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He's a douche about the whole thing. People think he's insulting because he's a total dick when he talks about religion. There are lots of folks who can critizise religion without being jerks about it. At least for me, it's not Dawkin's ideas that people are offended by, but how he expresses them. More proof Dawkins is a jerk:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.single.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/dawkins_watson1.gif

We've been exploring Mars for 40+ years now and so far we've not found evidence of life. We are much closer answering the question if it did or does, and I won't be surprised if we find microfossils and even life, but the parameters are very narrow. Now if we send a DNA sequencer to a icy moon of Jupiter or Saturn that has an ocean under it's ice, the odds of finding life go up dramatically. Europa would have been my first choice but we have to get through that thick crust. Enceladus would be even better. It's spewing liquid water into space. So we know where the crust is thinnest. And it does have the ingredients for life.

Bang on.

In the days of the start up of the LHC, a certain Walter L. Wagner was estimating a 50% chance of the world collapsing into a black hole at LHC turn on.
Watch the daily show video linked here: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/05/01/daily-show-explains-the-lhc/
Walter enters at 2'30''. The probability lesson comes at ~3'30''.

Is this why we haven't heard much from Mary Schwietzer lately? Six years ago she isolated soft tissue remnants from inside a T-rex femur.

More recently, Charlotte Oskam (Biologist at Murdoch University in Australia) identified DNA in fossilized egg shells.

We've always known that DNA was unlikely to survive the passage of aeons, this just puts a number to it. Specific conditions could still allow better than typical preservation, and so I dislike making an absolute statement that we'll never find it. Hopefully those who are still looking for the elusive ancient DNA will take this study as a way to focus their search rather than have their funding cut.

During the ascent the Falcon 9 lost an engine. Apparently a single engine fault is something that the Falcon 9 is designed for and can continue the mission on 8 engines.

Here you go.

You'll notice that in terms of utility, a 1000 MPG car is no less practical than a 1000 MPH car. No more practical, either. In fact, not at all practical.

I take it that on further reflection, you don't want either?

I wonder how true that is. Not that this is his brain nor that he revolutionized physics. I just wonder if THIS is the brain that did it.

You see, London has a strenuous test for Taxi drivers. Their streets are not like New York, where many are numbered in sequential order and relatively easy to learn. London has 25,000 roads, with no real rhyme or reason, and perspective taxi drivers - to get licensed - needs to memorize them and takes several years. The test is called the Knowlege, iirc, and it takes an average of a dozen attempt to pass:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/12/08/acquiring-the-knowledge-changes-the-brains-of-london-cab-drivers/

The hippocampus of these drivers is substantially larger and stay so throughout their working life. But it shrinks back down after retirement:
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/About-us/75th-anniversary/WTVM052023.htm

This is Einsteins brain after, what, 40 some years after his best achievement? Is it the same brain anymore? Wouldn't it be like poking at the Schwarzenegger's remains whenever he dies to see what makes a bodybuilder at his peak? Just something to ponder.

There's also the finding that many types of thermal paper contain much larger amounts of BPA than food packaging:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2010/07/28/study-finds-bpa-in-store-receipts-health-effects-as-yet-unclear/

Would be interesting if the link between obesity and eating fast food was only partly due to the food itself and partly due to handling the receipts.

I'd guess Canadian Mennonites are the big consumers of white vinegar (for pickling--and they have the bowel disease to prove it), with homesick Brits as the big consumers of cider vinegar. Otherwise, outside of fish and chip shops, you rarely see the stuff around.

Among older English Canadians, you'd be closer to the mark with inferior/unidentifiable bubbly orange melted cheese (curds are the superior Quebecois surrogate), or for pancakes and pastries, maple syrup.

For pasta, we make an exception to the bubble orange cheese and shake Kraft brand pre-grated Parmesan out of a green plastic cylinder. You could make a similar food stuff by fabricating a solid soft-plastic cylinder, then using a mixture of table salt and MSG as grit, boring out the center until it's off-white and fluffy.

