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The Black Death that killed half the people in Europe in the 14th century has long thought to have been carried by fleas on a certain type of rat. But now scientists think it was actually an Ebola-like disease.

Debora MacKenzie writes in New Scientist that researchers have long blamed the bubonic plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, but they?ve never been able to find traces of it in the remains of Black Death victims. “We cannot rule out Yersinia as the cause of the Black Death,” says researcher Alan Cooper, “But right now there is no molecular evidence for it.” After a detailed analysis of historical records, Susan Scott and Chris Duncan think it might have been caused by a virus that led to massive bleeding, like Ebola.
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Scientists want to study stampedes at places like sports arenas and music concerts, so they can figure out how to prevent them. They can’t study actual human stampedes, so what can they do??They stampede mice instead. They’ve discovered that fewer, smaller exits actually enable more mice (and people) to escape.

Gaia Vince writes in New Scientist that experiments on how panicked mice escape from enclosed areas show that they behave in the same way computer models predict humans do. Disasters such as the May 2001 stampede at a football stadium in Ghana that killed more than 120 people, and the February 2003 Chicago nightclub stampede that killed 21 people, have made scientists try to develop models to predict how people will behave when trying to flee.
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The California recall election was almost derailed due to fears about using the same type of punch card ballots that skewed the Presidential election in Florida. These, as well as traditional voting machines, are rapidly being phased out in favor of touch-screen computers. But like all computers, they can be hacked.
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Clearly, one of the most critical questions of the twenty-first century concerns why the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were not prevented. As I outline below, there are numerous aspects regarding the official stories about September 11th which do not fit with known facts, which contradict each other, which defy common sense, and which indicate a pattern of misinformation and coverup. The reports coming out of Washington do very little to alleviate these concerns.
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