Astrofiammante .'s List: Astrofiammante's bookmarks

Jon Ronson meets Paul Davies, the scientist with an awesome responsibility.

A reclusive Russian genius has refused to accept $1m (£667,000) in prize money for solving the Poincare Conjecture, one of the most difficult puzzles in mathematics.

The Tournament of Books makes a sport of literature, with surprisingly smart results

As well as being Dark Skies 2010 Week, it's also Ada Lovelace Day, when bloggers the world over celebrate women in science and technology in the name of Byron's pioneering daughter Ada and today I'd like to celebrate Margaret Bryan, working between 1797-1816 in the fields of astronomy and mathematics.

QI host hits out at the 'infantilism' of British TV, saying many programmes are like 'chicken nuggets'

When I first heard about barefoot running, several years ago, I was skeptical — don’t we need cushion to protect us from injuries, and why would I want to run barefoot, anyway?

Online, people talk about social media outposts – Facebook and Twitter for example. These are places where your online persona extends out of your blog, so other people can meet you and get to know you through different social media avenues. Can this be applied to real life?

No one knows who Jack the Ripper was. And no one knows for certain what motivated him. But he was, in a macabre way, a man for his times. This is a bid to locate him through the science of geospatial intelligence.

Trees are to be cut back around Antony Gormley's sculpture after passersby - including the sculptor himself - complain it can no longer be seen

I adore this - as does almost everyone who sees it

Certainly, things have improved slightly in recent years, but for every Kara Thrace there are a slew of disappointing female characters in her wake. At best, most female characters on sci-fi shows are annoyingly stereotypical and, at worst, are introduced as pointless eye candy.

Adrian Searle says that handing over the Saatchi Gallery to the nation to become the Museum of Contemporary Art, London, is a generous gift but too many questions about future policy remain unanswered.

A review of a new biography of Pearl S Buck: "In 1929, an American woman traveled from her home in China to settle her severely impaired daughter in a New Jersey institution. She did so with borrowed money, as she could not afford the fees. The parting was excruciating; she was, she recalled, 'nearly destroyed by grief and fear.' The house felt empty on her return to Nanjing, but she knew precisely what to do: 'This I decided was the time to begin really to write.'"

Governments must take more action to protect journalists after 137 media personnel were killed last year, according to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

If sleep paralysis creates a realistic waking nightmare - conjuring up images of aliens and evil entities - does this trick of the mind explain phenomena like alien abductions?

It's not your fault that you have no willpower. It's all in the brain...

For the first time in 47 years of polling, the number of Americans who said that they have had a religious or mystical experience, which the question defined as a “moment of sudden religious insight or awakening,” was greater than those who said that they

Appointing a successor to the Dalai Lama will have major political repercussions, reports Clifford Coonan from Shigatse.

"Smelling strongly of alcohol, the 44-year-old whispered only that he was 'one of them,' on a secret mission and belonged to the Federal Crime Office, a body similar to the FBI, local police said. A check revealed he had no such credentials."

"The record was all the more satisfying for having been achieved with a plane that stayed true to the traditions of origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. He folded his 10cm aircraft by hand from a single sheet of paper and did not use sc