From time to time and against strong resistance from the scientific establishment, inspired scientists come out of the closet and dare to publicly consider whether the future can influence the present. Is it in principle possible that we may be able to partially perceive the future say via evolved emotional responses? Future influence has been proposed by Roger Penrose in order to explain how certain crystals grow. So called quasi-periodic crystals avoid additions of atoms into places and orientations that are perfectly allowed while growing, but whose occupation would lead to future mismatches in the resulting, larger crystal (this is due to quasi-periodic crystals not having periodic order over large distances like usual crystals).

The cat is possibly the cruelest hunter, and like with so many bad things, humans are to blame for turning something naturally not so good (Natural Born Killers) much worse. Some deluded apologists, most of them female and overweight, hold that even with ever more house cats hunting to escape boredom, there would be a natural equilibrium if we just let feral cats run wild. This is ridiculous, because natural cats such as lions hunt as little as possible. Every hunt risks injury. An animal cannot hunt efficiently if it is injured. Every unnecessary hunt increases the chance of the predator's death.

Donna Laframboise’s book “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC” is out. Negative reviews on amazon are very helpful. Forget the positive ones; they are seldom useful. Reviews that give the writer a low score are the most revealing. Often, they are witness of an informed person who has spend time on a charitable reading but who found the work nevertheless lacking for good reasons. In this case however, the negative reviews are lightning fast reactions of well known people (Scott A. Mandia, Peter Gleick) who have obviously not read the book before writing their “review”.

“Siri” is the personal assistant application on the newest iPhone. Now it is not exactly news that Apple products are overpriced and of relatively low quality - do not drop the new iPhone; it is fragile. Apple aims for those who ‘are easily parted from their money’ (translation at Pocket English Idioms).

A study by ICARUS re-investigated their neutrino experiments based on the article by Cohen and Glashow, who showed that superluminal neutrinos in standard model physics lose energy through neutral-current weak-interactions, which is somewhat like Cherenkov radiation. Given a neutrino moving faster than light a given distance D through a standard background, one can compute the rate of usually expected energy lost through that radiation. The neutrinos are detected via so called ‘charged-current interactions’, which turn them into muons, 104 of which ICARUS detected.