1.
When I was a kid I was totally into this partwork magazine all about mysterious things.
(A partwork is/was a subscription-only magazine of fixed duration, like a boxset vs a soap.)
There was a lot of it about but it may have been The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space, & Time:
the paranormal and mysteries such as UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, spontaneous human combustion, the Cottingley Fairies, ancient knowledge, sea monsters, the Yeti, weird coincidences, stone circles, contact with the dead, and notable historical characters linked to the occult.
…all of which populate my head to this date.
Anyway!
Spontaneous human combustion.
The idea that a human can just one day autonomously and involuntarily self-immolate, burn to ashes, and touch nothing around them.
It felt like a risk maybe? If you had a fever?
Wikipedia discusses the many proposed mechanisms including the eating (somehow) of phosphorus which may lead to the formation of phosphine, which can autoignite.
Phosphine!
Anyway spontaneous human combustion went away mysteriously coinciding with the decline of (a) armchairs with no fire safety standards, (b) smoking so much and (c) polyester clothes.
2.
Babies emit a chemical that makes women 19% more aggressive and men 18.5% less aggressive.
Science (2021).
3.
NASA recently returned a sample from an asteroid in the OSIRIS-REx mission.
It contains phosphate, indicating that
the asteroid could have splintered off from an ancient, small, primitive ocean world.
Oh!
RELATED:
Back in 2020, phosphine was spotted in the atmosphere of Venus. Controversially then, but perhaps it’s been detected again. This may indicate life.
I discussed it at the time: Mars problems vs Venus problems was one of my 5 most popular posts of the year.
Hey so what I only just discovered is that phosphine smells like garlic or rotting fish. Venus!
4.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Late Neolithic (6,400-3,500 BC) across Eurasia. Their language was the progenitor of the current European language family; their mythology, our mythology.
Something about the Proto-Indo-European language was that it
had a two-gender system which originally distinguished words between animate and inanimate, a system used to separate a common term from its deified synonym. For instance, fire as an active principle was […] (Latin ignis; Sanskrit Agni), while the inanimate, physical entity was […] (Greek pyr; English fire).
Agni:
The word Agni is used in many contexts, ranging from fire in the stomach, the cooking fire in a home, the sacrificial fire in an altar, the fire of cremation, the fire of rebirth, the fire in the energetic saps concealed within plants, the atmospheric fire in lightning and the celestial fire in the sun. … a metaphor for immortal principle in humans, and any energy or knowledge that consumes and dispels a state of darkness, transforms and procreates an enlightened state of existence.
Something more fire than fire.
1.
When I was a kid I was totally into this partwork magazine all about mysterious things.
(A partwork is/was a subscription-only magazine of fixed duration, like a boxset vs a soap.)
There was a lot of it about but it may have been The Unexplained: Mysteries of Mind, Space, & Time:
…all of which populate my head to this date.
Anyway!
Spontaneous human combustion.
The idea that a human can just one day autonomously and involuntarily self-immolate, burn to ashes, and touch nothing around them.
It felt like a risk maybe? If you had a fever?
Wikipedia discusses the many proposed mechanisms including the eating (somehow) of phosphorus which
Phosphine!
Anyway spontaneous human combustion went away mysteriously coinciding with the decline of (a) armchairs with no fire safety standards, (b) smoking so much and (c) polyester clothes.
2.
Babies emit a chemical that makes women 19% more aggressive and men 18.5% less aggressive.
Science (2021).
3.
NASA recently returned a sample from an asteroid in the OSIRIS-REx mission.
It contains phosphate, indicating that
Oh!
RELATED:
Back in 2020, phosphine was spotted in the atmosphere of Venus. Controversially then, but perhaps it’s been detected again. This may indicate life.
I discussed it at the time: Mars problems vs Venus problems was one of my 5 most popular posts of the year.
Hey so what I only just discovered is that phosphine smells like garlic or rotting fish. Venus!
4.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in the Late Neolithic (6,400-3,500 BC) across Eurasia. Their language was the progenitor of the current European language family; their mythology, our mythology.
Something about the Proto-Indo-European language was that it
Agni:
Something more fire than fire.