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Not just Americans, but most people across the world don't believe in evolution.

Got any proof? Because I've got some that shows you're wrong. Link.

Citation?

And next thing you know there will be patents on human genes. Oh wait a minute, we already have those too.

Patents on human genes

The latest issue of National Geographic has a good article on this (it's also online).

If you look at the Energy Balance tab, I'll gladly take cellulosic ethanol over biodiesel any day.

And any ethanol, regardless of production method, needs a retail path to be of any use. The market for corn-based ethanol we're developing now can be shifted over to cellulosic ethanol when the technology becomes feasible.

While each acre of corn produces around 300 gallons (1,135 liters) of ethanol a year and an acre of soybeans around 60 gallons (227 liters) of biodiesel, each acre of algae theoretically can churn out more than 5,000 gallons (19,000 liters) of biofuel each year.

Various sources talk about 18 villages that have "disappeared" on these Satellite images and 30 new ones around a Military Base as "proof" for forced relocations.

How can this be proof of anything? Just a reminder, Myanmar has a population of a little less than 50 million people. The only pictures I've seen (here and here) show villages of maybe five houses in the middle of a wood, so these 18 villages could've simply been abandoned. Sources speak of burnt down ruins... but is it really that far fetched to assume there might be accidental fires involved? After all Myanmar population is said to live a quite backward style of living (and that being the Military Regimes fault).

If the pictures that are public are the best evidence they have then I'd be highly critical of using them as a base for any kind of punishment (the fact aside that sanctions won't hurt anyone than the population).

National Geographic has a small copy of one of the images: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070928-burma-satellite.html

First they say that germs from space will cause us to get sick. Then they tell us that it's just the ground water http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/070921-meteor-peru.html. Now they're telling us deadly germs from earth taken to space. Geez....

it's entirely possible, even believing the worst-case warming trends, that it may actually save lives (because of fewer cold-related deaths) and make things better overall.

At the least what you'd be doing is exchanging deaths from the cold to heat deaths. However you're actually doing much more, higher temperatures allow disease and virus vectors to travel farther. Take malaria, carried by mosquitoes they don't go too far north or too high in altitude because of the cold. However rising temps allow mosquitoes to go further north and higher in altitude thus spreading malaria further. Then there are other problems as well, for instance science studies have shown that Poison Ivy grows faster and becomes more potent with higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Or take freshwater, many people depend on seasonal melting of glaciers for fresh water supplies. Normally during winter rain and snowfall would replenish the glacier, however as it warms while the ice melts faster and faster, there's less rain and snow to replenish the water source. This is becoming a problem in Africa as Mount Kilimanjaro's Glacier Is Crumbling. Countries in the Andes of South America are starting to experience the same problems. Bolivia gets a lot of water from glaciers. And in Peru one of the major cities, I don't recall which one right now, gets almost if not all of it's fresh water from a glacier. When those glaciers are gone there goes fresh water supplies for hundreds of millions of not billions of people. Heck melting glacier in the Himalayas threatens to wipeout entire villages.

Yes, a lot of the price is in the initial capital, not in the marginal cost, and thus will fade out if (not when) they send enough people up to cover it. But it still will not be cheap enough for a mere millionaire.

A million bucks is not what it used to be, and the vast majority (much more than 99.9%) of those 9.5 million millionaires still would be unable to afford such a trip. Simply flying up to the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is well beyond the vacation budget of most people whose net worth just grazes the 1 million line (which accounts for most of the people officially classified as millionaires). One company (Space Adventures) that has been trying to develop space tourism to the moon (just a flyby, no landing) estimates that the cost will be around $100 million a seat, which isn't pocket change for the vast majority of millionaires (or even billionaires). I guess some of those with net worths with 11 digits might be able to afford such a trip, but at last count there were only 67 of them. And most of them are far too old to be able to go on such a trip. Assuming 10% of them can and want to make the trip and you send up 2 a year (one annual trip with a capsule that fits two plus a pilot, I have no idea how you are expecting to send up 10 every week), your company will run out of customers after only 3 years. Great way to make headlines, but not a very solid business plan.

Well, given that I'm not a zoologist, probably "talking out the arse" is a more apt description than "educated guess". So take it with more than a grain of salt.

That said, if the above paragraph didn't drive you off yet, there have been studies exactly on this domain. I didn't keep a list of links, being that I just read a ton of unrelated stuff and just rely on memory from that point, but some quick googling turns up quite a few links on animal vision and camouflage.

