In the 1980s, paleontologists and other scientists put together an elegant scenario accounting for the enormous mass extinction that took place at the end of the Cretaceous Period of the Mesozoic Era. That scenario entailed the following events ( Read more... )

Those who want to eliminate all machines** somehow always overlook the simplest and first of our power-tools: fire. The use of fire for cooking food and other purposes involves the use of a chemical machine whose nuts and bolts are furiously interacting molecules. Fire is thus as much a machine as a plow, a bolt-cutter, a spear, a harvesting ( Read more... )

I wish that the BBC or Discover would produce Walking With Fire, about the history of fire on Earth from the Devonian to the present and beyond, with Stephen J. Pyne narrating and explaining fire's role in the ecology of Earth's biosphere and its relationship to all Earth's creatures, including us

The very first fires on Earth came about in the ( Read more... )

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/110909_sediba

This is just about right.

In his book Fire: A Brief History (part of his Cycle of Fire series), Stephen J. Pyne describes a cave in Africa filled with fossilized bones. A horizontal layer of charcoal, ( Read more... )

It is the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and civilization. The spirit of the festival of Christmas reaches back to the time when ice covered much of our world, and humans huddled together in cave communities, pooling their talents and knowledge in the ( Read more... )

From Lesson III, Part 2, Section 4, Key 31 of my Qaballah and Tarot:  A Basic Course in 9 Lessons

In Fire: A Brief History, Stephen J. Pyne reminds us that the philosopher Plato described human life as like that of men in a cave, their only light from flames behind them, their only knowledge of their universe the shadows dancing before them on the ( Read more... )

Newspaper Rock: Mighty whitey to the rescueIs he for or agin whites? For or agin non-whites? Is this a joke, or meant to be taken seriously? You choose ( Read more... )

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/pharmaceutical-waste-seeping-into-environment-0241/Read more... )