In 1,993 responses to a Sex Survey questionnaire, responses consisted of 1,351 males and 642 females.   Progressives were over-represented (N=973), while Conservatives were under-represented (N=395).

If you haven't seen "Thor", I am not spoiling the movie for you if I tell you Natale Portman's character is an astronomer.   So what, you ask?   Indeed, Jodie Foster was an astronomer in "Contact", I wasn't aware there was any particular dearth of female astronomers in cinema, or in astronomy, but if you are a culture blogger who masquerades in science, and there are less than 50% of women in a field, then it's cause for concern.

Don't like Guantanamo?   In the mid-East, detention centers are the norm rather than an exception.   Dorothy Parvaz got a look inside Syria's secret prisons because her luggage had the misinfortune of containing a satellite phone and an internet hub.   And that was with an American passport and an Al Jazeera-sponsored visa.   You can imagine how Syrians get treated.  

Most of the our days were spent listening to the sounds of young men being brutally interrogated – sometimes tied up in stress positions until it sounded like their bones were cracking, as we saw from our bathroom window (a bathroom with no running water, except for one tap in a sink filled with roughly 10 cm of sewage).

As Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, devolved into a one-trick crusade against America in general, and George W. Bush in particular, he ironically began to do the one thing he did not want to do; he validated the Bush approach of using 'enhanced interrogation' on terrorists by documenting the instances so historians can see how much it helped.

The detainment approach, and Guantanamo Bay, have been shown by 765 illegally-obtained Wikileaks documents to actually be a crucial part of one of the most successful intelligence operations in history.  Oops.

Unless you have culturally been living under a rock, you have heard of Area 51 - Roswell, New Mexico.   Supposedly an alien spacecraft came down there in 1947 and a vast government conspiracy sprung up to build the thing and keep it secret for nearly 70 years.

Annie Jacobsen, journalist and contributing editor at the LA Times (they are thrilled about that plug) says the UFO was just a Soviet spy plane that came down due to weather.    But that isn't the end of it.    The Soviets, no strangers to eugenics, had staffed it with genetically engineered pilots, 'alien-like' children aged 12 or 13 and Stalin hoped to cause some panic in the U.S., a la the Orson Welles radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" in 1939.

LED bulbs will finally be bright enough to replace 100-watt incandescent light bulbs but there is a problem - they will cost $50 each.  And won't be available until after the ban.  And they produce almost as much heat as incandescent bulbs, making them ridiculously inefficient.

Advocates always believe in legislating perfectly healthy businesses out of existence because they contend 'the miracle of capitalism' will make the replacement they just subsidized and mandated through government fiat cheaper.   Well, why should they get cheaper when the government created a monopoly market?    If capitalism works, and $50 is a good price to pay for a light bulb, it doesn't need government bans on regular light bulbs.

The 2010 miniseries from the UK, Genius of Britain: The Scientists Who Changed the World ships for Americans May 31^st.

Nothing is convenient to criticize like the food industry.   Environmental mullahs blame farmers for nitrogen and pesticides and greenhouse gases, though farming has actually "dematerialized" in the last 30 years and is producing the more food with only 60 percent of the land used in 1980.    Meanwhile, cultural fundamentalists decry the Utopian ideal every culture in history always sought to attain - cheap food.  So cheap people can eat a lot and choose to get fat.

Io's global "ocean" of molten rock beneath the surface feeds its prolific volcanism, a new study finds.

Unlike Earth's magma, which tends to cluster in pockets around the edges of tectonic plates, Io's magma is found in a global reservoir at least 30 miles (48 kilometers) deep, the study suggests. This huge reserve of subsurface molten rock helps explain why Io is the most volcanically active object in the solar system, spewing out 100 times more lava than all of Earth's volcanoes combined.

NASA's Galileo reveals magma 'ocean' beneath surface of Jupiter's moon - Kids Science Zone