E.g., This one seems to discuss just that, and even says that patterns evolve and are optimized by natural selection. It give the zebra's stripes as an example of disruptive camouflage right in the first column. (As opposed to cryptic camouflage, where the animal tries to blend in the background by imitating the background pattern.)

The fact that the mammal eye (including human) is pretty much hard-wired to detect edges, is well known. I'm too lazy to search for a more authoritative source, so Wikipedia. The key paragraph there is "Spatial Encoding". Each photoreceptor is physically wired to inhibit the surrounding ones, so basically large patches of exactly the same colour will produce very little signal, if at all, while the edges will produce the most.

We also know that various animals (A) have a lot less bandwidth for transmitting the result to the brains, so the image will be much more aggressively reduced to edges. (E.g., IIRC a hamster has about 10 times less bandwidth than a human.) And/or (B) have various adaptations to recognize certain patterns, sometimes as early as the eye itself. (E.g., it seems that a frog's eyes and optic nerve actually have separate data channels for "there's probably an edge here" and "there's something moving here" (a.k.a., the "bug detector".) See a summary for example, here. Not a primary source, but it nails it pretty well and gives you some names to search for if you feel so inclined.) And/or (C) actually respond differently to different patterns and shapes. (E.g., the thing I mentioned about birds recognizing foes by eye position was actually an experiment in seeing how they react to various artificial heads.)

The idea that primate evolution was at least partially driven by the need to recognize snakes, is from a recent news piece that appeared all over the net a while ago. Among other places, you can see it on National Geographic.

Well, you get the idea. It's not _my_ guess, I know I've read it and various other bits before in various places, but, well, my memory has been known to fail before. So take it with a grain of salt and do your own search :)

Is the information from all these various probes being shared or is each nation building up its own little pool of data?

Agriculture is probably humanity's most powerful invention, and why hasn't it turned on us to kill us? Because we control it? Or is it simply because it helps us and that is what it's primary purpose is?

Unfortunately, it seems to have partially backfired in the last century both in dietary and land use terms.

No sooner would your spreadsheet application spontaneously become a 3D game engine than an intelligence designed for help spontaneously become a harmful entity.

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." -- Louis D. Brandeis

Intelligence is not wisdom. Perhaps an exponentially higher intelligence might consistently find wisdom, but for now the two seem to be orthogonal.

Perhaps the best argument for the singularity is that we're apparently screwed without it, so better to jump into the unknown than stay on our apparently screwage-bound course.

A hell of a lot more cheaply, too.

There are people who are training hound dogs to detect cancer in people.

The dogs are better suited to the task than some million dollar laser beam.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/08/08 20_040820_detectordogs.html

Dogs are cheaper to train and maintain. And, they provide therapy for those who are proven positive.

It's win-win.

I already gave my DNA to the National Geographic Genographic project. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

Think of it as evolution in action. There is no correlation between 'media personality' and 'intelligent', despite what tabloid readers seem to believe. One more reason for me to wonder why we have various concerts, etc., which are purported to support one thing or another.

Perhaps we're getting beyond this, as a couple of events this year have fallen pretty flat. Personally, I don't feel the need to hear about the latest lunacy of slut du jour, musicians deploying the Single Name PR Strategy (Sting, Madonna, Bono), or even OSS folk (media stars in a small world) who deploy the initials or login strategy (RS, ESR).

Even in the rare case of people of this ilk actually having something meaningful to say, they tend to not be people that I'd want to be trapped in an elevator with. I'm a Linux and BSD guy, so it's somewhat hard to admit that last. But truthfully, I'd sooner be trapped in an elevator with Bill Gates than Richard Stallman or Eric Raymond. I already get the advantages of the approaches preached by the last two, but Gates could at least tell me things I definitely don't know about the threat of malaria as an endemic disease. http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0707/featur e1/

I could have sworn I heard about something like that somewhere before...

If they say they don't believe in evolution... in my books they already look bad. But not being American I don't count. And this makes sense in a way as most Americans don't believe in evolution. This is another of those things that help explain to the world how the U.S. could elect George Bush. This is not meant as a 'dig' or troll. Where most of the people in other developed countries believe in evolution, and believe correctly that most of the people in other developed countries believe in evolution, it doesn't hold true with America and Americans (glad to see that Americans hang in there solidly with the Turkish educational system when it comes to biology... now that is a 'dig'). And the rest of the world doesn't understand that, since their only view of America is through (mostly) Los Angeles and New York based media outlets.

Read http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/09 19_walkingwhale.html and you have your "smoking gun", just as you requested.

Well, actually its a whale with legs, but it may convince you anyway.

