From Ritu, news on SIDS research. It seems that a study out of Cambridge is correlating high levels of alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) in the mother’s blood during the second trimester with a higher chance of stillbirth or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS, also known as “crib death”). Lime and I recently had a disagreement about this, I claimed that (according to what I’d read a few years ago) it had been pretty conclusively shown that parents leaving their kids unattended contributed to most crib deaths (especially considering that SIDS is rare in a lot of countries where parents never leave infants …

This was just too potentially big not to mention: via Katolik Shinja: Yahoo! News – Could Space Signal Be Alien Contact? LONDON (Reuters) – An unexplained radio signal from deep space could — just might be — contact from an alien civilization, New Scientist magazine reported on Thursday. The signal, coming from a point between the Pisces and Aries constellations, has been picked up three times by a telescope in Puerto Rico. I’m very curious to see what comes of this.

Here’s a review of physicist Roger Penrose’s new book. I won’t spin out all of what I think about Penrose, but I will say that despite the fact I admire his dedication to the ability of “everyman” to understand what the hell he’s talking about, he sometimes also talks about stuff that, it seems to me, he’s pulling straight out of his arse. When I attended a talk by him, I got this impression very clearly; he was pushing the microtubules-in-the-brain-quantum-computing stuff and I got the feeling nobody in the room was biting. He fielded some pretty harsh questions, which …