Doonesbury brilliance - Lauren

Once again Garry Trudeau has shown that he has a better grasp on what's happening in the world than most. I thought this Sunday's Doonesbury was particularly amusing.


Here is the website for the strip.

Sagar: Elephant Evolution Consistent with Human Evolution!

SO some scientists have recently taken 30 grams of bone from a mastadon tooth and mapped its mitochondrial genome. This is cool because based on analysis of the mastadon mitochondrial genome with genomes of elephants and mammoths, the scientists have concluded that African elephants diverged from Asian elephants and mammoths at the same time as humans and chimpanzees suggesting that there was some environmental event that accelerated evolution across species during that time period. The article is pretty interesting and the link is here .

-Sagar

fun on pbs

...oh and another thing...

a few weeks ago, I caught a part of a PBS series talking about atheism and here's what I found when I googled:

"PBS TV Stations to Air Three-Part Documentary on Atheism"
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewCulture.asp?Page=/Culture/archive/200704/CUL20070430c.html

The documentary, "Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief" travels through history and discusses the ever dwindling belief in the existence of God. I'm not sure which episode I watched, but they talked about how Newton's laws enabled people to look at the universe in a more physical and less mysterious/spiritual way. They had only gotten to around late 1700's by the end of the episode I watched, and I'm assuming they wouldn't disregard Darwin...

Anyway, I'm going to try to watch the whole thing. Most of the episodes can be found on YouTube...but they might be removed for copyright infringement...so try to watch 'em fast :)
YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Atheism%3A+A+Rough+History+of+Disbelief

In conclusion, I applaud PBS for attempting to broaden people's horizons and for offering a different side of the story.

cheers 2,
dani

fun on facebook

whoa...there's a lot of stuff happening on this blog :)

so I was on facebook today and my friend posted this and it was so ridiculously relevant that I had to share. If someone had already posted this, well it's worth a second laugh:

can't wait to see you all in LONDON!!!

cheers

Dani

General Ridiculousness- Joy

Seeing that I have already given away my dark secret of being a comics nerd, I figure I would post this one from my favorite site qwantz.com, as we will (hopefully) be meeting Dawkins. Click on the comic to read in fullscreen. Enjoy!

Ben Bova: Human Intelligence vs. wisdom -- Alex S.

Ben Bova is one of the most preeminently science fiction writers alive right now. He's definitely one of my favorite sci fi authors. These days, though, he's writing more and more books about social problems that the human race faces. For example, one of the books that I recently read was his The High Road, which talks about how in order for the human race to survive, it MUST diversity through the colonization of other planets in outer space. Stuff like that is really interesting.

http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2007/jul/21/ben_bova_intelligence_places_us_atop_all_primates_/

In this opinion article, Ben Bova sort of talks about humans and chimps and our relative dominance when it comes to intelligence, however, our intelligence has also produced a lot of social problems on the planet. And then he talks about if we have the 'wisdom' that it takes to solve these problems. In any case, it's a really short and sweet article. I think you guys will enjoy reading it.