Just in the past two months cooking at home I've done Mexican, Italian, French, Moroccan, Greek, Persian, northern Indian, Chinese and Thai--not counting a leg of chicken with roast vegetables (who owns that?)

Among younger Canadians, you'd be a lot closer to the truth listing our favorite condiment as "ethnic foil pouch".

Wikipedia lists 25 different ethnic groups each accounting for at least 1% of the Canadian population. The Japanese article lacks a comparable table, because there isn't much need. A different source lists Japanese 98.5%, Koreans 0.5%, Chinese 0.4%, other 0.6% (although there has lately been a large influx of foreigners by Japanese norms). In any of the three big Canadian cities (and several smaller ones), you could without too much effort go two full months without duplicating the ethnicity of your lunch or dinner (supposing you don't count India, China, and Africa each as a single country). And if one night you're stuck for inspiration, skip a meal and tick off North Korean.

I don't eat a lot of seaweed myself, as I'm not fully equipped.

Gut bacteria in Japanese people borrowed sushi-digesting genes from ocean bacteria

Abiogenesis is definitely an unsolved problem - so far. So what? The question of how life got started is logically distinct from how it developed after that start. And evolution addresses that question comprehensively. (Even in the case of the putative examples of 'irreducible complexity' that ID'ers have advanced - e.g. the bacterial flagellum, the clotting cascade, or the vertebrate immune system.)

(Oh, and progress is actually being made on the abiogenesis front anyway.)

Wonderful ethical question, but if the human race is known for anything, its the non-subscription to the magazine which ponders over such things.

I don't know, Scientific American seems to have a decent subscription rate, for example, and is also known for covering topics such as this.

Someone will attempt to bring them back, now argue about how it should be done.

I agree, the first attempts are already being made (wooly mammoth) I'm not sure I see the argument, unless you're talking about a specific plague or major pest, and releasing them into the wild.

1) Obviously - where else would they go?
2) Humans have this nasty habit of wiping things out for food or convenience: mammoths, passenger pigeons, etc. It can be assumed that resurrected species will be considered valuable enough by their caretakers to avoid that fate for at least a while.
3) I agree, current zoos mostly suck, although there's new thought going into "zoos", like safari parks, where there's more room to roam, etc
4) Disagree, if we can resurrect it, we'll also have a good idea of what they eat, and we can probably recreate the flora as well (for herbivores)
5) Interest drives effort

Well, here are some mostly living ones:
http://discovermagazine.com/2002/nov/feat50

Some more from past centuries:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Ten-Historic-Female-Scientists-You-Should-Know.html

Oh, and don't forget a Slashdot favourite, Ada Lovelace.

This is because of the body's spontaneous abort mechanism that ceases pregnancies that have genetic problems.

No, it's much much more common that than. 60 to 80% of ALL fertilized eggs (blatsocysts?) fail to implant in the womb. Healthy or not.

So, does that mean the mother is guilty of murder? Do we need to install strainers in toilets to catch these little guys as they exit the body with menses?

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/may/cover/article_view?b_start:int=2&-C

"the numbers consistently suggest that, at minimum, two-thirds of all human eggs fertilized during normal conception either fail to implant at the end of the first week or later spontaneously abort. Some experts suggest that the numbers are even more dramatic. John Opitz, a professor of pediatrics, human genetics, and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah, told the Presidentâ(TM)s Council on Bioethics last September that preimplantation embryo loss is âoeenormous. Estimates range all the way from 60 percent to 80 percent of the very earliest stages, cleavage stages, for example, that are lost.â

Quantum mechanics shows that conscious participation can help define the universe (Are things a wave or a particle? Matters if you're looking). John Wheeler took this further and called it the Participatory Anthropic Principle. (Not as catchy as his other terms he came up with like black hole or wormhole). So whomever sees epoch first may become the Maker. A fun little read on the idea is 2002 discover mag article

Nobel Prize Winner Warns We're Running Out Of Helium

...is where I go to get the latest space news. Just kidding. I go to the Bad Astronomer, who posted a color 360 panorama two days ago: http://mblogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/08/09/first-color-360-degree-panorama-from-curiosity/ C'mon Slashot, you can do better than this.

