Six months ago on Dreamland, we interviewed William F. Mann, who talked his family tradition of secret knowledge of the 14th century Templar crossing from Scotland to Canada that happened hundreds of years before Columbus arrived. Now North America’s oldest church, probably built by the Templars, may have been discovered beneath a small town in Newfoundland.
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UPDATE – All over the earth, animal species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate. Orangutans were once known as the “old men of the jungle,” because they behave so much like humans. Now they may disappear as well. But the very LATEST victim is the Chinese tiger which, like so many others, is being exploited for use in traditional Chinese medicine.
In the Independent, Claire Soares writes that orangutans “may be wiped off the face of the earth within 10 years,” due to illegal rainforest logging in their habitats. She quotes UN official Christian Nellemann as saying, “The rate of decline of the forests is the most alarming we have seen yet anywhere in the world. Suitable forest habitat may be gone in as little as a decade.”
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Six US scientists have issued a warning: civilization is threatened by global warming. These NASA researchers claim that the UN panel on climate change (the IPCC) is UNDERESTIMATING the upcoming sea level rise.
In the Independent, Steve Connor quotes NASA’s James Hansen as saying, “?The Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.”
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We’ve reported before about how artists’ diseases may have influenced their art. Now researchers think that Monet?s blurred vision, caused by cataracts, may have influenced his famous paintings of water lilies.
In the Independent, Jonathan Brown reports that US ophthalmologist Michael Marmor says that Monet’s cataracts would have made the world seem blurry and yellow-tinted?two characteristics of his later “water lily” series of paintings.
Monet finally had cataract surgery in 1923, at the age of 86. But Brown quotes art historian Chris Riopelle as saying, “[Monet’s eye condition] does not entirely answer the questions?after surgery, Monet’s style did not alter radically.”
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