature is also found in nine of the 11 frogs belonging to the Astylosternus genus, most of which live in Cameroon.

Nice bullshit-riddled article about Hayden’s (torture czar III) exit from the CIA.  If you believe only THREE PEOPLE were water-boarded over the last five years, I have a nice little bridge in Jersey I want to sell you.

40 feet down, allegedly with mastodon glyph.

…the Onslow County native found himself in a bizarre, CIA-funded drug testing and mind-control program, according to a lawsuit that he and five other veterans and Vietnam Veterans of America filed last week. The suit was filed in federal court in San Francisco against the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Adrian Belew, musician/inventor pt 2.

The Dawn of Personal Subs. Props to Popular Mechanics.

Laughing Gas Makes People Suggestible

Cocaine Makes Bees Excitable

Yes, but how does LSD affect the reproductive cycle of hamsters in zero gravity?

“This idea would have been viewed as crazy 25 years ago, but these new findings have invigorated research … in the role that biology may play in atmospheric processes.”

Sorry, you’ll have to click the link to find out what the hell they’re talking about.

Discover has the scoop on how we will all die in horrible agony and terror.