Well, you knew this day was coming. Ray Kurzweil, futurist and author, was attacked for his supposed lack of understanding of how the brain functions, by popular biologist and ScienceBlogs blogger PZ Myers earlier this week.


Image courtesy of Singularity Hub

Several Italian scientists may be charged later this year with manslaughter over the deaths of 308 people who died in and around l'Aquila in 2009.  Is this reasonable?

I wanted to write about something new in this post, but as Google News failed to inform me of any interesting geology-related happenings (unless you include this BBC article which is just one big rock pun) I will have to make do with something almost-current I have wanted to write about for a while.

A young fisherman in a distant past looks across the sea and ponders: "What an unimaginably big stretch of water!" He has no idea where it ends or even if it ends. But he knows one thing: over time spans of many years the rainfall into the sea adds up to a lot of water, and therefore the sea must be rising. This means that in a number of generations the sea will inevitably flood the lands, making the world an inhabitable place. But it also means that in the past the sea must have been much shallower. Too shallow for fish to thrive in. An inevitable conclusion forces itself upon our young fisherman. His generation is a very privileged one. A generation that lives late enough to find fish to feed on, and early enough to find land to live on. A remarkable coincidence.

The human genome is the home of over 3 billion nucleotide base pairs packaged into 23 chromosome pairs. But despite the tremendous size of the human genome, only 1-2% of genome actually encodes for proteins.

Previously undetected landforms indicate the Moon is ... shrinking.

Lobate scarps  are thrust faults that occur primarily in the Moon's lunar highlands. They were first recognized in photographs taken near the moon's equator by the panoramic cameras flown on the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions. Fourteen previously unknown lobate scarps have now been revealed in very high resolution images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera. The newly detected scarps indicate that the thrust faults are globally distributed and not clustered near the moon's equator.