By now you all know about Bill Foster, an outgoing council member in St. Petersburg, Florida, who has very strong creationist leanings. Foster had written a widely cited letter linking Hitler and the Columbine shooters to Darwinism. I thought it would be fair to have the ENTIRE letter written by foster available, rather than allowing this quote mining to go unanswered! This is a transcription of a PDF file available at the St. Petersburg Times. The Honorable Nancy N. Bortock, Chairman All Pinellas County School Boared Members P.O. Box 2942 Largo, Florida 33779-2942 Re: Evolution…

Cells do things (or stop doing things) because of internal homeostatic (or other) regulatory mechanisms, or because of communication with the "outside" via receptor sites located on the cell membrane. To get cells to do what we want (produce more or less of a hormone, for instance, or simply to die as in the case of cancer cells) it would be nice to have a machine that you point at a patient, program a few dials and buttons, and then affect the receptor sites in that person's cells. Well, the production model isn't quite ready yet, but such a device now exists on both the drawing board and…

It's a good one.... Jan 13 Horatio Alger born, 1834 Jan 13 Sophie Tucker born, 1884 Jan 13 Wilhelm Wien born, 1864, Nobel prize for blackbody radiation laws Jan 13 Fellowship enters Moria Jan 13 National Liberation Day in Togo Jan 13 Eric Clapton plays the "Rainbow Concert" in London, 1973 Jan 14 Albert Schweitzer born, 1875 Jan 14 The first "Be-In" is held in Golden Gate Park, 1967 Jan 14* Adults Day in Japan Jan 14 Konferenz von Casablanca, 1943 Jan 14 Julian Calendar New Year's Day Jan 14 Anniversary Day (Southland)

We are reminded, via Mousie Cat at Evolving in Kansas, that Yesterday (I'm so embarrassed I missed this) was Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday! Wallace was born in 1823. We should now clearly recognise the fact, that the wealth and knowledge and culture of the few do not constitute civilization, and do not of themselves advance us towards the "perfect social state." Our vast manufacturing system, our gigantic commerce, our crowded towns and cities, support and continually renew a mass of human misery and crime absolutely greater than has ever existed before. They create and maintain in…

Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, inventor Robert Fischell makes three wishes: redesigning a portable migraine treatment, finding new cures for clinical depression, and reforming the medical malpractice system. He also shares three new inventions that could improve the lives of millions: His Angel Med Guardian System -- a pacemaker-sized device wired into the heart -- detects an elevation in the electric signal of the heart, the first sign of a heart attack. His transcranial magnetic stimulator treats migraines with a magnetic pulse. Finally, the Neuropace prevents epileptic seizures by…

Florida has a purifying effect on politicians. Around the nation, there is a range of opinion among politicians about science education and other issues, but it seems that in Florida, we have a purified strain of politicians. They are pure idiots. A likely future candidate for Mayor of St. Petersburg, Bill Foster, believes that the study of Darwinism led Hitler to come up with the Holocaust, and the Columbine shooters to come up with murder and mayhem. Foster, currently a city council member in St. Petersburg, wrote a letter to the Pinellas County School Board (considering changes in the…

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer who invented robots and dive equipment that have allowed him to plumb Earth's deepest abysses, explains his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter's moon Europa. The plan is to send the machine to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that's not enough, he's also planning to mine lunar ice by 2015.

A 14 year old kid in Lodz, Poland, modified a TV remote to control the public transit train system. "He studied the trams and the tracks for a long time and then built a device that looked like a TV remote control and used it to manoeuvre the trams and the tracks," said Miroslaw Micor, a spokesman for Lodz police. "He had converted the television control into a device capable of controlling all the junctions on the line and wrote in the pages of a school exercise book where the best junctions were to move trams around and what signals to change. "He treated it like any other schoolboy might…

Armed with a backhoe and a handful of markers, Deborah Gordon studies ant colonies in the Arizona desert. She asks: How do these chitinous creatures get down to business -- and even multitask when they need to -- with no language, memory or visible leadership? Her answers could lead to a better understanding of all complex systems, from the brain to the Web.

Cooperation in nature is very common, and papers about how unlikely cooperation in nature would be are also common. Especially in Nature. (The Journal.) The latest paper is nicely summarized in a press release from the University of Bristol: Cooperative behaviour is common in many species, including humans. Given that cooperative individuals can often be exploited, it is not immediately clear why such behaviour has evolved. ... Professor John McNamara and colleagues demonstrate that when individuals in a population are choosy about their partners, cooperativeness is rewarded and tends to…

Hat tips: Evolgen Biorad Biosingularity ..And, pretty much everybody else on the Internet. Can you identify the singers that are being parodies? (or at least, imitated?)

There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Imagine taking twenty percent of those stars and stuffing them into one, single black hole. That would be one hell of a black hole. Well, there is such a black hole, called OJ287 (no relation to the ex foot ball star/murderer). It is about 3.5 billion light years away. What is interesting about OJ287 is that there is so much gravity going on here .... between this massive black hole and a smaller black hole that orbits it ... that you have to measure the orbital dynamics using Einsteinian calculations, which makes it a test of one of…

Or, one of those 1960s flowers similar to bathtub decals. Who cares, it runs Linux and is only $199.00 US. It'll have an Intel Celeron processor, a 945GC chipset, 512MB of memory and either a 60GB or 80GB hard drive. What it won't have: an optical drive or a PCI Express slot. Despite that, it's a pretty good-looking box, and comes in red, blue, white, and black, each with a different icon stamped on the front. Details here.

I will not be outdone by my fellow bloggers 3-quarks, Thoughts from Kansas, Pure Pedantry and A Blog Around the Clock. They are all putting up these "electoral compass things" where you ask a bunch of questions and get in return a graph showing where you are in relation to the US presidential candidates. So, this is my result: Wow, am I Liberal or What! Try it yourself, here!

An Einstein Ring is one of those freaky relativistic predictions that can't possibly be true unless Einstein was right. Well, Einstein Rings have been observed in the past, and now, we have a double Einstein Ring. Doubly proving that Einstein was right! Click here for a bigger picture of the amazing double Einstein ring. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung…

MIT scientists have found a new way that DNA can carry out its work that is about as surprising as discovering that a mold used to cast a metal tool can also serve as a tool itself, with two complementary shapes each showing distinct functional roles. Professor Manolis Kellis and postdoctoral research fellow Alexander Stark report in the Jan. 1 issue of the journal Genes & Development that in certain DNA sequences, both strands of a DNA segment can perform useful functions, each encoding a distinct molecule that helps control cell functions. There is a full press report here.

Gemina (pronunced Gem eee na) the Crocket Neck Giraffe died for reasons unrelated to her neck. We prefer to remember Gemina in life rather than as, well, a dead giraffe. Details of her death are here.

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This just in from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected plump black holes where least expected -- skinny galaxies. ... Scientists have long held that all galaxies except the slender, bulgeless spirals harbor supermassive black holes at their cores. Furthermore, bulges were thought to be required for black holes to grow. The new Spitzer observations throw this theory into question. The infrared telescope surveyed 32 flat and bulgeless galaxies and detected monstrous black holes lurking in the bellies of seven of them. The results imply that galaxy bulges…

The latest on the Florida fight over the use of the actual word "evolution" in the classroom. (Or, more specifically, in the science standards) A panel of education experts just wrapped up three days of meetings at the state Department of Education to hammer out new standards. The state Board of Education will have the final say next month. The way science is taught in Florida public school classrooms could soon change. Right now, the state science curriculum uses the words "biological changes over time" instead of "evolution". Biology teacher Nicholas Daigle believes the current standards…