Dr. Daniel P.

To our forefathers, distinguishing the living from the dead centered on calidum innatum - vital heat. Aristotle showed that when the heart turns cold, compared to other organs, a person dies and postulated that the vital heat produced in the heart caused blood vessels to react like water bubbles in boiling water - heat which our lungs cooled with air, to keep the cycle going. Modern microbiology knows body heat is not what the ancients envisioned and is more complex than an organ; biological processes should produce thermal signatures no matter how small, even within single cells, it was just that nobody knew how to measure them.

Phone Hacking Scandal - Appeal Dismissed

Rebekah Brooks, News International’s former chief executive,  Andy Coulson, former No. 10 spin doctor (Downing Street communications chief), and others have lost an appeal which attempted to redefine what is meant by the ordinary words which define  the unlawful interception of communications.

They, or rather their lawyers, tried to persuade the Appeal Court that the legal and technical definitions concerning the transmission of telecommunications did not cover voicemails.

Everyone has seen dinosaur skeletons in museums. You're not supposed to touch them, even on the outside.

Dr. Qi Zhao of the Institute for Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing got to not only touch some, he got to section two arm and two leg bones from 16 individual dinosaurs, ranging in age from less than one year to 10 years old (fully-grown). He did the sectioning work in a special palaeohistology laboratory in Bonn. 

Myotonic dystrophy is an inherited disorder, the most common form of a group of conditions called muscular dystrophies that involve progressive muscle wasting and weakness.

Myotonic dystrophy type 1 is caused a type of RNA defect known as a "triplet repeat," a series of three nucleotides repeated more times than normal in an individual's genetic code. In this case, a cytosine-uracil-guanine (CUG) triplet repeat binds to the protein MBNL1, rendering it inactive and resulting in RNA splicing abnormalities.

Spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way appear to be much larger and more massive than previously believed, according to new observations made with Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph.

Could you make an ancient beer using nothing but ancient tools?

Probably, if you know how to make beer anyway.  But would it be authentic ancient beer? Archaeologists and brewmasters have been trying to make just that kind, sparing no effort to replicate a 5,000-year-old Sumerian beer using nothing more complex than clay jugs and a wooden spoon.

It's the ultimate artisan brew. 

We all think about space exploration, but we also need to think about dodging 50 years of debris from space exploration - aluminum, steel, nylon, even liquid sodium from Russian satellites. Sierra Club hasn't started fundraising over this issue yet but they might after reading this article.

According to NASA, there are more than 21,000 pieces of 'space junk' roughly the size of a baseball in orbit, and about 500,000 pieces that are golf ball-sized. Sure, space is big, but when a piece of space junk strikes a spacecraft, the collision occurs at a velocity of 5 to 15 kilometers per second, roughly ten times faster than a speeding bullet.

Michael Graner, PhD, a CU Cancer Center investigator and associate professor of neurosurgery at the CU School of Medicine, experimented on his dog.

Before anyone yells "Tesla!" and PETA gets up in arms, he did it for the best of reasons.  At age 12, his great dane Star collapsed during a coughing fit and Graner discovered the cause: lung cancer, specifically advanced bronchoalveolar adenocarcinoma with metastasis to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was grim, with a median survival from diagnosis of only about 6-27 days. And Star was well past the age when she could've tolerated chemotherapy or radiation.