Compare two hypotheses: (1) Global warming is primarily caused by the sun, cosmic rays, or some other external factor. (2) Global warming is primarily caused by humans. (Yes, there are other possible hypotheses.)

If hypothesis 1 is right, you would expect most of the planets to be showing warming over any small period of time. If hypothesis 2 is right, you would expect approximately half of the other planets to be showing warming (and the other half to be showing cooling). Unfortunately, with 7 other planets, it's hard to rely on the law of large numbers to distinguish between these two hypotheses. (If you got 5 heads out of 7 coin flips, would you assume the coin was biased? The only thing you could say for certain was that heads weren't on both sides of the coin.) Of course, we don't even have data from all 7 of the other planets for a small period of time.

Global warming theories aren't based merely on the correlation between increased CO2 and increased temperature. They're based on fundamental science and complicated models. The fundamental science has been known for over 100 years - complicated models weren't necessary for that. The complicated models are necessary to determine the scope of the greenhouse gas phenomenon (feedback cycles, etc., are non-linear and hence can be very difficult to predict with detail). These models have actually done a pretty good job, and they're getting better. Some people are actually saying now, "In 20 years, this warming will be over, and then the scientists will see how wrong they are." Some people were saying that 20 years ago, too.

This technology is better suited for underwater research instead?

while there may be laws, rampant corruption renders them useless.

Some, good reading here:

http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/featur e4/

• Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea.
• The north pole is melting.
• Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate.
• This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures.
• Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans.

Now, it might be reasoned that the Earth is warming naturally and that humans can't possibly effect such a change on the environment. If you believe this, I have a bridge in Minnesota to sell you. Have you been to China lately? There, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize, they have churned up so much dust and smoke so as to make most of the air unbreathable. When on travels north from Beijing to Badaling (where the Great Wall is up in the mountains), the smog is so bad it makes LA at rush hour look like heaven.

The examples I have listed above are all things which have not happened in the last several thousand years (esp. the one about the ski areas :-) ) In some cases, one must go back tens of thousands of years to see such large scale changes in the environment. It may be that it's part of the natural cycle. However pundits on this side of the issue have yet to prove that they understand the ice age any better than those on the side of climate change. However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems, and the rapid industrialization of the world is contributing to the CO2 that's out there.

In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.

• Ice shelves in the arctic are breaking up and falling into the sea.
• The north pole is melting.
• Glaciers all around the world are receding at an alarming rate.
• This has led a number of ski areas to fear for their futures.
• Indonesia's islands are being submerged by the rising oceans.

Now, it might be reasoned that the Earth is warming naturally and that humans can't possibly effect such a change on the environment. If you believe this, I have a bridge in Minnesota to sell you. Have you been to China lately? There, in an attempt to rapidly industrialize, they have churned up so much dust and smoke so as to make most of the air unbreathable. When on travels north from Beijing to Badaling (where the Great Wall is up in the mountains), the smog is so bad it makes LA at rush hour look like heaven.

The examples I have listed above are all things which have not happened in the last several thousand years (esp. the one about the ski areas :-) ) In some cases, one must go back tens of thousands of years to see such large scale changes in the environment. It may be that it's part of the natural cycle. However pundits on this side of the issue have yet to prove that they understand the ice age any better than those on the side of climate change. However, climate scientists *have* shown that increased CO2 can lead to warming in all kinds of closed systems, and the rapid industrialization of the world is contributing to the CO2 that's out there.

In short, if you don't trust the computer models which nobody sees as perfect, don't bury your head in the sand. Look around with your own eyes and you will see that there's tons of other evidence that the world is changing.

Never mind the fact that scientists are witnessing ice shelves in Antarctica falling into the sea. Or that the North Pole is melting so that there will soon be a North-West Passage which Canada is laying claims to. Or that much of the global warming data does not come from NASA. Or that ski areas in the Alpsare going out of business. Or that there is glacial melting everywhere.. Or that Indonesia's islands are being submerged by rising sea level. Call me a deluded, but it seems that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of these so called "global warming" fanatics.

Never mind the fact that scientists are witnessing ice shelves in Antarctica falling into the sea. Or that the North Pole is melting so that there will soon be a North-West Passage which Canada is laying claims to. Or that much of the global warming data does not come from NASA. Or that ski areas in the Alpsare going out of business. Or that there is glacial melting everywhere.. Or that Indonesia's islands are being submerged by rising sea level. Call me a deluded, but it seems that the preponderance of evidence is on the side of these so called "global warming" fanatics.

As has previosly been mentioned : http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/04 23_030423_crowtools.html

Crows have been observed to construct tools as well. In fact, they fashion more complex tools than chimps. They've learned different designs by copying other birds, and they pass their tool-building knowledge down through the generations.

