Using sound to hunt for food is a pretty ingenious adaptation for bats flying at night. But it doesn’t work if another bat is messing with you. Scientists have discovered that a species of bats can purposely jam the sonars of others to keep rivals away from their insect prey. Read more…
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Bats Can Use Sonar Jamming to Steal Food From Each Other
An anonymous reader writes: 390, 127 Brits declared their religion as Jediism in their last census — many as a joke, but some are quite serious, the BBC reports. Cambridge University Divinity Faculty researcher Beth Singler estimates at least 2, 000 of them are “genuine, ” around the same number as the Church of Scientology. The U.K. Church of Jediism has 200, 000 members worldwide. Their belief system has expanded well beyond the Star Wars universe to include tenets from Taoism, Buddhism, Catholicism and Samurai. Former priest, psychotherapist and writer Mark Vernon finds real power in the Jedi story: “The reason it’s so powerful and universal is that we have to find ourselves. It’s by losing ourselves and identifying with something greater like the Jedi myth that we find a fuller life.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Jedi-ism Becomes a Serious Religion
Last year, a church congregation in Grand Ledge, Michigan cracked open a time capsule from 1912 filled with all the usual suspects: photos, newspapers, and newsletters. Basically, it had all the boring stuff you’d expect a church to put in their time capsule in 1912. But there was one single mystery item: a neat little package wrapped in brown paper . It was quite the puzzler. Until now. Read more…
Large Christian communities are not abundant in Muslim-dominated Egypt, but one of the more populace groups are the garbage scavenging Zabbaleen who have retained their Coptic beliefs and established the largest Christian church in the Middle East at the Monastery of Saint Simon. Read more…
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The Cave Church of Garbage City
When it was built in 1977, Citicorp Center (later renamed Citigroup Center, now called 601 Lexington) was, at 59 stories, the seventh-tallest building in the world. You can pick it out of the New York City skyline by its 45-degree angled top. Read more…
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How a Simple Design Error Could Have Toppled a NYC Skyscraper
Very few of us will work at a single job our whole lives. Even fewer will work on a single, self-led project our whole lives. Spanish octogenarian Justo Gallego Martinez is an exception: He’s been the sole designer, engineer, and construction worker on a cathedral in Madrid since 1961. Read more…
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A Single Man Spent 53 Years Building This Massive Cathedral
Nerval’s Lobster writes “The Vatican, while notoriously secretive about things buried in its vaults and archives, is being as public as the digital age allows it to be about the nearly completed restoration of catacombs early Christians used as secret churches as well as burial sites. Contractors, archaeologists and art experts spent the past five years restoring the Priscilla catacombs under the Vatican using lasers, among other techniques, to restore frescoes painted on the walls of the burial chambers. The Vatican unveiled the work Nov. 19 with a press conference in the Basilica of San Silvestro outside the burial tunnels, accompanied by a virtual tour of the Priscilla catacombs provided by Google Maps. The basilica is divided into an area for religious services and another that acts as a deposit for sculptures and artifacts dug up during excavations of the catacombs and other areas underneath the Vatican.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Google Maps, Lasers Reveal Vatican Catacombs
An anonymous reader writes “People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. ‘Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality, ‘ spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps