Weird Links

Black holes may contain whole universes inside them, according to a theory called loop quantum gravity.

The Earth has a large moon, making it unique in the inner solar system. Mercury and Venus have no moons, and Mars has only two small asteroid-sized objects orbiting it. Would life have evolved differently, or even appeared on Earth without the Moon?

Chief UN atomic watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei said Sunday he had no evidence that Iran is building nuclear weapons and accused US leaders of adding "fuel to the fire" with recent bellicose rhetoric.

An account of experiments supposedly conducted on living cells recovered from a downpour of "Red Rain" in India, 2001. The cells were observed to grow at 300 degrees Celsius, and pressure up to 300 pounds per square centimeter. The cells were seens to reproduce by budding, although chemical analysis did not show the presence of phospherous; present in the backbone of DNA.

There then follows an interview with the researcher, Godfrey Louis, who carried out the experiments.

Apparently there's a paper published on this research, the pdf of which eludes me for the moment, but I'm sure it's a blast so here's the citation:

Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar. The Red Rain Phenomenon of Kerala and its Possible Extraterrestrial Origin (2006). Astrophysics and Space Science. 302:175-187.

The demonization of Iran drags on relentlessly as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has been officially branded a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and its elite Quds Force a supporter of terrorism. The latter has for months been accused of supplying Shi'ite militias in Iraq with weapons that are killing US soldiers.

The move follows President George W Bush's comments last week that implied that Iran obtaining nuclear weapons could lead to "World War III", and Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on Sunday in which he said that "the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences" if Iran does not comply with demands.

At some point within the next twenty or thirty years China will face an energy crisis for which it will be almost certainly unprepared. The crisis may come sooner if, due to a combination of internal and external pressures, the Chinese are forced to limit the use of coal and similar fuels. At that point their economic growth would stall and they would face a massive recession.

For the US this means that in the future, say around 2025, the ability of private US or multinational firms to offer China a reliable supply of beamed electricity at a competitive price would allow China to continue its economic growth and emergence as part of a peaceful world power structure.

For seven years, the left has been up in arms about President Bush's aggressive foreign policy, his secrecy, his partisanship, and his expansive claims on executive power. It's odd, then, that they're prepared to nominate Hillary Clinton to carry the party into the 2008 elections.

The problem with Hillary Clinton is two-fold: First, she's likely to be as bad or worse than Bush on all of those issues, and second, she's the one Democrat the Republicans still have a chance to beat.

World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown. Decline in gas, coal and uranium also predicted.

Seems like Gordon Brown will push this one through parliament without a referendum, so you may as well read as much about it as you can.

The United Kingdom is planning to claim sovereign rights over a vast area of the remote seabed off Antarctica, the Guardian has learned. The submission to the United Nations covers more than 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles) of seabed, and is likely to signal a quickening of the race for territory around the south pole in the world's least explored continent.

The claim would be in defiance of the spirit of the 1959 Antarctic treaty, to which the UK is a signatory. It specifically states that no new claims shall be asserted on the continent. The treaty was drawn up to prevent territorial disputes.