From the Fringe

I thought it might be interesting to start a thread for way-out items in the news - things well beyond my "boggle threshold," though other people may disagree.

Courtesy of Mysterious Universe - the Daily Mail reports that William S. Romoser, Emeritus Professor of Medical Entomology at Ohio State University, has examined images taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover and believes they show insects - not only fossil insects but living insects as well. And also something like a snake with an insect in its mouth (fossil):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...-Mars.html

The Big Think naturally suggests this just reflects the brain's tendency to see patterns where they don't exist - pareidolia. Of course, there's quite a long history of that as far as Mars is concerned:
https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/mars-aliens

I thought it might be interesting to start a thread for way-out items in the news - things well beyond my "boggle threshold," though other people may disagree.

Courtesy of Mysterious Universe - the Daily Mail reports that William S. Romoser, Emeritus Professor of Medical Entomology at Ohio State University, has examined images taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover and believes they show insects - not only fossil insects but living insects as well. And also something like a snake with an insect in its mouth (fossil):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/...-Mars.html

Courtesy of the Daily Grail - NASA has issued a statement saying this is impossible 
https://www.foxnews.com/science/nasa-den...es-on-mars

The DG also notes that Ohio University has taken down the web page reporting Romoser's claims.

Bless... his researchgate page lists him studying Zoology/Entomology at Ohio State University in 1958... so I guess he must be somewhere close to 80 years old.

One of the reports said he had written a widely used textbook. Pareidolia can be very seductive.

Mysterious Universe says - apparently with a straight face - that Nostradamus was predicting the current epidemic of coronavirus when he wrote:
The great plague of the maritime city will not cease until there be avenged the death of the just blood, condemned for a price without crime, of the great lady outraged by pretense.
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/01/n...to-spread/

The evidence? It's an epidemic. Nothing else in the prophecy is explained, except that Hong Kong is a maritime city and in the previous SARS epidemic most of the cases were in China and many were in Hong Kong.

Ironically enough, this and the preceding two verses are usually claimed as one of Nostradamus's "greatest hits," as a prediction of the Great Fire of London, the Great Plague of London and the Second Anglo-Dutch War, all in 1665-7.

Mysterious Universe says - apparently with a straight face - that Nostradamus was predicting the current epidemic of coronavirus when he wrote:
The great plague of the maritime city will not cease until there be avenged the death of the just blood, condemned for a price without crime, of the great lady outraged by pretense.
https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/01/n...to-spread/

The Mysterious Universe piece comes from an article in the UK tabloid, the Daily Star. The Star coyly attributes the story to "A conspiracy theorist [who] has latched on to the extract, tying it to fears of a SARS-like virus spreading."

In fact, to all appearances, the Star just got the story from an old article claiming that Nostradamus had predicted SARS (in 2003), and presented a quotation from the old article in such a way that it could be misinterpreted as a claim that Nostradamus had predicted the Wuhan virus. And apparently Mysterious Universe swallowed that bit of lazy misdirection whole, and presented the quotation printed by the Star as a prediction of what's happening now!

A useful warning not to believe anything in the tabloids - or anything in Mysterious Universe either.