GRACE also measured the 2005 Amazon drought, regarded as the worst in over a century. Just five years later, the 2010 Amazon drought might have been even more severe.

GRACE also measured the 2010-2011 floods in Australian and Columbia, which dumped so much water on land that sea level temporarily dropped by ~6mm.

Here's the picture from Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog on Discover magazine's web site:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/08/06/curiosity-update-heat-shield-spotted/

I'll watch it at TwiT.tv -> http://twit.tv/2012/07/30/mars-landing-special-aug-5th-10pm-pdt

The presenters/guests to this event will be:

Jonathan Strickland (How Stuff Works) -> http://www.howstuffworks.com/jonathan-strickland-author1.htm
Dr Kiki (Dr Kiki Science Hour) -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiki_Sanford
Phil Plait (Bad Astronomer) -> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/20/mars-attacks-of-the-show/
Steve Sell (JPL, Sky Crane) -> http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/30jul_skycrane/

Hope they do a good job!

Peace!

I think almost everyone is fine with government regulating dangerous unproven medical treatments with potentially horrific side-effects.

The issue in the courts there is, that Dr's were arguing that they were using your own body to treat itself, which they are...much like a skin graft..the FDA isn't involved there. The FDA wants its hands in this...and somehow have successfully gotten the courts to say that taking your own cells out...and putting them back in...is a foreign drug being introduced into the body...and in there jurisdiction.

Sad...this one is a battle that should have been won by the doctors, as that it has been showing great progress in many areas....hope this can be appealed and overturned.

You do know that the injected stem cells could easily become cancerous and kill the patient? Regulating medicine is what FDA set out to do.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/02/18/embryonic-stem-cell-therapy-causes-cancer-in-teenage-boy/

Proper regulation gets rid off snake oil, so the patient can pick those proven treatments. In this particular situation, it is more than getting rid off snake oil. It is about safety.

If by "remaining stable for most of human history" they mean "for most of the time modern humans have existed" then they are on reasonably firm ground - between 40,000 BCE and 4000 BCE there was little population growth - except for colonization of new areas. If they mean the period thought of as "the historic period" when we have written records, then no, they are no correct.

A good graph that reveals population growth trend patterns since pre-historic times is this one: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/12/the-axial-age-world-population/

Most charts using a linear population scale only show the exponential blow up that appears at the end of the curve of every exponential process, no matter when you pick that end, but offers little or no insight into what was happening in previous epochs.

What the Discover graph shows is that population was pretty stable until the development of civilization around 4000 BCE, a steady upward trend then set in for the next 3500 years, then around 500 BCE the development of high ancient civilization in the Mediterranean and East Asia led to a growth spurt which hit a plateau around 100 BCE after which there was only slight growth for the remainder of the ancient civilization period (until around 500 CE), the so-called Medieval "Dark Age" period led to accelerated, but erratic growth, and then we entered the two recent acceleration periods - the early modern period (age of exploration), and then the industrial revolution.

I think it is worth while to point out that, of the 5 independent investigations that were launched as a result of the so-called "Climategate", all 5 have exonerated the Climatologists under investigation. None of the 5 were able to find any evidence of scientific malpractice. I'd call that, coupled with the endorsement of the G8 (+5) national academies of science, a pretty unequivocal vindication of the science of Global Climate Change.

Yeah.

Happens all the time, just need to look. Try this potential cure for cancer. The gentleman was trying to cure his own cancer and actually had a significant remission, but ultimately died. But the underlying technology has been the root of an entire spectrum of new therapeutic technologies using nanograin metals and external energy sources to induce chemical, biological, and physical events to impact diseases.

