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That only works for the CDs that try to prevent you from ripping them by installing something via auto run when you put the CD in. The ones that violate the Red Book standards (invalid data tracks, bogus checksum data, whatever) are more sinister, and you might want to be careful about trying them on a Mac.

There was a comprehensive article on flow batteries in New Scientist a week ago (subscription only unfortunately). It said that flow batteries currently only have about half the storage density of lead acid batteries so right now there are better alternatives for vehicle applications. However they really shine for fixed locations that need to store large amounts of power such as wind farms. You can scale up the amount of storage capacity simply by adding additional chemicals and larger tanks.

But will you like knowing that you're on camera several hundred times a day (as is supposedly true for Englishmen today), monitored not just by a bored policeman but by software designed to identify people and suspicious behavior (eg. this story)? Considering the existing cameras with microphones, will you shiver when the machines call you by name and ask what you're doing? "Move along, citizen."

If we're to be monitored, we should be pushing to make sure that we have access, ourselves, to the surveillance network and that we're not shut out by laws "protecting privacy" from everyone but the government. This is the argument developed in Brin's The Transparent Society.

Check these out, they work locally too. I don't see how you would stop a flu with either unless you could irradiate the whole body and selectively kill the bad parts.

No, I meant more like these-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4097267. stm - Missle defence shield test fails
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/12/national /main666433.shtml - Missle defense fails again
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair09232006.html - Star Wars Goes Online...Crashes
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/824828.stm - Test failur fuels skepticism
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2924 - US missile defence test dodges decoys
http://www-tech.mit.edu/V125/N5/long4_5.5w.html - Missile Defense System Test Fails
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Second_U.S._anti-missi le_defence_system_test_fails -Second U.S. anti-missile defence system test fails

this is something that kills tumors in-vitro,

Actually, according to this more thorough article, the drug has also proven effective is mouse models.

Granted, this still isn't the same as a human trial, but it's a far cry from simply killing cancer in a petri dish.

As for the notion that the unwillingness to develop a drug in the absence of patent protection somehow is an argument against patents

Actually, it's more of an argument against privately funded drug development, as it's pretty clear that an unpatentable drug, no matter how effective, isn't useful to a company who's sole purpose is to make money.

here

-mcgrew (my computer is broken):

Here's the actual press release that appears to talk about the canyon policy. Reading through it, it looks like there's a bit of misunderstanding on who exactly is saying or not saying what (I don't think selling a creationist book means that if you ask a tour guide they have to tell you the canyon is 6000 years old). They do have links to letters and responses though, you can read them yourself. Other sources picked up their press release but don't mention anything about a ban on telling people how old the canyon is.

Do tour guides at the Grand Canyon take orders directly from the Federal Government

Why, as a matter of fact, they do. It's a national park, ruled by the National Park Service.

much less the Presidential Administration?

Mary Bomar, current director of the Park Service, was appointed by Bush and confirmed October 2006.

NASA recently got their budget put on hold instead of the 0.5 billion dollar increase they were supposed to get for 2007. I'm not sure who's to blame on this one, the Republicans for not pushing the budget through before the Democrats took power or the Democrats for holding to the 2006 budget for NASA for 2007. Either way, due to the loss in expected income for NASA, they are having to cut many of their planned expenditures and take short cuts on the projects they are still planning on doing.

There's an interesting article in the last issue of New Scientist, discussing work by physicist Gerard 't Hooft in refining his theory of a determanistic level of reality below quantum physiscs, from which the apparent randomness and Copenhagen state collape of quantum physics appears.

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/m g19025504.000

Maybe Einstein was right that "God doesn't play dice" (a rather misunderstood statement given that Einstein was an ardent aetheist).

Presumably efforts such as string theory to unite general relativity & quantum mechanics may be quite shaken up if this new theory is correct.

A Japanese Mars probe, originally timed to arrive with that of the NSA rovers and ESA Beagle limps through space. It ran out of fuel.

The Hayabusa asteroid probe probably landed on one and got a sample, failed on its return earth, schedued this summer. Bad computer programs and running out fuel is blamed.

