An Egyptian Handbook of Ritual Power has been deciphered revealing a series
of invocations and spells. It includes love spells, exorcisms and a cure for black jaundice (a potentially fatal infection). Written in Coptic, the 20 page illustrated codex dates back around 1,300 years.
Photo by Ms. Effy Alexakis,
The ancient book “starts with a lengthy series of invocations that culminate with drawings and words of power,” write Malcolm Choat and Iain Gardner, who are professors in Australia at Macquarie University and the University of Sydney, respectively, in their book, “A Coptic Handbook of Ritual Power” (Brepols, 2014). “These are followed by a number of prescriptions or spells to cure possession by spirits and various ailments, or to bring success in love and business.”
For instance, to subjugate someone, the codex says you have to say a magical formula over two nails, and then “drive them into his doorpost, one on the right side, one on the left.”
Some of the invocations are associated with a group called “Sethians.” This group flourished in Egypt during the early centuries of Christianity and held Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, in high regard. One invocation in the newly deciphered codex calls “Seth, Seth, the living Christ.”
The opening of the codex refers to a divine figure named “Baktiotha” whose identity is a mystery, researchers say. The lines read, “I give thanks to you and I call upon you, the Baktiotha: The great one, who is very trustworthy; the one who is lord over the forty and the nine kinds of serpents,” according to the translation.
“The Baktiotha is an ambivalent figure. He is a great power and a ruler of forces in the material realm,” Choat and Gardner said at a conference, before their book on the codex was published.
Historical records indicate that church leaders regarded the Sethians as heretics and by the 7th century, the Sethians were either extinct or dying out.
A small asteroid disintegrates in Earth’s atmosphere about every other week, and the distribution around the world appears to be random. That is the main message of a map released in November 2014 by NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) observation program. The new data could help scientists refine estimates of the distribution of asteroids near Earth, including larger ones that could pose a danger.
The map above indicates the locations where small asteroids crashed into Earth’s atmosphere between 1994 and 2013. Each of these 556 events resulted in a very bright meteor—also known as a bolide or fireball. On the map, orange dots represent daytime impacts and blue represents nighttime. The size of each dot is proportional to the radiated energy of the fireball, measured in billions of Joules (GigaJoules).
The map includes asteroids/meteors ranging from about 1 meter (3 feet) to almost 20 meters (65 feet); it does not include objects smaller than a meter. Nearly all of them disintegrated in the atmosphere and were harmless to life on the surface. The notable exception was the February 2013 Chelyabinsk event over central Russia. That impact released the energy equivalent of 440,000 to 500,000 tons of TNT, and it was the largest meteor to hit Earth in this period.
Map from NASA Planetary Science. Caption by Linda Billings (NEO program), Mike Carlowicz (Earth Observatory), and DC Agle (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).
Since most of us don’t have access to the videos the NSA drones film of our every move, how about a quadcopter that makes your own? 
It straps to your wrist
takes off with a flick of your arm:
Flies out and takes your picture and returns for you catch and wear it again:
A super light-weight device powered by a solar cell:
So the next time you want to catch your ascent of El Capitan
Or some equally insane act
you can do so.
Meet Oscar, a cat with a supernatural ability to feel when people are about to die. In over 50 documented cases, Oscar, who lives in a nursing home , has curled up beside patients in their final hours, seeing them through to the ‘other side’.
His unique story was revealed by Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, who claims Oscar’s predictions have rarely been wrong in the past six years. In fact, he has even proved medical staff wrong at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island, where he was adopted seven years ago as a kitten.
Dr. Dosa first told the world about Oscar’s rare gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has accurately sensed even more deaths, convincing the geriatrician that it wasn’t just a series of coincidences.
Dr. Dosa doesn’t offer any scientific explanations for the cat’s abilities, but he does suggest that Oscar – like dogs that are reportedly able to smell cancer – might be able to smell ketones, which are distinctly odored biochemicals given off by dying cells.
Dr. Jill Goldman, a certified animal behaviorist in California, expands on that theory – that Oscar’s predictions might be a learned behavior. “There has been ample opportunity for him to make an association between ‘that’ smell and death.”
Irrespective of the reason, patients and their families at the nursing home find comfort in Oscar’s presence, in the idea that the animal was there and might be there when their loved ones eventually pass. The staff have grown so confident of Oscar’s ESP that they now inform family members when he snuggles up with one of the patients.
More details of the remarkable animal:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7129952/Cat-predicts-50-deaths-in-RI-nursing-home.html
It is a 1961 documentary called “Ask Me, Don’t Tell Me” that was created by the American Friends Service Committee (the Quakers) that shows how they brokered peace between the many ‘jacket clubs’ (as the gangs in San Francisco were then called).
The new research by specialists at St George’s, University of London, studied the treatment of brain cancer tumours in the laboratory and discovered that the most effective treatment was to combine active chemical components of the cannabis plant with radiation.
Those treated with both irradiation and the cannabinoids saw the most beneficial results and a drastic reduction in size. In some cases, the tumours effectively disappeared in the animals. This augurs well for further research in humans in the future. At the moment this is a mostly fatal disease with about a 10% survival rate.
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2014-11-cannabis-effect-brain-cancer.html#ajTabs
It was the staggering amount of footwear in the caves that captured the attention of archaeologists, past and present.
With soles made from a single piece of bison leather, lined with fur, and sewn together at the heel, the moccasins are made in a style typical of the Canadian Subarctic, Ives said, a fashion his team describes as being “decidedly out of place in the eastern Great Basin.”
These moccasins and other cues have led some experts to theorize that the caves’ inhabitants were part of a great migration from the far north, a wave of people who moved into the Great Basin in the 12th and 13th centuries, and eventually gave rise to cultures that include the Apache and the Navajo.
The Truthiness Shall Set You Freak
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 