There is no shortage of good ideas, bright people, or visionary people. There is an overabundance or orthodoxies, bureaucracies, superstitions about education vs. aptitude, and a general laziness with people in positions of power or authority to distinguish between what looks good on paper vs. what works well in the world. A society that allowed more people to participate in discovery, and allowed them to distinguish themselves, vs. endless lines of acolytes who've already swallowed the KoolAid to get to the point of selection, might allow us to make new and truly unexpected discoveries.

The last link is just awesomesauce. That is all.

His ISS capture during an eclipse also!

This write-up gives reasons for doubting that the new technique does show dinosaurs were significantly lighter than previously thought.

Creationism is based on specific facts,

"My holy book says so" is not fact-based reasoning.

evolved in multiple species using multiple methods happened? ... I'd like to understand how that's possible.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=evolution+sexual+reproduction , Wikipedia: "Sexual reproduction first appeared by 1200 million years ago in the Proterozoic Eon. All sexually reproducing organisms derive from a common ancestor which was a single celled eukaryotic species"

Riddle me this: there are 100,000 known fragments of viruses in the human genome, making up over 8% of our DNA. Virus copies are also found in chimp DNA. Why would a creator insert broken copies of viral DNA into his creations? I've never heard a good creationist explanation for that.

How about the fact that average brain size is shrinking over time?

Gallup and a few others have consistently gotten numbers between 40-48% for this data, but for reasons I don't fully understand, CBS polls on the same issue get slightly higher results. They get routinely in the 50-55% range http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-965223.html. I'm not sure why this discrepancy exists, but it isn't a single yearly issue and it doesn't seem to be connected to how the questions are phrased, which suggests there's some more subtle issue going on.

The data for both this years Gallup poll and previous years does show some fairly predictable patterns. For example, by most of the previous polls, around 60% of Republicans are Young Earth Creationists while a little under 40% of Democrats are Young Earth Creationists. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. This should not however be taken as general evidence that Republicans or conservatives are dumb or uneducated. The GSS as part of their regular survey does a set about general science knowledge, and that data suggests that when not asking questions about evolution or age of the Earth, progressives and conservatives look very similar, and there's some evidence that the people with the least science knowledge are self-identified moderates http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/03/the-republican-fluency-with-science/ although exactly what is going on is not clear. http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2011/04/political-affiliation-and-scientific.html. This is part of a general trend which suggests that moderates in the US are often not very well informed.

Also, while Gallup says that the fraction of people who reject evolution has stayed roughly constant, there's a potentially more interesting trend in the data, over the last 30 years there's been a steady increase in people who say that evolution occurred with God taking no part in the process. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108226/Republicans-Democrats-Differ-Creationism.aspx. Most of that is movement not from the strict creationists but from a reduction in the size of the group that thinks that evolution happened with God guiding it. This may reflect the general decline of the moderately religious, especially so called "mainline Protestants" or it may be due to other effects such as general increases in partisanship.

In fact, there is recent work described in this months Discover about using proteins produced by pythons (and no not the language) to renew and strengthen damages hearts.

Simple, money and political ties talks. Aspartame sat sidelined by the FDA because of tests showing it was a carcinogen and neurotoxin. Rumsfeld was put in as CEO and he used all his political ties to get it approved. The company was later bought out by.. Monsanto. We have Monsanto to thank that huge percentages of crops are all genetically modified. Since recent studies show that you are what you eat and food RNA can effect your genes the entire genetic modification of base food crops is a little worrying. Millions of years of symbiotic evolution is being altered in ways not even fully understood yet. I'm all for scientific advances but rushing to market and forcing this down people's throats is not a good attitude.

Percentage of Genetic Modified Crops

• Soybeans (Herbicide resistant gene taken from bacteria inserted into soybean)- 93% US, 77% world
• Corn/Maize (New genes, some from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, added/transferred into plant genome.) - 86% US, 26% world
• Squash (Contains coat protein genes of viruses.) - 13% US

I happen to know one of the authors of the paper, and she was herself rather frustrated about exaggerations and misinterpretations she is seeing of her work in 'journalistic' literature.