Tool construction and use is not a uniquely human trait, it's not even unique to primates.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/08/07 0806-humans-asia.html

Breathe a sigh of relief! Europeans aren't descended from filthy niggers but intelligent and cultured Asians who have no compunction about devaluing the dollar by liquidating their foreign assets 900 billion of which are USA money.

Here's some:

http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=44
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/07 0308-asteroids_2.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117854.700 -will-we-catch-a-falling-star-there-are-many-aster oids-outthere-in-space-and-the-chances-are-that-so oner-or-later-one-will-head-forearth-but-no-one-kn ows-what-to-do-if-we-find-ourselves-on-collision-c ourse.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/fl_side2_020 901.html
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=79899200 2
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/415367.html
http://www.sciencebits.com/PlanesAndMeteorites

Not sure how your lottery analogy applies. The nasa article sums up your logical fallacy: "The perception of risk from impacts is smaller than for being killed in a plane crash because planes crash at a steady rate with (relatively) few deaths per event, whereas lethal impacts are rare but kill a lot of people. At the very least, the potential consequences of impact are large enough to cause concern."

Drive to the top of Mt. Wilson above LA, there are a zillion transmitting towers. The TV towers each put out hundreds of kilowatts of rf. If the birds and squirrels up there are doing ok, then it is hard to understand how a cell tower could cause problems.

Despite Mutations, Chernobyl Wildlife Is Thriving

"In Italy around 40 percent of the barn swallows return each year, whereas the annual survival rate is 15 percent or less for Chernobyl," Mousseau said.

Conclusion: Wildlife bounces back, breeds quickly, and is perfectly willing to live in an area where more than half of their population dies of various radiation-related issues every year. Nobody's claiming that TV towers are anywhere near that deadly (even the tinfoil hat people), and therefore the existence of birds and squirrels near TV towers means approximately zero.

Personally, I agree that these people are crazy. But your logic in proving them so is horribly, horribly flawed.

Trainable? Nowadays you just need controllable:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/05 01_020501_roborats.html

Responds fairly predictably to pain/pleasure and various stimuli = controllable.

https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/

It's both. There is toxic algae,"red tide", that can poison fish directly, but too much of non toxic algae that dies strips dissolved O2 out of the water fast as it decomposes and can kill fish. It's a big problem right now, several areas around the planet are experiencing it. Not just limited to a few isolated little mudpuddles or anything like that, it goes right to big areas of the open ocean.

Here is one reference the gulf dead zone

Strange that he would come back in robot form and his mom would come back in shark form. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/07 0524-shark-virgin.html

they aren't exempt from anything, they merely got permision to use the maximum level allowed.

i don't see the issue unless you are planning on swimming right beside the outlet pipe. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0209/featu re2/online_extra.html

people USE 2.4 billion gallons a DAY and it doesn't even make a dent in the lake, so you can imagine the bullshit tiny % of pollution a few thousand pounds makes. I'd bet money animals and humans contribute more pollution to the river in the form of urine per day.

so why don't you all try and have some perspective for once and not jump on the "omgz the evil corperation is killing the world" bandwagon.

Links:

• Information about mammoth tusks.
• Mammoth tusks for sale for up to $16k each.
• Article on the possibility of cloning mammoths.

Probably no clones, but this will still give researchers a wealth of information. It's very likely the genomic DNA can be sequenced, maybe even fully. There was one study that was able to sequence the genomic (as opposed to the much more resistant mitochondrial) DNA of two 40 000 YO cave bears. It could also be that in the future we will be able to clone just from the sequence information, although this would be quite some time away.

What bothers me most about this exercise in ignorance and faulty logic is the absolute confidence of it's absurd assertions.

All suicide bombers are islamic men? Except for the women, increasing in numbers: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/12 13_041213_tv_suicide_bombers.html
Oh, and kamakazes in WWII - I don't remember Japan going Islamic.

Presidents, Vice Presidents, and Cabinet Members have more male children? Since most of them take office when their children are in at least their teens, it seems mighty foresightful of them to arrange this in advance.

Last I checked, you can't genetically inherit an acquired trait, but that doesn't seem to be a problem for the authors.

This isn't science. It's idle speculation by someone who read some science, once.

It's been "edited" by someone who didn't.

National Geographic reported a day later that the storms are not a threat: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/07 0706-rovers-dust.html.
--
Rent solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Very few women Muslims become bombers, and in virtually every case, the woman is given the ultimatum of either redeeming her family's honor (after she was caught having an affair or committing some other sexual trespass) by becoming a bomber, or die by honor killing.

