"Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist who has vigorously opposed the entanglement of science and religion while also calling for mutual respect between the two, has won the 2010 Templeton Prize." Yet again the prize has gone to a scientist who says nice things about religion.

"Ayala, 76, a naturalized American who moved from Spain to New York in 1961 for graduate study and soon became a leader in molecular evolution and genetics, has devoted more than 30 years to asserting that both science and faith are damaged when either invades the proper domain of the other.

CO2 Emissions : More Is The New Less

As part of its climate change strategy, the Government set a UK aviation target in January 2009, to reduce UK aviation emissions back to 2005 levels in 2050. Together with deep cuts in other sectors, this would achieve the UK’s legislated economy-wide greenhouse gas (GHG) target to reduce emissions by 80% in 2050 relative to 1990. 

http://www.theccc.org.uk/sectors/aviation

Saturday, 27 March 2010
The political arguments about a third runway for London's Heathrow airport broke out again fiercely last night after a High Court judge declined to quash the project but told the Government to get its aviation policy in order.

On Blogging And Soothsaying


The internet is a wonderful means of spreading information, but there is a danger of spreading misinformation.  It probably takes far fewer years of education to read a science article than to fully understand it.  The danger is that, just as many people rely on their horoscopes, so too do many people rely on their favorite bloggers to do their critical thinking for them.

Over at Marginal Revolution economist Tyler Cowan has started one of those blog trends, and many other bloggers have followed like a pack of lemmings.

In Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel asks some questions about peer review — its purpose and its effect — prompted by strong online criticism of a peer-reviewed paper that was published with at least some significant review comments ignored.

One particularly interesting statement that Janet makes is in the second sentence of this paragraph:

As Bora was the "editor" of the paper rather than an official referee of the paper, it’s not clear whether the journal editors overseeing the fate of this submission actually forwarded Bora’s critiques onto the author, or if they did forward the critiques to the author but indicated that they wouldn’t coun

It's Earth Hour - Let's Black Out Big Time!


Earth hour is an event organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature in which participants switch off lights for one hour at night.  The objective is to produce an hour of darkness as a means of highlighting the need for global action on climate change.

Earth Hour - climate change campaigners urge global switch-off

The fourth annual lights-out event expects 1 billion participants, and counts for the first time international landmarks including the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State building and the Burj Khalifa

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/26/energy-climate-change

A pale pink, half-moon shaped scar sits above my left breast as a  reminder of my youth spent at Jones Beach with more baby oil than sunscreen, doing more baking than bathing. My scar is from having MOHS micrographic surgery, after basal cell carcinoma was found in a biopsy of a mole.

Basal cell carcinoma is one of several types of nonmelanoma skin cancers, which are the most common forms of skin cancer in the United States.  According to a study in the "Archives of
Dermatology", as of 2006, there have been 3.5 million cases a year in 2 million American people.

Princeton researchers found that high-fructose corn syrup-- the basic sweetener is sodas and just about everything-- causes more weight gain that sugar.  Calorie for calorie, rats got fatter on the corn syrup than on sugar.

And at the same time, PepsiCo has released 'Throwback' products-- Pepsi sodas made with sugar instead of corn syrup.  So if researchers are saying sugar is better for you, we need to check which tastes better-- corn syrup or sugar?

Consumers continue to click on spam despite awareness of how bots and viruses spread through risky email behavior, according to the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). Their findings were based on a survey it released today covering North America and Western Europe and said that even though over eighty percent of email users are aware of the existence of bots, tens of millions respond to spam in ways that could leave them vulnerable to a malware infection.

A team of geologists say that, in just two centuries, stunning population growth, sprawling megacities and increased use of fossil fuels have wrought such vast and unprecedented changes to our world that humans actually might be ushering in a new geological time interval they have dubbed the "Anthropocene Epoch".

Writing in Environmental Science and Technology, the team says the dawning of this new epoch may include the sixth largest mass extinction in Earth's history.