Noumenal News

In 1877, the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was looking at
Mars through his new telescope, and he noticed intricate etchings in
the equatorial region of the planet’s surface. Schiaparelli called
these lines canali, by which he probably meant something like “gullies”
or “grooves,” but his coinage got wrongly translated into English as
“canals.” It was a regrettable linguistic slip.
The idea […]

The next milestone in the relentless pursuit of smaller, higher performance microchips has been unveiled.

Chip-maker Intel has announced that it will start
manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres
(billionths of a metre) wide.

Shrinking the basic building blocks of microchips will make them faster and more efficient.

Computer giant IBM has also signalled its intention to start production […]

HOOPESTON – The witch school that moved into Hoopeston’s elephant
building three years ago may soon be the site of a reality TV show on
the Sci-Fi channel.
“We’re pretty excited even though we don’t know that much about it yet,” said Don Lewis, who is the Witch School’s chancellor.
Full Article

Controversial Catholic group Opus Dei has complained
to the BBC about what it says is a “defamatory” portrayal in primetime
drama Waking The Dead.

Two episodes of the crime series, shown last weekend,
featured devotees of the religious organisation embroiled in a gruesome
double murder.

Opus Dei said the BBC broke religious guidelines by showing its members as “murderers, thieves […]

Evangelical and Catholic Christians, of the slightly barmy variety (and yes, that includes the present pontiff), have been convinced for some time that Harry Potter is part of a fiendish plot to bring the wee innocent ones to the dark arts of Satan. Yes, J.K. Rowling is, when she’s not busy being non-existent, accused of […]

The Greeks developed mathematics as a deductive science that reached its climax with Euclid of Alexandria in his masterpiece The Elements.
Before that, during the ancient Egyptian era, mathematics was an
inductive discipline of a utilitarian nature used to perform practical
tasks such as flood control or land measurement using rope. It has been
suggested that mathematics then amounted […]

Burnaby school board decided Tuesday
to stop allowing pamphlets offering free Gideon Bibles to be
distributed in city classrooms.

“The decision was made to suspend it pending a review of our policy,” said trustee Ron Burton.

Last October, a Burnaby
grandfather wrote to the school board complaining that two of his
grandchildren received pamphlets at school offering a free copy of […]

For years astronomers have known that the upper atmospheres of Saturn and other giant planets are hotter than can be explained by absorbed sunlight. Today the mystery deepened.
The phenomenon has long been blamed on a mechanism similar to what creates the aurora, or Northern Lights on Earth. On Earth, magnetic energy in the […]

BY DAY SHE’S the Stanislaus National Forest’s
archaeologist. With a master’s degree in anthropology, she makes sure
prehistoric Native American sites in the woods are protected. She’s
also the forest’s liaison with the Me-Wuk tribe.
But it’s what Kathy Strain does in her spare time that separates her from Forest Service colleagues.

She’s a Bigfooter. A student of […]

CRESCO - A team of ghost hunters believe they have found what goes bump in the night in Iowa.
Wisconsin’s
Chad Lewis and Terry Fisk spent nearly two years researching reports of
hauntings and spirit activity throughout Iowa in order to produce their
book, The Iowa Road Guide to Haunted Locations, which was released last
week. The book features detailed […]