Academic research in Japan is mostly on a shoestring budget, and I guess this is a result. I hope they keep on trying.

"Scientists have devised numerous possible explanations, including mini black holes left over from the Big Bang, but have had little success in producing working examples." Really? Hmm...

"Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Humboldt University, both in Berlin, have used underwater electrical discharges to generate luminous plasma clouds resembling ball lightning that last for nearly half a second and are up to 20 centimetres across."

Physicists create great balls of fire 07 June 2006

"Now, however, researchers in Israel have built a system that can create lightning balls in the lab."

Great balls of lightning 9 February 2006

I'm pretty sure that Dr. Pace VanDevender, Vice President Emeritus of Sandia National Laboratories, with a Ph.D. in physics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, counts as a scientist. He also has proposed singularities as the source of ball lightning, although he's not exactly confident (source requires subscription):

VanDevender himself knows it's on the wild side. "This is a long string of what-ifs," he admits, "it's very loosey-goosey." He reckons the odds of mini black holes existing are 1 in 10, the odds of catching one, maybe 1 in 1000, if he's optimistic. And that's what he wants to do: catch a black hole. "After stewing on it for years, I decided I did not want to die without knowing whether it was or was not real," he says.

That sounds like this New Scientist article:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/m g19225831.700

The same guy also talks about ball lightning due to neutrinos here:

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=88edua 1k

MRO has only been on station a few months, since March. Imaging these four American landers were probably higher priorities than older Soviet landers. One might also ask when we'll get images of the defunct Beagle 2 lander from the ESA's Mars Express mission. It died somewhere on descent.

Give JPL enough time, I'm sure they'll locate every little man-made scap we've placed on the surface of Mars.

Experiments have been conducted that measure it to be the speed of light.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3232

I don't understand why this is such big news. There are pictures of galaxies that go back to less than a billion years after the big bang, i.e about 13 billion years. Here's one: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4756. Now that is fricking amazing. There are better photos, I just did a quick Google to get this one.

When the light left those galaxies/quasars/whatever 13 billion years ago, the universe was much smaller than it is now. So that 13 billion light year radius sphere surrounding us was only a 500 million light year sphere at the time, yet the light has taken 13 billion year to get here. (Actually, the universe is not really a sphere. It's some warped dimensional thing that I can't possibly understand.)

So what's the big deal about 1 billion light years?

The article on New Scientist clearly states that the amniotic stem cells can be taken from the placenta after delivery and placed in cryogenic storage and then replicated easily within 36 hours to become a plentiful source of these cells....

So all the comments about the dangers of taking fluid during pregnancy are mis-informed based on the original link apparently... sounds like bias from cnn editors.

This is a great new discovery and should certainly be explored fully before being discounted because it doesn't involved the destruction of embryos to accomplish new science.

Galaxys clump more than they should or even form never mind keep their distinctive shape given the current theory of gravitation. Rather than update Newton they invent dark matter. There is also the case of that probe that is leaving the solar system faster that it should. Does dark matter account for that too. Why don't they just bring back the aether.

"Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) is a theory that explains the galaxy rotation problem without assuming the existence of dark matter"

"'Ether' returns in a bid to oust dark matter"

Storage space wise we seem to be getting there a couple of hd generations even if were not there yet (in terms of affordability). Brain has around 10^11 neurons (one terabyte is 10^12 bytes, SI standard). Each neuron can make connections to thousands or ten thousands other ones. Even with some clever mapping of connections I'm guessing we would need something in the petabyte scale. (Source for number of neurons and connections: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/brain/d n9969)

Then of course there's the question if having a brain mapped out on something as relativly slow as a hd cluster could be useful.

Funnily enough, I was just bitching about scientific faux pas in the mainstream media, but New Scientist?

New Scientist's response is just embarrasing. From editor Jeremy Webb (emphasis added):

"It is a fair criticism that New Scientist did not make clear enough how controversial Roger Shawyer's engine is. We should have made more explicit where it apparently contravenes the laws of nature and reported that several physicists declined to comment on the device because they thought it too contentious.

