In 637, a few years after the founder of Islam, Muhammad, died, one of his military commanders completed the Arab conquest of Jerusalem, prior to that a holy city for Jews and Christians. It was over 400 years before Christians were able to take it back.

If I have a choice between an emissions-belching factory near my home or clean, high-paying jobs from a diverse group of educated people 13,000 feet above where citizens live, I am siding with science.

This is why while I was a successful environmental fundraiser, many of their positions made no sense to me, even when I was young and naïve. Many of the positions I was supposed to believe in weren't about the environment, they were about manufacturing hype to raise money. Hawaiʻi's Thirty Meter Telescope is another example where it is not about the environment - 13 observatories and telescopes have been there for over 40 years - and it is also not about the next tactic after the environmental argument failed - religion. 

There are only four seasons so one of them is going to win when it comes to drug use, and it's little surprise that season for teenagers is summer,when kids are not in school.

A recent analysis of survey results found that 34 percent of new LSD initiates first used the drug in the summer. In addition, 30 percent of marijuana, 30 percent of ecstasy (MDMA/Molly), and 28 percent of cocaine use was found to begin in summer months. Since summer is 25 percent of the seasons this is not really compelling insight, but if epidemiologists want to get National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) funding, they need to find things to hype up.

This stunning specimen with her regal ridges (and small anomaly) is an Apoderoceras ammonite, an extinct genus of cephalopod and active predatory mollusk belonging to the subclass Ammonoidea.

The McAbee fossil beds are known for their incredible abundance, diversity and quality of fossils including lovely plant, insect and fish species that lived in an old lake bed setting 52 million years ago.
It is one of the best local sites in the province to experience a fossil dig first-hand. It's an easy 4 hour drive from Vancouver and easily done as a daytrip. The site was designated a Provincial Heritage Site under British Columbia's Heritage Conservation Act back in July of 2012, then promptly closed to the public.

Horseshoe crabs are classic living fossils. These marine and brackish water arthropods of the order Xiphosura are slowly evolving, conservative taxa.

Many First Nations sites were inhabited continually for centuries. These sites were both home, providing continuity and community and also formed a spiritual connection to the landscape. The day to day activities of each of these communities would much like our own. Babies were born, meals were served and life followed a natural cycle.

We've known for some time that the islet is sensitive to a glucose demand in secreting insulin and uses gap junctions as a tuning parameter in this adaptation.

While you and I may have been lagging behind a bit as of late, excused by a particularly hot July, the CMS collaboration has kept grinding its data, producing exquisite new results from the large amounts of proton-proton collisions that the experiment has been collecting during Run 2, i.e. until last year. 
Of course, the process of going from subatomic collisions to submitted papers is a long and complex one. The first part of the journey involves triggering, storage, and reconstruction of the acquired datasets, and reduction of the data into an analysis-friendly format. While this might sound like a partly automatic and painless procedure, it involves the expense of liters of sweat by conscentious collaborators who oversee the data acquisition and their processing.

Claims about marijuana being medical have never been shown in clinical trials, they have instead been a joke among users, but it opened the doorway to recreational legalization. Yet the myth of benefit, or at least lack of harm, persist, and new survey results show more women are smoking it daily. Even pregnant ones. At least in California.