She pointed to what she feels is a much more relevant summary of the paper here : http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/05/04/a-duplicated-gene-shaped-human-brain-evolution%E2%80%A6-and-why-the-genome-project-missed-it/

The "Other Planets are Heating up too" hypothesis has been debunked:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/04/29/is-global-warming-solar-induced/

But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching to LED lights and turning down the thermostat. Politicians never fix anything.

From your blog post:

Mars: To start, is Mars even warming globally at all? Perhaps not — it might be a local effect.

Jupiter: The evidence for Jupiter’s global warming is nothing of the sort. It is evidence that there are warm spots, with storms rising to the tops of the clouds. This may just be a local effect, and not global.

Therefore it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between factors like the Sun warming up Triton anomalously, or just the usual changes in the moon due to seasons.

As for tiny Pluto, its dynamics are very poorly understood. What we do see is that its atmosphere appears to be thicker than expected right now. Pluto doesn’t have much of an air blanket, and it changes over the course of Pluto’s orbit as the tiny iceball approaches and recedes from the Sun. Pluto reached perihelion, the closest point in its orbit to the Sun, in 1989, and is slowly drawing away again. You might think its atmosphere would start freezing out, getting thinner. But that’s not happening; it’s getting quite a bit thicker.
However, this is not totally unexpected. Changes are not instantaneous, and it may take a while for things to thaw.

The BLOG post you linked to is full of "may be" and we don't know. He consistently claims there is no warming, then claims that we don't know what's causing the warming. For example, on Jupiter he claims that there is no evidence for warming and then in the same paragraph claims that the warming may be local. Again, MAY BE local. And if there is no evidence of warming, what local warming is he talking about?

Finally, he pulls a classic fallacy of "Poisoning the well":

And the guy who is proposing that the Sun is warming Mars doesn’t think CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

OK, so he doesn't think that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. What does that have to do with his ability to judge the temperature on Mars? Also, it's not true. What the article your blog used as a source said was, "Heading Pulkovo's space research laboratory is Dr. Abdussamatov, one of the world's chief critics of the theory that man-made carbon dioxide emissions create a greenhouse effect, leading to global warming." and "It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations." So, it's not that he doesn't believe CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but he questions the source of CO2 and its overall effect.

I have an open mind and take an agnostic approach to AGW. Unfortunately, I see a whole lot more BS coming from the global warming crowd. Take this gem, from the EPA itself:

Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9-15 years. Methane is over 20 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year period

Am I the only one who fails to see the massive logic fail in that statement? If methane only lasts for 9-15 years, how is more effective at trapping heat over a 100 year period?

But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching

The "Other Planets are Heating up too" hypothesis has been debunked:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2007/04/29/is-global-warming-solar-induced/

But, until the engineers get involved on a real fix I wouldn't bother changing your lifestyle, other than maybe switching to LED lights and turning down the thermostat. Politicians never fix anything.

Studies suggest that one of the defining characteristics being used by boards to select CEOs in in fact height--Yes, how "tall" someone is. I imagine other factors such as hairstyle, teeth, and charm are being applied as well because I see no other reason for the modern day plague of vapid and incompetent CEOs, and the associated layers of equally useless senior managers.

The problem is not restricted to management either. Boards too seem to have become saturated with unqualified socialites, often from unrelated industries or even unrelated fields like academia, selected for personal or political connections rather than for any actually relevant competencies.

Um NO the studies don't suggest that a CEO is selected because of his height correlation != causation. It could be that tall people are biased into a leadership role by society giving them more confidence to be leaders and thus succeed, but the study in no way implies boards choose the tall guy over the short guy. Political connections are worth a lot to companies securing loans, tax incentives, government contracts, ... all are much easier with political contacts, It's no coincidence that Michael Obama went from a 100k salary to 300k salary right after her husband became a Senator, and her position went unfilled after she left.

