When browsing through the shelves of a delightful bookstore near my home, I saw a book that was devoted to the science of “Harry Potter”- I’ve seen books on the science of Star Trek, but never Harry Potter, so it was unusual for me to find Michio Kaku’s article,  "Small-Scale Invisibility Cloaks".

Harry Potter and his Invisibility CloakThe whole article sounds like crazy-talk, but is actually true. In 2006, some industrious scientists at Duke University created metamaterials, “which could render an object invisible by absorbing all the light that hits it, but only in two dimensions and only at microwave frequencies”.

Now, very small three-dimensional objects can appear to disappear when under an infrared light if they are placed under an invisibility carpet. According to Kaku, when you put the object underneath the carpet, the bump disappears. He believes that this technology can be applied to larger objects or people as well in the future, which is definitely starting to sound more than a little like Harry Potter. The main reason that the technology is able to work is that infra-red light works at a lower frequency than regular light and has a longer wavelength; when light hits the bump, it bounces off.

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What if the whole Bruce Willis scenario in The Sixth Sense were much more than M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest hit film? Caron Goode is playing a true life, though living, role of Wills’s character, investigating the minds of children who might possibly see ghosts.

The psychologist says that her efforts stem from her own childhood experiences, and she’s out to discover whether or not the imaginary friends that so many kids have are actually the spirits of the dead instead. She’s even written a book, Kids Who See Ghosts: How to Guide Them Through Fear, about it.

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When I was a kid, I had this incredibly morbid book about spontaneous human combustion.  It was written in as lurid a fashion as possible, had a collection of glossy photos in a central inset, and put forth the most preposterous theories with great enthusiasm.  I'm pretty sure I bought it out of the nickel box at someone's garage sale.  

(Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking, letting an eight year old girl read a book about spontaneous human combustion.  Maybe they didn't notice, or maybe they were just happy that I read books at all.  Certainly I doubt they realized that I was both compelled to read it, and suffering from nightmares where I woke up with half my body burnt and reduced to ash.)


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The King of Rock and Roll would be 75 years old if he were still alive today.  That's what fascinates me about the "Elvis faked his own death" legend: what happened afterward?  

I can believe that Elvis Presley faked his own death.  Although I think the possibility is unlikely.  Let's be honest, surely anyone who wanted to fake their own death would leave a better fake death behind than "died while pooping." 

Something like, "died while rescuing a kitten from a tree" or even "died quietly in his sleep."  Something with a little dignity, you know?  Something better than the existing story, which is that he was found approximately 10 hours after his likely death, face down in a puddle of vomit on his bathroom floor, with his pants around his ankles.  That's just sad.


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Maybe… maybe not!  A ton of images and video purporting to show a rash of UFOs over China last week have gone through a flurry of internet activity.  Debunked!  Bunked!  Re-debunked!  It's missiles!  It's a counter-missile system!  It's an optical illusion!  It's UFOs and China doesn't want to admit it!

Here are the facts: something happened to shut down Xiaoshan Airport.  To quote CNN, "Eighteen flights were delayed or rerouted and operations shut down after twinkling lights were spotted above the terminal around 9 p.m. July 7."  Some people thought it was a private aircraft which had gone astray.  Others thought it was something military - an experimental aircraft, perhaps, or who knows what.

What CNN describes as "twinkling lights" has been described by other sources as "a glowing object hovering in the afternoon sky."  


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After my Sim reached level 10 in the Ghost Hunter profession* I noticed that his Job Experience bar reset, and began filling up again as he continued to perform his professional duties.  I couldn't help wondering: now what?  


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Oh clutter, does anyone escape your grasp?  I am considered (both by myself and by others) to be a ruthless, effective, and tireless fighter of clutter.  And yet I can point to six things that belong somewhere else within arm's reach of my keyboard as I type this right now.  

Clutter propagates in the dark, it creeps in on little cat feet, and can even destroy lives.  Philip K. Dick coined the term "kipple" in his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more."


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Last time we discussed some of the broader issues around the phenomena of cold spots.  This time I wanted to dig down into a more narrow discussion of the physics involved.  Temperature - heat - is energy, and there are several ways to "harvest" heat in order to use it for energy.  But could ghosts be harvesting heat literally out of thin air in order to power their appearances?


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I was pretty psyched to start the Ghost Hunting profession.  But like all the other career paths, I had kind of lost interest by the time I got to Level 8 or so.  The great thing about the new professions is that you get to play your Sim as they work.  The sucky thing about the new professions is that you have to play your Sim as they work!  It's a dilemma.


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Cold spots are one of the hallmarks of a haunting.  Any ghost hunter worth the title will carry some sort of thermometer for testing the temperature of the air.  Many people report that the ambient temperature drops when ghosts are present (or about to be present).  The standard explanation is that the spirits are drawing the energy from the air in order to manifest.  But what does that mean, and is it plausible?  


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