I just love when Citizen Science results in a new finding. J. Goodbody reports on an Amateur Astrologer who found a new constellation! Click Here. carr2d2 reviews Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World without God by Greg Graffin and Steve Olson, which she seems to like. Click here. Glen Beck has figured out how to get some crazy person to put a bullet in the head of another liberal. No one's been shot yet but the death treats are coming along nicely. Click here.

Apple likes its hardware to be closed source. Very closed: If you want to remove the outer casing on your iPhone 4 to replace the battery or a broken screen, it won't be easy anymore. In the past, you could use a Phillip screwdriver to remove two tiny screws at the base of the phone and then simply slide off the back cover. But Apple is replacing the outer screw with a mysterious tamper-resistant screw across its most popular product lines, ... source Keep an eye in iFixit for a fix to this. A little Linux Naval Gazing: With the recent announcement from Apple that Steve Jobs is taking a…

It was so abrupt that MSNBC ads and promotions still include his show. It is being said by MSNBC officials that this has nothing to do with the Comcast takeover. "There were many occasions, particularly in the last 2 1/2 years, where all that surrounded the show -- but never the show itself -- was just too much for me," Olbermann said in his exit statement. "But your support and loyalty and, if I may use the word, insistence, ultimately required that I keep going. My gratitude to you is boundless." source Check this out:

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

And such closeness has not been achieved before or since. Voyager 2 passed very close to the funny-named planet 25 years ago today (plus or minus) and that is the only close fly by to date. As NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made the only close approach to date of our mysterious seventh planet Uranus 25 years ago, Project Scientist Ed Stone and the Voyager team gathered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to pore over the data coming in. Images of the small, icy Uranus moon Miranda were particularly surprising. Since small moons tend to cool and freeze over rapidly after…

One of the complications of interplanetary research is that the probes you've placed on the other planet can't be reached via radio while the planet they are on passes to the other side of the sun, which happens now and then. In fact, for the days before and after Mars is opposite the sun, communication is risky because it is remotely possible that something could be misunderstood if the signal is messed up by passing near the sun. So, from January 27th through February 11th there will be no talking to the Rovers on Mars (but some listening). Conveniently, Opportunity Rover has arrived at a…

This came up a while ago and I assumed the idea would die the usual quick and painless death, but the idea seems to be either so fascinating or so irritating to people (mainly in various blog comment sections) that it still twitches and still has a heartbeat, but only as a result of the repeated flogging it is getting. The research was reported in Science and quickly popularized in a post by Brian Alexander. Please read this review of the tear research and a critique of Alexander's post by Christie Wilcox. The idea that tears are a mechanism to avoid rape is mainly proffered in comments in…

Surprise! HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- Wednesday, Jan. 19 at 11:30 a.m. EST, engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., confirmed that the NanoSail-D nanosatellite ejected from Fast Affordable Scientific and Technology Satellite, FASTSAT. The ejection event occurred spontaneously and was identified this morning when engineers at the center analyzed onboard FASTSAT telemetry. The ejection of NanoSail-D also has been confirmed by ground-based satellite tracking assets Now, NASA is asking HAMs to help: Amateur ham operators are asked to listen for the signal to verify NanoSail-D is…

Fountain Lady, Imma let you be upset and all in a minute, but right now I've got to say that there is not a single one of the 37 million people who watched you fall in the water 'cuz you were texting and not watching where you were going who has not at some time or another in their life ran into a light pole or stepped off a curb they didn't see or something similar. The only difference between you and the rest of us is that your misstep matched a modern meme ... misadventure due to texting ... and it got totally YouTubed. Rather than being upset, you should do what that homeless guy did…

A new study compares "acceptance of evolution" by highly educated adult academics with college students in various categories, with all those sampled being in New England, which has the highest overall acceptance of evolution in the US (a mere 59 percent). The results are interesting. The study is rather complicated. The original paper provides a great deal of detail about the characteristics of the population. Several different questions were ask. At the end of the day, however, the following results are the most important: The percentage of respondents who feel that evolution alone…

Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries "first and worst," with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.

I don't know about this ... There's an angry divisive tension in the air that threatens to make modern politics impossible. Elizabeth Lesser explores the two sides of human nature within us (call them "the mystic" and "the warrior") that can be harnessed to elevate the way we treat each other. She shares a simple way to begin real dialogue -- by going to lunch with someone who doesn't agree with you, and asking them three questions to find out what's really in their hearts.

Just because, I mean, wouldn't you want to know who she'd appoint to the supreme court?

Well, maybe, but probably not. Even though milk allergies in infants and very young toddlers are the most common food allergy, they still occur in only about 2.5 percent of the population in the US and other Western groups. For this reason, I was rather perplexed some months back when I encountered a group of eight mothers randomly assembled, three of whom had infants with milk allergies. Two of the mothers had started to eliminate all dairy from their diets, including eggs, in order to reduce the effects of the milk allergy on their infants. Who were breastfeeding. I realized that…

The U.S. House of Representatives voted 245-189 to repeal President Obama's health care law. I'm sure I'm speaking to the converted here, but if you happen to live in a US Congressional district with one of those representatives who voted to repeal this law, I'd like to pass on one whopping big "Fuck You" for not doing enough in the last election. And, if you don't like that, feel free to send me one as well, because I live in one of those districts. My representative is a virtual clone of Michel Bachmann but without the big hair. And he will be hearing from me. Details.

Of these three items, two will be of interest to you. Can't tell which two, though: "My roomate lives like a horseradish" ... check out this web site that accumulates funny auto-correct mishaps. Bill Gates beats Pope, Dali Lama in Popularity Contest (see this) just as Windows stops being THE operating system (see this). Did you know that Joan Rivers got tossed off of Fox for criticizing Sarah Palin? See this.

Bedbugs (Insects of the Cimicidae family, commonly Cimex lectularius) are annoying, might carry diseases (though this is unclear, so probably nothing importat1, and are apparently becoming more common in the US. Interestingly, there has been very little study done of their genetics. A new study just out in PLoS ONE looks at the bedbug genome in an effort to better understand pesticide resistance in these pesky critters. The current working hypothesis is that pesticide resistance in bedbugs results from point mutations in certain genes, though there may be another explanation. Bedbugs…

The Linux command 'units' may or may not be installed on your system. If not, if you use synaptic or apt, type (at the prompt) sudo apt-get install units or equiviliant for other distributions. Then type in the word "units" and play around. Here are a few sample outputs: The program is a little clunky. You have to know the specific codes for each type of measurement, though 'units' will figure out what you mean sometimes. To exit, type ctrl-D. There is a way to use this utility in a script. That and other details are found in the manual.

Since he is a minor his name has been withheld. The 14 year old boy in South Carolina called the police to tell them that he had attacked his father, his grandmother, and his great aunt. He told the police he'd be there when they arrived, possibly waiting outside. When police appeared on the scene they found the boy with his hands in the air out in front of the house, and inside were his dead father and dead great aunt, and a critically injured grandmother, all three attacked with a dull butter knife and a small piece of twine. No, wait, sorry, I got that detail wrong. The boy did not use…

Sometimes interesting scientific evidence shows up in unexpected places. Years ago, there had been discussion of the possibility that immediate post glacial climate in the North Atlantic coastal region was unusually warm, but the evidence was spotty. Then, I was looking through material taken from a geotechnical boring placed to assess the geology of a part of Boston Harbor where a new tunnel was being planned, and found a large fragment of a clam embedded in clay. The clay was deposited during the last glacial maximum and later, and was associated with the melting of glaciers in the…