The real problem in business is in fact CEOs, other executive managers, and the methods that are being used to select them. CEOs have devolved into grossly overpaid playboys with no responsibilities towards shareholders, customers, or indeed the company itself.

We are witnessing not just companies, but entire industries collapse before our eyes. Multinational firms, once immensely profitable, are being driven into stagnation, decline, and ultimately bankruptcy with each passing year. Excuses such as "globalisation", foreign competitors, and "government" are always trotted out, but no-one every really asks serious questions about the management of these companies, or why they spent increasingly large amounts on executive remuneration even as became less profitable.

Studies suggest that one of the defining characteristics being used by boards to select CEOs in in fact height--Yes, how "tall" someone is. I imagine other factors such as hairstyle, teeth, and charm are being applied as well because I see no other reason for the modern day plague of vapid and incompetent CEOs, and the associated layers of equally useless senior managers.

The problem is not restricted to management either. Boards too seem to have become saturated with unqualified socialites, often from unrelated industries or even unrelated fields like academia, selected for personal or political connections rather than for any actually relevant competencies.

But ultimately, I place the blame on shareholders and investors. They are the ones who ultimately approve the appointment of the unqualified, unsuitable, unethical, and incompetent CEOs currently wrecking companies left and right. If their definition of "business savvy" means knowing which designer suits to wear and looking good at press conferences, then they deserve to lose their money and the company deserves to fail.

Any competent CIOs and other such employees should not waste their lives in unprofitable asylums, instead should busy themselves setting up their own company which they can then run like an actual business instead of a office pantomime.

The scientific quality of WG2 is unfortunately rather low

Thanks for your blithe dismissal of that, but I think the many climate experts and scientific bodies who contributed to and reviewed it have a more credible opinion.

it's easier to just quote some scientists who are typically described as skeptics [wsj.com]

Well, if that's your best source for your opinions, it's no wonder you're labouring under this misapprehension. Maybe you should be listening to actual climate scientists? Or if you just want to see a bunch of signatures, try this letter, signed by 255 scientists.

If you want us to believe that WG2's conclusions are inaccurate and can be safely ignored, you're going to need much more credible evidence than that.

That doesn't explain why so many of the Republicans candidates disagree with basic science.

I give up. This is clearly something beyond the comprehension of your tiny white brain.

What you're implying is wrong in so many ways, I don't know where to start. But how about this: the gene is more prevalent in blacks than whites. Mod parent racist.

Whoooosh!

No gene for you!

What you're implying is wrong in so many ways, I don't know where to start. But how about this: the gene is more prevalent in blacks than whites. Mod parent racist.

i. e. http://mmmgroup2.altervista.org/e-trees.html While I guess that these are just "dendritic structures", I wonder if there were later any better close-ups of them done by the orbiting satellites?

Dry Ice, formations made by super heated sand getting frozen.

http://discovermagazine.com/2001/nov/breakghost

Here is an article with one photo of the skull, at least. And this one shows the scientists reassembling the fossil like a jigsaw puzzle (and has an interesting writeup in general).

Here is an article with one photo of the skull, at least. And this one shows the scientists reassembling the fossil like a jigsaw puzzle (and has an interesting writeup in general).

So what? We already know those numbers are wrong and they were wild guesses at the time they were made.

The problem is that every single one of those numbers where we've been able to confirm it was wrong moves in one direction, and not the direction of making intelligent life less common.

Our telescopes aren't that good. A Dyson sphere, especially a red-shifted one is going to be practically invisible in most of the spectrum we observe at.

