China reports that they have the six-horned Goat Of The Apocalypse… I’d say born but if it’s got horns it’s not a baby. Six horns! Okay, maybe five would have been better… five gets you a pentacle, especially good if it had a horn under its chin (inconvenient for it, though)… six is more like a Jewish Star of David goat, though it doesn’t seem to be wearing a yarmulke. So Goat Of The Apocalypse it is! Let’s name it “Asmodeus” and go visit it in Mongolia!

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Sufferers of celiac disease may cheer (you know who you are!), but the rest of us will be sad… predictions are that climate change will reduce wheat harvests. While a certain amount of warming helps crops, too much kills them, and the side effects of climate change - extreme precipitation (or the lack thereof), flooding - are also bad for crops.

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A Tufts university researcher wants to use an incident in “World of Warcraft” to learn about how a pandemic might spread and people might react to it.

In the fall of 2005, Blizzard Entertainment, which created and operates “World of Warcraft”, introduced a new area into the game and in the area, a new villain who could infect players with a curse called “Corrupted Blood”, which caused a great deal of damage to the player over a short period of time, usually killing the player in short order. A very unusual effect of Corrupted Blood was that it could infect others standing near players who were afflicted by it. Leaving the area would clear the curse, but it turned out there was an accidental vector for it to travel outside of the new area, via pets belonging to Hunter characters. So, while the creators of World of Warcraft had meant for it to be contained in only the new area they’d added, it spread across the world and through the major cities. Players started avoiding the major cities and groups of other players in an attempt to stay clear of the curse.

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“Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse” is an anthology of post-apocalyptic stories due out on January 8th. It includes stories by Stephen King, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Orson Scott Card, Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow and others… and while it’s post-apocalyptic it apparently is grounded well enough to not include zombies or aliens.

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The two-headed cow of the apocalypse has apparently died, not taking the world with it.

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The next time that Dr. Impossible wants to smash an asteroid into the Earth he should bit torrent a copy of the University of Southampton’s “NEOimpactor” which will simulate the crash of an asteroid into the Earth and allow him to model where the greatest damage will be done.

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“Southland Tales” isn’t the only apocalypse targeting Los Angeles… “Right at Your Door” also concerns a Los Angeles apocalypse.

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It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned zombies. And, in fact, I’ve been a little zombied out. While the world hasn’t changed enough to no longer be in need of acute zombie political commentary, it seems like everyone and their Aunt Petunia has been jumping on the zombie bandwagon the last couple of years. Which reminds me that “Fido” never did play in our area, and it looked to be “Shaun of the Dead” good.

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When some of the first words you hear in a film are David Cronenberg telling you that he’s calling for the gas company, which will do its best to keep the gas flowing until the very end, that this isn’t a traditional end-of-the-world film. In fact, it’s a film that doesn’t really get into the nitty-gritty of how the world ends, and isn’t going to have Bruce Willis show up to protect us all at the very last moment.

Instead, “Last Night”, written, directed by and starring Don McKellar - who later won an Oscar for the screeplay for “The Red Violin” - the film has other familiar faces in Sandra Oh (“Sideways”, “Under the Tuscan Sun”, “The Princess Diaries”, “Grey’s Anatomy”), Callum Keith Rennie (“Memento”, “Battlestar Galactica”, “Blade - Trinity”) and Genevieve Bujold (“King Of Hearts”, “Dead Ringers”, “Coma”).

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62 years ago today the United States of America dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

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