But should New Scientist should have covered this story at all? The answer is a resounding yes..."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10873-cheap- drug-dodges-big-pharma-patents.html

If you have a science article, why not link a science outlet? General news media generally get science wrong, and non-science reporters rarely understand the subject.

BBC is fine for stories about serial killers, unless the serial killer is a disease.

-sm62704

...is tasty!

In all seriousness, you make a good point. BSE was first spotted among the cannibals of Papua New Guinea (where eating of the dead was a sign of respect).

http://www.gwinnettdailyonline.com/GDP/archive/art icleEEF238D9C90E4B2989F5E473D3145A16.asp

Here are a ton of articles on BSE & vCJD:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/health/bse

That and this together could make for an interesting tent one day, amongst other things. Add in flexible displays etc and you could be applying for research grants from DoD and DHS. Portable command centers anyone? Portable geek huts?

There is a better article about COROT over at the new scientist web site. http://www.newscientist.com/home.ns

I wouldn't say that calling global warming 'highly doubtful' is inflammatory. While I have no doubt that continued destruction and pollution of our environment will have profound if not irreversable negative impact on our planet, attributing the sinking of an island to global warming is irresponsible journalism at best.

While ocean levels are rising around the world, Arctic levels are falling http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5076322. stm and the model predicting the globabl warming trend cannot explain why.

Another unexplained action is while consensus is that the planet is getting warmer and glaciers are melting, the Antarctic ice sheet - by far the biggest in the word is actually growing larger: http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Antarctic_Ice_She et.htm. Glaciers in California are also growing: http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14317368p -15234887c.html

Given that the Northern Hemisphere at least is getting warmer, this is not entirely a bad thing as the food growing season is longer, and the increased productivity is an economic boon. From this government report on climate change: http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalasses sment/overviewmidwest.htm "With an increase in the length of the growing season, double cropping, the practice of planting a second crop after the first is harvested, is likely to become more prevalent. The CO2 fertilization effect is likely to enhance plant growth and contribute to generally higher yields. The largest increases are projected to occur in the northern areas of the region, where crop yields are currently temperature limited."

But with the increase in global temperature, the worlds deserts would increase in size causing more environmental destruction you say? Not so - the Sahara desert, the largest desert in the world, is actually shrinking, again contrary to the global warming model. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17523610.300 -africans-go-back-to-the-land-as-plants-reclaim-th e-desert.html

So given all of these environmental observations (not minor discrepancies but huge anomalies) that are contrary to the global warming prediction, I think its perfectly acceptableto have doubts as to the actual cause of sinking islands.

Link

OK!

First is WMAP Cosmology 101: Big Bang Concepts. I think this page is reputable, because the domain is map.gsfc.nasa.gov. There are a few things about this link- First, it makes no real commitments to shape. It says it's possible that the universe has a more complex shape than "closed sphere, flat, or open," but it's unwilling to commit to anything. That said, it suggests flat, by pointing out that "If the density just equals the critical density, the universe is flat, but still presumably infinite. ... While the answer is not yet known for certain, [the average density of matter] appears to be tantalizingly close to the critical density."

Another important thing to note there, is that they use the terms "universe" and "visible universe" almost interchangably. (See, for example, the first paragraph under "The Origin of the Cosmic Microwave Background.") This jives with what Wikipedia says about "Observable universe:" "Both popular and professional research articles in cosmology often use the term "universe" to mean "observable universe"." I try not to use Wikipedia, but if it points out something that seems to agree with other websites, I conditionally take it. So: When they talk about the "size" of the universe, they almost always mean the size of the observable universe. (see also...)

