blacksundae

Wired:

The two remaining Democratic presidential candidates recently agreed to participate in the Compassion Forum, scheduled for April 13 at Messiah College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Billed as a conversation on faith and values, the event will be broadcast by the Church Communication Network. It also comes five days before a proposed science debate that was canceled after the candidates refused to participate.

Emphasis mine. Why would they want to talk about, you know, issues that actually affect the future of life on this planet, when they could be yammering away about the same ancient lies that have been killing people for millennia.

Fuck. And this is the comparatively rational party. It’s enough to make you want to take the Lord’s name in vain. Read on.

UPDATE: Just came across this. Seemed appropriate.

7. Evolutionary Theory is Incomplete
Evolutionary science is a work in progress. Science is constantly making new discoveries with regard to it and explanations are always adjusted if necessary. Evolutionary theory is like all of the other sciences in this respect. Science is always trying to improve our knowledge. At present, evolution is the only well-supported explanation for all of life’s diversity.

Read the whole list. [via Reddit]

whytheluckystiff on KidForum’s 1996 page of kid inventions.

I am disgusted that we, as a country, can send a man to the Moon, but we can’t create a Robot Bird Who Restores Food. For shame, America! For shame!

Ever wonder who the “His” is in His Dark Materials? Apparently it’s Pulickel M. Ajayan:

A scientist at Rice University has created the darkest material known to man, a carpet of carbon nanotubes that reflects only 0.045 percent of all light shined upon it. That’s four times darker than the previously darkest known substance, and more than 100 times darker than the paint on a black Corvette.

Read on. [via Reddit]

AFP:

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday.

In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

Read on. [via Futurismic]

Science News:

Paleontologists have unearthed an ancient, sediment-filled burrow that holds remains of the creatures that dug it. The find is the first indisputable evidence that some dinosaurs maintained an underground lifestyle for at least part of their lives.

Read on. [via Boing Boing]

Discovery Channel:

“It’s unquestionably the metacarpal,” Quinlan told Discovery News. No previous T. rex remains have ever been found with a third metacarpal, despite the fact that the other bones suggested its presence. “There is a notch in the side of the second metacarpal that was just begging to have something fit into it.”

The revised anatomy of the hand suggests there was a very strong tendon that attached to second metacarpal, giving the hand a pretty decent grip, she said. Still, the puny limbs were almost certainly not used by T. rex to grapple with prey or kill.

[edit]

That said, the new finger bone is not going to cause much change to reconstructions of T. rex, says Hartman. Throughout the evolution of meat-eating dinosaurs there was a trend towards fewer fingers, with the earliest having five fingers and the T. rex having two. This newfound nubbin of a third finger was already on its way out, and did not stick out much, he said.

“In another 10 million years they would have lost (the third finger) completely,” said Hartman. Unfortunately for them, however, the age of dinosaurs ended before that could happen.

Read on.

Scientific American:

It is not the cartoons that make your kids smack playmates or violently grab their toys but, rather, a lack of social skills, according to new research.

“It’s a natural behavior and it’s surprising that the idea that children and adolescents learn aggression from the media is still relevant,” says Richard Tremblay, a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Montreal, who has spent more than two decades tracking 35,000 Canadian children (from age five months through their 20s) in search of the roots of physical aggression. “Clearly youth were violent before television appeared.”

Tremblay’s previous results have suggested that children on average reach a peak of violent behavior (biting, scratching, screaming, hitting…) around 18 months of age. The level of aggression begins to taper between the ages of two and five as they begin to learn other, more sophisticated ways of communicating their needs and wants.

Read on. [via Digg]