In order to be in equilibrium a Dyson sphere needs to be putting out as much energy as the star itself would, but red-shifted. We should be able to detect that. There's in fact a project specifically to search for them http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm. Further discussion here- http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/12/02/no-dyson-spheres-found-yet/. The project in question by 2010 had searched systematically for Dyson spheres or partial Dyson spheres within 300 parsecs (around 1000 light years), primarily using data from IRAS which is almost 20 years old. Other projects have tried to look further out. Spitzer time isn't being directly devoted to this, but it is sensitive enough that if there were any Dyson spheres that went across its field of view out to the edge of our galaxy they likely would have been noticed, and similar remarks are potentially true for nearby galaxies.

Not sure why this should be surprising. Someone has to be first and it may well be us.

Sure we could be first, and someone has to be. But that's not likely, since we've arrived on the scene very late as far as we can tell.

Excerpt from the leaked Heartland Institute documents:
"[Dr. Wojick's] effort will focus on providing curriculum that shows that the topic of climate change is controversial and uncertain – two key points that are effective at dissuading teachers from teaching science."
source.
That certainly sounds to me like a symptom of the anti-intellectual disease that is eating away at conservative support for science.

Strongly disagree. It very much is in the surprising category. Back of the envelope calculations made fifty years ago suggested that life and intelligent life should be much more common than they are. (That's why this is the Fermi question, he did essentially make a Fermi calculation). Since Fermi's time, the situation, if anything has gotten more extreme not less so. We know that planets are common, and planets in the habitable zone are not rare See for example, this estimate that gives that about a third of sun-like stars have planets in the habitable zone http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1109/1109.4682v1.pdf. While there's some criticism of that estimate http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/09/29/new-study-13-of-sun-like-stars-might-have-terrestrial-planets-in-their-habitable-zones/ even critics agree that that's about the right order of magnitude. . And that's just sun-like stars. This is part of a much larger pattern where stable, Earth-like conditions are increasingly common. For example, for a long time, it was claimed that an Earth-like planet would need a large moon to stabilize the climate and weather enough for life but we now know that that's probably not the case http://www.universetoday.com/91331/life-on-alien-planets-may-not-require-a-large-moon-after-all/. Recent work suggests that red dwarf stars have much broader habitable zones than previously thought http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228374.400-most-common-stars-are-more-lifefriendly-than-thought.html. And all of this is just for Earth-like, carbon-based life operating at temperatures close to those we are used to.

We also shouldn't expect intelligent life to be at or near our own tech level. As a species we are very young. The probability that other intelligent life if is out there is at our tech level is small. If humans are any indication, species which form civilizations can likely take to the stars in the blink of an eye as far as age of stars are concerned. Let's use a hypothetical examples. Humans as a species have been around for around million years (there are definitional issues but this seems like an ok approximation). Now, even if it took another 3000 years to develop effective interstellar travel, that's still about the same amount of time. Traveling then at about a thousandth the speed of light, that would take around 10 million years to spread through the Milky Way. So if intelligent life even remotely like us is out there, we should expect it to have already spread out. But we don't see that.

At a related level, we see no indication of large scale engineering projects. We see no Dyson spheres, or Matrioshka brains or anything else that would be visible to us through our telescopes. And this applies not just to our own galaxy but to neighboring galaxies such as Andromeda. The entire universe looks to our eyes completely natural. And note that while humans have only come up with a few ideas for stellar engineering and similarly largescale projects, we've only been thinking about it for fifty years. This strongly suggests that there are no old civilizations in our neighboring galaxies. Put all of that together and you get that at a galactic level, there's no signs of intelligent life in our entire local cluster. That should be shocking.

In all scientific fields, some theories are more supported by facts than others, thus they are more likely than others.

This is also the case for astronomy.
Here is an example where those who choose to ignore mountains of facts in order to deny the most supported theories are called deniers by astronomers:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/09/im-skeptical-of-denialism/

I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.

Is Slashdot the official discussion board for your site? Not that I mind the stories, but these days every time I see something interesting on your site, I say to myself "that will be on Slashdot tomorrow".

I've received some nice pictures of the galaxy+SN which I just posted to the blog as well. Looks like this is a Type II, the explosion of a massive star at the end of its short life.