Yet another thing to note here, is that it says that the universe doesn't necessarily start at a point. The Big Bang may have occurred everywhere. The "bang" is about the space that is appearing between all galaxies, not that the universe was first bound into a nutshell, and then exploded outwards. A picture I have made in my head, (which may reflect astrophysicists understand, which may not reflect astrophysicists understanding,) is that, plausibly, first there was stuff everywhere, infinitely, in all direction, but, that as time passed, "additional blank space" was put between all the things that exist. The entire observable universe came from just one small tiny dot of the stuff that is everywhere. The space that we see is mostly stuff that was added, since time began. So it's not so much that the universe started out small, and then grew large, as it is that the universe started out infinite, and that infinite universe is scaling outward, like scaling the real numbers out by some multiplier, over and over and over again. (Supporting link: "In this picture the Big Bang occurred everywhere."

Here's another website, on curious.astro.cornell.edu. Cornell "astro" .edu sounds reliable enough, to me. Sadly, this site is dated January, 1999.

Here's a 2006 educational publication, chapter 4 says that the universe is very nearly flat. This is typical of what I've seen on most sites. Note that in 5.1, he notes that the universe may be infinite; This, too, is fairly typical, in sites I see.

There are a number of newspaper articles, that have news of astronomers finding "hints" at one shape, or another shape, but there's nothing conclusive. In my experience, these articles are usually (A) confusing, and very likely (B) confused, and seem to be okay with that: "What will these wacky scientists come up with, next?" A funnel, a soccer ball, a pill, ...

When

by some more powerful equipment. From New Scientist Space: "Because Hubble's mirror is larger than Spitzer's, it turned up dwarf galaxies too faint for Spitzer to resolve. "Once we remove pixels in the Spitzer images corresponding to the locations of these galaxies, the background infrared light level mostly disappears," Cooray told New Scientist. 'We think, therefore, the infrared light seen in Spitzer images is mostly due to the faint infrared glow from these dwarf galaxies.'" The full article

Here are the real links that refer to today's media briefing:

ZDnet blog posting by Garett Rogers.
NASA's media advisory about today's media briefing (link via Gregg's blog post).
Article in New Scientist about Google and NASA's iEarth software (link via Gregg's blog post).

Start rant

The press release submitted by eldavojohn was issued on September 28, 2005! The media briefing hadn't even started when this posting was approved!

Attention slashdot "editors" -- the reason why you're losing mindshare to digg and other sites is for editing like this -- only a novice or clueless "editor" would get taken in by a bogus submission about a real event ocurring because they didn't trivally check its contents.

It's far too easy to slip things past slashdot's "editors", since a single "editor" can have the wool pulled over his eyes. Thus the surge in popularity of sites like digg, since (to build on esr's quote) Given enough eyeballs, all scams are transparent.

-- An unhappy long-time reader.

End rant

All the shiny white snow reflects heat back into space, trees in the north cause global warming.

.....Evolution is science.....

You wish it were so. Science is what can be experimentally determined in the lab or repeatedly observed and measured by anyone following the scientific method. First off what are your definitions of this thing called evolution? Is it the big bang? Is it the appearance of life from non-life? How about the progression from the goo by way of the zoo to you? Is that what you call evolution? The only kind of process that is also commonly called evolution is the FACT that bacteria, moths, birds and many other organisms can adapt to their environment. That is the ONLY facet of evolution that can be repeatedly duplicated and actually OBSERVED to be happening TODAY. That is what Darwin correctly observed and we still observe this today. Today's religion of evolution has been stretched far beyond what Darwin wrote in his seminal work, "Origin of the Species".

What really happened eons ago is pure conjecture and assumptions. There are many pseudo scientific words for faith or belief. I challenge you to open *any* so called scientific journal (dealing with origins) of any size at all and NOT find faith weasel words and phrases such as: If we assume; it is believed; speculates; the prevailing consensus is; could or may have; might be; thought to have; and other similar language whenever origins and the past are discussed. A sampling found all of the above expressions in many articles here:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dinosaurs

In science we want to deal with what we KNOW, and can repeatedly demonstrate, not what we believe or what could and might have been or not. When you show up in a court room, you will be asked what you personally witnessed. Nobody was there when the first reptile supposedly learned how to fly and then became a bird. Neither has anyone ever seen a transition creature between one kind of animal to another. Natural selection is a proven and observable mechanism. However it only works if there is already something to select for. Any animal breeder practices this selection process, but it has its limits beyond these processes cannot go. We can breed an almost unlimited variety of dogs, but they are still, every single one of them, without exception dogs. The same is true for other animal groups. Nobody has ever shown how new information can be generated by the sole interaction of energy and matter through time. All information ONLY comes from a mind. No body has ever shown otherwise.

