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Calamitous portents abound, but I'd like to gloss over those fantastical predictions from zany whack jobs and focus solely on the forecast provided by one Sir Isaac Newton. After all, he was correct about gravity, the laws of motion, and the spectrum of white light -- heck -- why not about the end of the world? Contrary to what you might think, Newton was not always the supreme rationalist that we've come to revere. He actually wrote more about theology and alchemy than science and math combined. Newton voraciously sought out patterns and hidden codes within the Bible and other...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Sir Isaac Newton. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, theologian, and author, who was a key figure in the scientific revolution with regard to gravitational forces. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle...

An incredibly rare 17th century alchemist's scroll giving instructions for the elixir of life has sold for a magical 585,000 [pounds]. The delicate manuscript was an illustrative methodology of 15th century scientist George Ripley's recipe for the philosophers' stone which made a potion that supposedly granted the drinker eternal life. It also gave instructions for turning base metals into gold. Although the instructions were impossibly cryptic - there is one reference to using dragon's blood - it didn't stop scholars of the time, including Sir Isaac Newton, giving it a go.

According to numbers taken from the Guttmacher Institute and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), some 53 million legal abortions were performed between 1973 and 2013 (inclusive). This number is an approximation as California, New Hampshire and Maryland have refused to supply state abortion numbers during recent years. It is known that the number of abortions has declined over the past several years, for example, from 1.31 million in 2000 to about 984,000 in 2013. Though liberals are undoubtedly distraught that, in a year to year comparison, nearly 300,000 escaped the convenience of wholesale genetic profiling, a few unadulterated whack-jobs...

January's Physics World features a fanciful re-imagining of the 10-year period in the life of the medieval Muslim polymath, written by Los Angeles-based science writer Jennifer Ouellette... In 11th-century Egypt, Aristotle's ancient thought that visible objects and our own eyes emit rays of light to enable our vision still held... As Ouellette writes, "This is a work of fiction -- a fanciful re-imagining of a 10-year period in the life of Ibn al-Haytham, considered by many historians to be the father of modern optics. Living at the height of the golden age of Arabic science, al-Haytham developed an early version...