"What we found in talking to the [bombers'] families and people in the community--and I want to limit this to the women whose stories we looked into--all of them had very traumatic personal stories and issues. Those things, combined with the horrors of living under occupation, could have provoked them to act.

"What kind of personal problems?

"One [terrorist], for example, was the first female suicide bomber in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, Wafa Idris. She was married off at a very young age and could not have kids. In that society a woman, a wife, who can't have kids is considered worthless. The husband [divorced Wafa and] married someone else and had kids with her.

"Wafa also worked with a humanitarian organization on the West Bank where she saw a lot of carnage [from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict]. You might say that she was a very depressed person."

National Geographic: Female Suicide Bombers: Dying to Kill

"Riyashi is hailed as a courageous resistance fighter among Palestinians throughout Gaza and the West Bank, but the truth about what drove her to such a terrible act is much more complex. Palestinians in Gaza and Israeli internal-security experts who studied the background of her case say Riyashi's husband had discovered that she was having an affair with a senior Hamas commander. Among conservative Palestinians, as in other parts of the Islamic world, an adulterous woman is often punished with death. Riyashi was given a second option: she could become a martyr.

"Behind the motives of religion and rage at Israeli occupation, Palestinian women, far more than men, tend to choose self-sacrifice as an exit from personal despair, while others are pushed into it for having broken taboos in strict Palestinian society."

Time: Palestinian Moms Becoming Martyrs

Save the birds and the bees!

The Egyptian fermentation process for beer also happened to generate tetracycline, an antibiotic.

Good link here

In 2003 the world was excited by stories about a process that changed any hydrocarbon into fuel. It was calculated that if all the agricultural waste in America was used, it would be unnecessary to import oil. Not only that but the process would be carbon neutral. For a variety of reasons, the process hasn't quite worked out. It appears to be marginally economical.

Given the above, I'm not very excited by the microwave process. It may work technically but it remains to be seen if it will work economically.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/11 25_031125_turkeyoil.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerizat ion

Of course, this comes with the "well that's f'n obvious" tagline of "The oldest penguin fossils yet found suggest that at least some ancestors of modern birds survived the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs." Duhh. They're here now, their ancestors must have survived.

You mean bones like the skull show in the very same photogallery as the artist's rendering? http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/ph otogalleries/giant-penguins/index.html

Pity that Saturn's rings turned out to be dust instead of ice bergs.

What are you talking about? Saturn's rings are a mix of dust and ice. They're more ice-enriched toward the outside and more dust/rock enriched toward the inside. The E-ring, for example, is almost pure ice, largely spewed forth from Enceladus.

I'm more curious about where they expect to get the water.

That is the rub, isn't it? No matter what, any terraforming organisms or other self-replicators are going to have to be very heavily engineered. They'll need to be able to live off ice, not liquid water. Furthermore, it's not normal photosynthesis that we want: we want them to use sunlight to split up minerals -- nitrates, carbonates, oxides, etc -- and release gasses from them. Mars needs more of an atmosphere. The problem gets still worse, though. In the process, they'd be creating a "food" source just waiting to be exploited -- metals that want to be oxidized. This is a tempting target for contamination and even for your terraformers themselves. You'd need to somehow engineer your terraformers to be effectively unable to mutate, and you'd also need either a way to control rogue bacteria or a way to sequester the unoxidized metals out of reach.

A sad fact of Mars is that there just isn't much CO2 there. All of those stories of terraforming involving melting the ice caps are just nonsense. The North Pole has one meter of winter dry ice. The South Pole has eight. That's it. There's huge, huge amounts of water ice at the poles, and subsurface in many other parts of Mars. But there's just not much CO2.

Whatever this Lowell Wood was smoking when he said that we need to get rid of *excess* CO2, I want some. Mars needs all the CO2 it can get. CO2 is poisonous to us, sure, but so mildly that people generally die of asphyxiation before CO2 poisoning if trapped in an enclosed space. Mars has enough problems on its own; worrying about reaching EPA guidelines isn't exactly our biggest problem. The worst problem a percent or two CO2 will cause is some acidosis (as for long-term effects, they may be minimized, as the body tends to compensate for respiratory acidosis after a few days). As for Mars' current atmosphere, it's only 0.007 atm CO2. That's richer than ours (0.0004 atm CO2), but still not some huge problem, and even meets EPA guidelines for long-term exposure (0.001 atm). Especially once plants kick in, CO2 simply won't be a problem.

Mars's problem is not what it has. It's what it doesn't have.