This "opinion" was posted on NewScientist recently. I think everyone can understand the implications to scientific progress if research facilities, like Biologic Institute, actively approach research to justify ID or even just credibly question evolution.

Rulings, that in the past were decided because Intelligent Design had no empirical justification based on research, could easily become clouded and ambiguous if a real scientist testified he concludes from his research that evolution alone cannot explain biological processes (TFA exemplifies Dr. Douglas Axe as making such a plausible claim).

I read this article, recalled a similar "opinion" piece documenting ID in Home Schooling textbooks and wondered if this was the beginning of a new Dark Ages.

The biggest problems i believe to be in your country are not things that you can just toss some money at and expect everything to be fine, firstly you should probably ban creationist science and have it presented once a fortnight in a seperate class that has nothing to do with science, next you should probably watch the home schooling in your country and the perversion of the sciences within it (granted that a minority may be doing the right thing) but honestly with books in the system saying things like "Evolution is a concept that attempts to free man from God and his responsibility to his Creator." what do you expect other than that your leadership in the fields of science will be f**cked.

The following url is an article on the state of home schooling in your country.
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg1922 5776.100-homeschooling-special-preach-your-childre n-well.html

Not all scientists are convinced that it was actually water.
 
"Many scientists believe the gullies were carved by liquid water, although others have argued they are due to avalanches of carbon dioxide gas or rivers of dust," from The New Scientist.
 
  Also, here is the NASA release from their site.

October 2001:

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1470

http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg18925331.2 00

The above article at the above link has a quote indicating that physical constants may be different if one were to travel along the different dimensions described by Heim Theory. If that was the case, the speed of light may be raised and the trip to Pluto shortened. Note that this would not actually require traveling faster than light, just faster that light as measured in "our" vacuum.

Think of it as a real theory which predicts warp-drive-like effects.

Remember, Stephen Hawking's bet over whether one could trace the path of matter through a black hole? Steve said you couldn't track matter's course through the singularity, a competing physicist said you could.. fast foward a few years to Hawking hosting a big press event to report that he was wrong, and this other guy was able to prove it mathematically.

A FEW YEARS ? Try 30, that's thirty years that the wrong theory existed. He made that bet in 1997 and conceeded in 2004. Even that's not a few. That's several. Do we really need to wait until 2036 for a better theory, and for it to be accepted? Do we need to wait until 2011 for a scientist to be willing to admit (s)he's wrong about soemthing here? This strikes you as a good idea(tm) on which to base your argument? http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6193

Google have been doing this for a while now. Looks like there is a whole project being undertaken by Google, Amazon, MS.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7509

Polonium-210 is not a substance to mess with. Weight for weight it is 250 billion times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide. It is chemically poisonous and a potent source of alpha particles. As these collide with other particles they generate heat: 140 watts per gram of the isotope. In the body, energetic alphas smash up DNA and interfere with cell division. Just 120 nanograms can deliver a fatal dose of radiation.

"To make mathematical models of the star's interior tally with experimental data, physicists have to use a lower value of G than is traditionally agreed. Mbelek says his calculations predict that electromagnetism would not boost gravity as much at higher temperatures, so you would expect G to be lower inside the Sun.

Exotic physics

But other researchers are not convinced. Clifford Will, a gravity theorist at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, believes improvements in terrestrial experiments will eventually do away with the need for explanations that rely on such exotic physics.

"In many ways it's a scandal that we don't have an agreed value for G, but if you look at the experiments, the values have been converging," he says. "In five years or so, we'll have an agreed value."

But Mbelek does not think so. Although the precision of individual measurements is improving, he says, the values are not converging."

