Dean’s Diner For some reason, Susan didn’t seem to like me very much. I have no clue as to why not. I was as agreeable as a kid as I am now as an adult. Whenever we would go into her restaurant, she would smile at my friends and then give me a disapproving glance….…

The authorities of the Russian town of Kemerovo arranged a special expedition to find the yeti habitat which was discovered by Google maps. Recently there have been more than 20 claims from the local hunters who said they had seen strange creatures in the forests. These creatures resembled yeti. After the claims from the local…

Are there any concerned liberal-minded faculty or students at St. Cloud State in MN who can help us out with something? Email me. kthxbye

“Texas has sent a clear message that evolution should be taught as a scientific theory open to critical scrutiny, not as a sacred dogma that can’t be questioned,” said Dr. John West, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle think tank that argues an intelligent designer created life. Post

Polycarbonate water bottles have received plenty of bad press for releasing potentially toxic compounds into unsuspecting drinkers, but there may be another culprit: everyday plastic packaging. A German study of commercially-available bottled water found contamination by chemicals that mimic natural sex hormones. When the researchers raised snails in the water, they bred with extreme rapidity…

Six bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, have died from a flu epidemic in a month at the Lola Ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ten more have contracted the flu. These are apes in a rehab center, and apparently the flu (we’ll assume for the moment that the diagnosis is accurate, but…

A few weeks ago I heard a story [about a teacher in Oklahoma] … Her students did so well, they won a science competition and were asked to fly somewhere to accept the prize. For many of those students, this would be their first trip on an airplane and their first trip outside of rural…

The caption of this photograph at The Guardian says only, “Nowruz celebrations in Afghanistan.” Nowruz is the name of the Iranian New Year, which is celebrated in a number of countries by people of several faiths. The baskets of dried fruits eaten during the holiday provide the only visual connection to the colorful festivities, and…

Analiese’s Reading about complications along the Red River, the Coleman-Franken recount, Immigrants, the FBI, wind turbines in the Twin Cities and more. Christopher Taylor asks: Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Lesbians? A homeschooled kid goes off to 6th grade. Ginny Hughes on Peek-a-boo perception

Amazing photographs at Boston.com of the ongoing flooding crisis on the Red River.

Check it out. I saw you working out on that new machine,” the personal trainer, folding towels at the counter by the locker room, was saying to some guy he knew. You see more trainers folding towels these days, what with the economy and all. “The new machine?” was the reply. “Yea. The wave.” “The…

OBJECTIVE: To establish if the ‘myth’ about whether the size of a man’s penis can be estimated from his shoe size has any basis, in fact. SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Two urologists measured the stretched penile length of 104 men in a prospective study and related this to their shoe size. RESULTS: The median stretched penile…

Marjorie Grene has died at the age if 98. She was a philosopher who addressed evolutionary biology. A philosopher of biology who once spent time as a farmer’s wife writing scholarly works before doing chores, Dr. Grene was one of the first philosophers to raise questions about the synthetic theory of evolution, which combines Darwin’s…

Hanna Rosin paints breast feeding, in a recent item in The Atlantic, as a social requirement for the privileged, a “no-exceptions requirement” and a badge of being a good mother. She also examines the possibility that breast-feeding is ” … an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down.” I dutifully breast-fed each of…

A new study warns that cold-blooded land animals like lizards and insects in the tropics may wither as the world warms. “Cold-blooded” is the layman’s term for ectotherms–animals whose body temperature is contingent on the surrounding environment, rather than internally regulated like that of warm-blooded creatures. They thrive in temperatures ranging from 68 degrees to…

Or did we.

A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded. In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in…