Ain’t It Cool News has up a pair of reviews - one positive, one less glowing - for Danny Boyle’s new film “Sunshine”. Boyle also directed “Trainspotting” and the oft-mentioned “28 Days Later”.

(more…)

First, you should know that Whitley Strieber has a book coming out in September 2007, a book so new, so … so secret! … that it doesn’t even have a cover up on Amazon yet. The book is 2012: The War for Souls.

The basic premise of the book is that a scientist finds that there are Earths in multiple dimensions and that in 2012, they’ll all be destroyed - Mayan prophecy style.

(more…)

Apparently global warming is causing sharp divisions in the National Association of Evangelicals, with some feeling that it distracts from “great moral issues of our time”, some feeling that “to harm this world by environmental degradation is an offense against God”, and some feeling that it’s part of a leftist agenda to divide evangelical unity (because, after all, everything is about them).

Via: Global warming gap among evangelicals widens - CNN.com
[tags]evangelicals, global warming[/tags]

Fox Atomic Films has a “sneak peak” trailer for 28 Weeks Later, the sequel to zombie film “28 Days Later”.

(more…)

Want to know the odds of bird flu going big in the next year? Not just the real likelihood but - Vegas odds?

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has created a “bird flu futures market” where epidemiologists, veterinarians and other medical experts can bet on bird flu.

This isn’t the first futures market of its kind; there have been futures markets betting on elections, terrorism, hurricanes and seasonal flu. The seasonal flu market was apparently correct in its forecasts 71 percent of the time.

(more…)

The climate report from the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” has been out for a bit now and perhaps a few people have had a chance to take it in.

The report predicts that the areas suffering the most from climate change will also be the poorest - Africa and parts of Asia. What we should expect over the next few decades is the spread of tropical diseases, starvation, flooding, extinctions and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people.

(more…)

There’s nothing like a Eurovision entry to give you the sense of a country’s national mood, and Israel’s must be pretty grim as they’ve voted for the band Teapacks’ songs “Push The Button” as their entry in the European music contest. I suppose it’s not surprising given that the leader of Iran has made it quite clear that he wants to annihilate Israel.

(more…)

Jericho, the post-nuclear-attack TV show on CBS, returned a couple of weeks ago, and its first episode back, “The Day Before”, was a huge improvement over the regular in-denial-about-the-nuclear-holocaust-soap-opera. It covers time leading up to the attacks, seems to reveal the nature of the attacks and gives some back-story for the series’ two main enigmatic characters.

(more…)

GlaxoSmithKline claims to have developed an effective vaccine for H5N1 and variants. Most flu vaccines protect against only a narrow range of viruses, and a concern in dealing with a flu pandemic is that the viruses mutate quickly, leading to a proliferation of slightly different viruses which one vaccine will not be effective against.

(more…)

In the category of “It’s not the bullet that kills you, it’s the hole”, New Scientist discusses the impact that nuclear winter may have versus the impact of the war that causes the winter. I thought that this had been all settled in the 70’s… I grew up with the message that if I survived the upcoming nuclear holocaust, my life would still be hell because of the following nuclear winter (not to mention the mutants…).

(more…)