Also, if you do a search on "non-gravitational acceleration", you'll notice that comets too exhibit gravitational anomalies. Astrophysicists tell us that these anomalies are caused by jets of gas outpouring from the center of the comets, causing it to spin around and do strange things. But we've observed comets up close now on multiple occasions and these supposed "jets" are actually electrical machining -- the result of charge being stripped off of the comet as it enters an electric field. The Deep Impact mission confirmed this probably as much as it can possibly be confirmed. Without jets, there are still gravitational anomalies on comets -- just like the Sun. I recommend that you look at the Deep Impact results:
http://www.thunderbolts.info/pdf/ElectricComet.pdf

It's Gravity. Gravity gravity gravity.

August 2005
Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis...

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7915

As a healthy person approaching the half century I now have 30 years of memory of scientific facts that influenced policy and culture that turned out to be wrong (sometimes grossly so).

Facts are always correct. It's the *conclusions* people draw from the facts that are so often wrong.

"Dudley Goodhead, from the UK's MRC Radiation and Genome Stability Unit, agrees that the poisoning must have been "a high-tech operation". But he points out that, in one respect, it was "stupid" because it left such an easily detectable trail. Further analysis of the polonium, and any other associated isotopes, could provide important clues as to its origins, he says."

I got that from:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10668-exspys -polonium-poisoning-suggests-sophistication.html

My take is this:

-- Someone wanted him guaranteed D.E.A.D., DEAD! as in eRADicated...
-- Someone doesn't care that polonium would be detected or traced to the Sushi bar.

-- Someone knows that polonium is an emitter, but is so small they can pass it through airports undetected or virtually so

-- Someone wants to deliver a message that as long as polonium can be produced or stolen, NO one is safe if the server of the poison has access to the target's food or drink or to the target's supplier of food or drink

Those ideas being posited, I suspect that was some HOT Sushi. Maybe hotter than hot. I wonder how cold the Sushi chef's hands are anymore. I heard (well, in a Korean film) that women don't make good Sushi chef's because their hands are too warm. But, after handling or fearing having handled polonium such chefs might be a bit warmer than usual.

And, for some reason, I am thinking "Appolonia", that group from the 80's...

Since methane hydrates releases are still suspected in the sinking of ships, how do the researchers account for the loss of buoyancy? Since this research calls for redesign of current ship building know-how, how are they planning on addressing the buoyancy part of the equation? To read more check out this http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn1350 and http://jbj.wordherders.net/archives/000992.html someone trying to weaponize the buoyancy concept. http://www.nexusresearchgroup.com/fun_science/buoy ant1.htm A fun science experiment for the kiddies, or others that want to understand it better.

There is no reason to lament the fact that most Russians prefer to be bankers instead of cosmonauts. Russia is simply not at the right economic stage to splurge on space programs. During the Cold War, the Russians spent heavily on space projects, but that situation is due to government intervention (in the economy) against the will of the people. That intervention wrecked the economy.

When Russia becomes rich like the rest of the West, then the Russians will return to space. Given the the incredible accomplishments of Russian mathematicians, I expect that a Russian genius will decipher and advance the work of Burkhard Heim. In so doing, he shall develop the first working prototype of a warp drive. (The Americans have already developed phasers, which can be deployed on a jet fighter. Are the Japanese working on shields?)

However, that is just an illusion for now. Right now, we must concentrate on steering Russia towards developing a true democracy and a real economy not based solely on commodities. The current pathetic state of Russia is partially due to the shenanigans of the Harvard elite.

An older New Scientist article on a related technique reports 7 to 25 times less light reflected, compared to optical black paint. NS also reports on the current laser-based technology.

it doesn't explain why a lot of these formations have fossils in them. Either there was death during those 50 million years (perhaps limited to animals), which doesn't seem to make much sense, or those events happened after the fall.

It's amusing that you completely missed the simplest, most direct, and most obvious conclusion because you were trapped in the assumptions of a naturalistic worldview.

Just take your assumptions and simply accept and follow them. You assumed the fossil bearing geology formed over millions of years. Ok, accept the usual view on that accumulation.

