Freedom of the press is integral to a functioning democracy and respect for human rights, it is said, and a new study tackles the effects of media freedom in countries that lack democratic institutions like fair elections. 

The findings?   By itself, freedom of the press doesn't accomplish much.   Media freedom in the absence of other institutional outlets for dissent is actually associated with greater oppression of human rights, Jenifer Whitten-Woodring, a doctoral candidate in political science and international relations at USC, found utilizing data from 93 countries for the years 1981-1995. 

Galileo Galilei wasn't just an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and heresy suspect (not to mention father of modern observational astronomy, modern physics, science, and modern science, that last one he was named by both Hawking and Einstein). He was also a friend of the Medici, the political Italian dynasty whose patronage of scientists and artists led to the Renaissance.¹

Did you know that Isabella Rossellini writes, co-directs, and stars in a show about reproductive behavior and conservation? The show is called Green Porno. Yes, really!

It has just come to my attention that Season Three includes a squid episode! It's pretty awesome and only a few minutes long, so you should definitely go the website and check it out.

If Isabella Rossellini were a squid, she claims:

"Everyone would want to eat me." So true! Any marine predator (and even some terrestrial and avian predators) that can fit a squid in their mouth will happily devour these swimming protein bars.

An article entitled "Can Robots Make Ethical Decisions" was recently published wherein the authors claim that they have successfully modeled difficult moral problems in computer logic, further asserting that morality is no longer solely within the realm of philosphers.

But is this true?

In the first place the "moral problems" selected are uncharacteristically binary in their approach and while they may represent a kind of moral dilemma, aren't particularly difficult to assess.  More importantly, the central question of ethics is precisely that it isn't subject to a simple algorithm to determine the appropriateness of any particular action.

Reading pervades every aspect of our daily lives, so much so that one would be hardpressed to find a room in a modern house without words written somewhere inside. Many of us now read more sentences in a day than we listen to. Not only are we highly competent readers, but our brains even appear to have regions devoted to recognizing words. A Martian just beginning to study us humans might be excused for concluding that we had evolved to read. 
 
But, of course, we haven’t. Reading and writing is a recent human invention, going back only several thousand years, and much more recently for many parts of the world. We are reading using the eyes and brains of our illiterate ancestors. Why are we so good at such an unnatural act? 
 

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), launched on June 18th, 2009,  will return more data about the Moon than any previous mission. The Lyman-Alpha Mapping Project (LAMP), developed by Southwest Research Institute,  uses a novel method to peer into the perpetual darkness of the Moon's so-called permanently shadowed regions - the dark side of the moon.

A 9-foot dinosaur excavated illegally from northeastern China and purchased by a private collector who brought it to the attention of paleontologists (hey, they'll return it after they're done)  is about the same weight as a grown human yet had still evolved all the hallmark anatomical features of Tyrannosaurus rex - except 30 million years earlier, according to a study in Science.

Raptorex displays the hallmarks of its famous descendant, Tyrannosaurus rex, like an oversized head, tiny arms and feet well-suited for running. The Raptorex brain cast also shows enlarged olfactory bulbs, like T. rex, indicating a highly developed sense of smell.

If you want to create a micro-aircraft that flies with the maneuverability and energy efficiency of an insect (and you know you do) decoding the aerodynamic secrets of insect flight is key because optimization through evolutionary pressures over millions of years far outstrips what we can achieve artificially. 

But it's not that simple.  Consider the 'bumblebee paradox' that plagued researchers for decades.    It turned out not to be a paradox but rather an issue with what we could model aerodynamically.   Look at mister bee below:

Scientists have observed ferromagnetism in an atomic gas for the first time, addressing the decades-old question of whether gases could show properties similar to a magnet made of iron or nickel.

A team observed the ferromagnetic behavior in a gas of lithium atoms cooled to 150 billionth of 1 Kelvin above absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). Team members used the lithium-6 isotope, which consists of three protons, three neutrons and three electrons. Since the number of constituents is odd, lithium-6 is a fermion — a class of exotic particles that have a half-integral spin — and has properties similar to an electron. Therefore, lithium atoms can be used to simulate the behavior of electrons.

There is new evidence that the solar wind has stripped away significant quantities of water from Venus.  

The SPICAV and VIRTIS instruments carried by the Venus Express spacecraft have been used to measure concentrations of water vapor in the Venusian atmosphere at altitudes ranging from the lowest 10 km up to 110 km, high above the cloud tops.

Studies led by scientists from Belgium and Russia have found that the ratio of heavy water, which contains the isotope deuterium instead of hydrogen, to normal water is nearly twice as high above the clouds compared to its value in the lower atmosphere.