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This wonderful headline showed up in my Facebook feed: U.S. 'planned to blow up Moon' with nuke during Cold War era to show Soviets might. This was a bit eyebrow-raising. Dr. Strangelove was a slightly unfair caricature, but the Cold War really did have a better-than-average share of nuttiness. Still - blowing up the moon? Surely not. And it was in fact surely not. The article itself says there was a never-pursued idea to detonate a nuke on the lunar surface. To an earthbound observer, it would have meant a bright, brief pinprick of light on the face of our celestial neighbor and not much…

UPDATE: The pages are DONE. Good work, Miriam! Let's try to act like a civilized society, for at least a few minutes, OK? There is a facebook page called "No respect for suicidal teens" that seems to have been put up by someone annoyed by attention given to someone who killed herself that the facebook page creator has judged worthy of death. Thus the page. It almost looks like a persona vendetta of some kind. Miriam Mogilevsky has created a petition asking Facebook to take this page down. I should note that there are actually two almost identical pages; either the person who created them…

My friend, Aslhey Miller, just wrote this thing and it is important. She has fallen in love with someone that her father does not approve of, and he, her father, has gone ahead and "disowned" her (a strange word when you think about it) for that reason. You should read this because it is socially and politically relevant, and Ashley is a social and political activist and a great writer. But she wrote it because she is a writer and needs to write about these things. This was not easy for her ... not easy to make the decision to write about this experience. I would appreciate it if you would…

But if you ask her for more details she'll get mad at you. Watch: Governor Brewer, two things: First, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Second, you need to learn to govern. You are the "govern"or. Act like it. Hat Tip Archy

The Carnival of Evolution is one of the few remaining carnivals. As such it is probably not so much as an atavism as another unique bloggy thing which still has a function in this world even if all of its nearest relatives are extinct. Like Aardvarks. Anyway, Carnival of Evolution #54: A Walkabout Mount Improbable is HERE

... And I don't mean the good kind. A feature of WordPress blogging software is that you can turn off commenting on old posts, older than a specified number of days. I don't like doing that because some of the most interesting comments trickle in on some of those old posts. Like this one. But, for some reason, old posts are spam magnets, and I'm not talking about the canned meat. I opened up commenting on old posts a while back, and suddenly the spam is rushing like Atlantic Seawater in a New York Subway. So, I've re-closed comments on those old posts. In the mean time, I deleted a LOT…

I have discussed rabies before. In Attack of the Hound of Malembi. Or, “Whose are these people, anyway?” I discussed a personal encounter with a rabid dog, which killed my cat and bit six friend. In Ode to Rocky I discuss an encounter with a cute little raccoon which probably did not have rabies, but since this was during the Great Rabid Raccoon Scare a few years back he got busted anyway. And now, we have Skeptically Speaking #190 RABID ... last Sunday's show which is now a podcast available for you to download. This week, we’re talking about a viral menace that’s one of the scariest –…

These three things are intimately connected. Well, OK, they're not really connected at all, but all will be the subject of discussion on the next Skeptically Speaking. I believe Desiree will be speaking on Sunday, December 2nd with James Pinfold about Dark Matter ... apparently there is new information bringing an explanation for it into question ... and the other items will be added into the podcast to be released on Friday, December 7th. Details here.

Have you ever wondered why on some days cats lick themselves more vigorously? I suspect not. But their licking rate is indeed variable. And it just might have to do with the animal’s fear of getting an electric shock. Unfortunately for felines, cat fur loses electrons very readily, and therein lies a problem. Anytime a cat rubs up against something, and they do a lot of rubbing up, electrons are transferred from the cat to the object, leaving the cat positively charged. When the animal now comes close to items that are good electrical conductors and therefore readily give up electrons, it is…

Here's Joe being a regular guy, picking up some cookies, a pie, some kids toys, and a big-ass TV. Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

For the full biography on the amazing Benjamin Carson visit our website: http://ow.ly/fIXdY

Hat Tip: Becky Crew

This looks interesting: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. This is the description of the book: The No Asshole Rule was awarded a Quill Award as the Best Business Book of 2007. When Robert Sutton's "No Asshole Rule" appeared in the Harvard Business Review, readers of this staid publication were amazed at the outpouring of support for this landmark essay. The idea was based on the notion, as adapted in hugely successful companies like Google and SAS, that employees with malicious intents or negative attitudes destroyed any sort of productive…

Luis Walter Alvarez – Physicist, Inventor and Engineer He was one of those rare thinkers whose contributions to science impacted a wide spectrum – ranging from splitting atoms (he was part of the research team that developed the atomic bomb) and creating aircraft radar systems, to developing theories about the extinction of dinosaurs. He is perhaps best known for receiving the 1968 Nobel Prize in Physics for the development and use of the liquid hydrogen bubble chamber to discover a number of resonance particles whose classification led to the quark description of matter. His diverse thinking…

When Bill O'Reilly said that you "can't explain tides" I laughed. Why did I laugh? Because if he wasn't such a dumb-ass he could have EASILY named a dozen thing that science claims to "know" that a reasonably good rhetorician could convince the average Tea Bagger that science really can't "know" because it can't really "see" them. The tides have been understood not only by science by by a lot of regular working class potential Republicans (though many are not) who eek out their living on the shores of the briny sea. Bill O'Reilly must have looked like a complete idiot to them. Meanwhile,…

Hypatia  --  Influential Mathematician and Philosopher --Perhaps the first woman to make a substantial contribution to the development of mathematics --Murdered by her adversaries Her influence as a mathematician, philosopher and teacher  in ancient Alexandria, Egypt --at a time when opportunities for women were practically non-existent-- was so great that Carl Sagan paid tribute to her in his book Cosmos. Hypatia has also been recognized in art work and novels throughout history. Born between the years 355 and 370 A.D., Hypatia, collaborating with her father (the mathematician Theon)…

Apparently a bunch of white guys. And, now that I have your attention: I apologize if your comment was in "moderation" for a long time. The Scienceblogs backend stopped sending me notices when something was being held in moderation, so I did not see a build up of moderated posts happening. They should be free now.

Are you interested in birding but don't really know much about it? Did you just put a feeder outside and noticed that birds are interesting, or did you finally get around to stopping at that wildlife refuge you drive by every week on the way to the casino and realize that walking down to the swamp to look at birds and stuff is both better exercise and cheaper than playing slot machines for nine hours straight? Or have you been birding in a casual way for a while, using your Uncle Ned's old binoculars and a tattered and torn Peterson you found on the sale table at the library, and want to…

Rebecca Lee Crumpler -- Physician Challenged the prevailing attitudes of her day when in 1864 she became the first African American woman to earn a medical degree. Even at an early age, Rebecca Lee  Crumpler displayed a penchant and sensitivity toward caring for the poor and ill. Born in Delaware in 1831, she was raised by an aunt who was dedicated to looking after sick neighbors and friends.  At the age of 21, young Rebecca moved to Charleston, Mass., to work as a nurse for the next eight years.  Since the first formal nursing school wouldn’t open for another 20  years, Rebecca was able to…

After a couple of months of testing, the results are in. I've attempted to wrestle with this issue on this blog before, but with unsatisfying results. PHS (Push Here Stupid) cameras can be tricky, for a number of reasons. A few years ago, my sister gave Julia a Sony, that new fancy digital camera with all sorts of bells and whistled. It took amazingly good photographs. But cameras in the same line that I've looked at later don't take photographs that are nearly as good. Why? In my opinion, because they are made by Sony. It seems to me that Sony is great at coming out with wonderful…