And you assumed that all life was immortal and nothing died until the fall introduced death. Well ok, just accept that too.

And what do we have? The obvious direct situation that you didn't even notice you dismissed? We have all those live immortal animals buried in the rocks for millions of years, not dying until the fall introduced death.

Now some might object that animals obviously cannot live buried in rock for millions of years. Except we've already assumed that those animals will not and cannot die no matter what happens to them. Some might object that that is a violation of all natural laws. But we are already accepting and assuming that God can and does throw out or violate of all sorts of natural laws at will. Some might object that it makes absolutely no sense that God would leave living animals buried in rock for millions of years. But isn't the assumption already that God does all sorts of things in ways that make absolutely no sense to us? The whole "God works in mysterious ways" thing? If we were to reject things simply because they don't make much sense to our small minds, we'd have to throw out half the Bible.

Of course, that is all just arguing from your assumptions. I don't actually accept that whole everything-was-immortal bit. The majority of Christians in the world accept evolution and that God created a perfect and complete universe with perfect and complete natural laws and mechanisms to run that universe, and that evolution is the natural mechanism for creating the diversity of life just as the laws of optics are the mechanism for creating rainbows and that stellar nuclear fusion is the natural mechanism creating sunlight for the earth. The majority of Christians in the world do accept that humans evolved from earlier animals, as should be obvious this story. Out of 32 nations, the US came in second to last in a poll on that exact question, ahead of Turkey. Based on the percentages in that poll, and the overwhelming percentage of Christians in most of those countries, in most cases it is a mathematical certainty that over half of Christians in most of those countries accept that humans evolved from earlier animals. Globally that really is the majority Christian position. It really is a distinctly minority view attempting to place evolution in conflict with God.

-

Yet another slashvertisement for New Scientist claptrap. Will the pseudo science crap ever stop? If I wanted to read that shit I'd go there, PLEASE stop posting it here.

"New" Scientist? If this is the new science I don't want anything to do with it.

At least they do not claim to be scientists, just "New Scientists". New Scientist = euphemism for Pseudo Scientist.

Give us some real science please. You won't find it at New Scientist, nor will you find it in Nature.

You can find real science in publications like those overseen by the following organisations: ACS, RSC, AIP, IOP, AMS, Elsevier, etc., etc...

See the difference? Probably not...

I know a lot of Christians who seek to oppress their neighbors, as Christ didn't teach. You're lucky your experience has not been the same.

Yes, they even go so far as to try and claim our entire country was founded on their silly beliefs! Of course they don't know what to think when you point out that most of the important founding fathers of our country were either atheist or deists, and that many early documents from our government clearly state that it is NOT founded on any religion. For example the Treaty of Tripoli, which states "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion". No, historical documents clearly show that our founding fathers understood the need for a separation of church and state. Of course little things suchs a facts and the truth never seem to stop these religious idiots from spewing their slanted revisionist history view of things. But they are just flat out wrong and we have the papers to prove it! To bad they are all taught to ignore logic and reason, so good luck trying to convince them other wise.

I still find it hard to beleive that, in modern times, people can still be stupid enough to beleive in a god. Hasn't logic and reason PROVEN it self to you people enough yet? How many more inventions such as heated homes, cars, and computers, will it take before you people finaly admit that logic and reason are correct and faith is not? Your collective religions attempted to destory ALL human knowledge and science back in the dark ages. If your religious leaders had their way NONE of what you take for granted would exist right now! Honestly, I don't think people who beleive in god deserve to have ANY of these things! No modern convienences for you! You people tried to stop science from ever taking off, I don't think it's fair that you be allowed to continue promoting your stupid beleif systems while benefiting from the hard work people like my self are doing every day to further the causes of logic and reason and use them to improve our world. A chruch having a web site is THE most HYPACRITICAL thing I can think of! I mean, it took until 1992 for the catholics to finally understand that the earth is not flat and rotates around the sun. Faith is just pathetic...

...the gun that shoots around corners.