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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.

Anyone interested in education should look at what Finland has done. They're now top in the world education wise, spend 30% less on education than we do, have a student/teacher ration of 7 / 1 and only require 1 standardized test when they graduate. Why are Finalds Schools Successful. The teaching to the test, having a huge level of bureaucracy with the dept of education, and local teachers having absolutely no control over their students seems like it isn't working in the US.

I guess you could say places like Texas and Kentucky could have bible thumping no evolution courses if it was state level. But if the student fails the graduation required test that would help weed out the idiot teachings. Besides I went to a catholic school myself and we had an hour of religion class every day so it's already doable. (Although I was taught real science, no creationism)

Try argon or carbon dioxide. Both are heavier than air so will be easier to manage. They will naturally tend to flow down, like water. With a heavier than air gas, you can just pump it in, in a still air environment, using a best guess method to figure out when the container is nearly pure argon or CO2.

Carbon dioxide is (in)famous for this property in Africa. Volcanoes will belch out CO2 every so often and it accumulates in depressions in the ground, where animals and children can be overcome by it. Here's an extreme example of it.

Your links are a little dated since as of the most recent, dinosaur soft tissues have been discovered intact. Like T. Rexas blood vessels. See here. Granted it was only in 2006, but I was surprised none of the links were more recent.

While this particular discovery didn't provide us with DNA, it does give more hints to the biology of dinosaurs in light of the absense of DNA. Though not equivocal, still very important to our understanding, as some conclusions can be drawn from soft tissue structure.

Perhaps if the Indians had done the same to the Europeans right from the beginning (instead of handing them land), they would still control America.

The Natives did (here) (humorously here). As history has shown all this accomplished was delaying things. Also the Natives were in number compared to when the Europeans started colonizing the New World.

Notice how the europeans had zero success taking-over China despite repeated attempts..... because the Chinese rejected the invaders.

The greatest killer of all was disease, failure of their own immune systems. Disease wiped many of these people out, this is documented with Cortez, too. There is some evidence of the affect these epidemics had relating to the carbon dioxide levels around the time of Columbus' arrival.

Also related, you may find Lies My Teach Told Me an interesting read.

I have to start by saying that I am extremely biased. Even though it is only a few hours away, my wife won't let me visit the Edison museum in Fort Myers for fear I would burn it down.

However Edison was a truly dispicable man. You can say what you want about Gates, Jobs, Elison, Zuckerburg and others but they are businessmen and often nasty businessmen.

Edison spent years trying to discredit A/C including killing animals as large as an elephant.*

One of his inventions was the electric chair which by it's very design is a device to kill.**

The nascent movie business actually pulled up stakes and moved 3000 miles to a little CA town called Hollywood because Edison's thugs would destroy any film or equipment being used for movie making unless he got a cut.***

I could go on but I think I'm getting a tad emotionally attached to this post. I think all of us are. Have you ever seen so many four and fives?

* Jan. 4, 1903: Edison Fries an Elephant to Prove His Point.
** Edison's Menlo Park Lab Invents the Electric Chair.
*** Edison's hires goons to shut down movie filming.

And that whole dark ages thing, you get that from where? Argument by anal extraction? Well, straw-men are carbon-neutral...

From science, from their own mouths, and from what, how and in the ways they act. Don't worry if reality has to kick you in the chops every now and then.

In case any fans missed it, Smithsonian magazine got a scoop with Groening this month, answering things like why the name Bart, which Springfield, and who many of the characters are really based on. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Matt-Groening-Reveals-the-Location-of-the-Real-Springfield.html

If you were on the fence about buying a hybrid instead of normal ICE-only car, buy a hybrid. The more people who do that, the less oil we will need.

If you are trying to lose weight or maintain health, switch to a more vegetarian diet instead of meat. We won't have to grow food for cattle, and can use that for people.

The environmentalism angle covers deforestation and oil burning, as well as maintaining habitat for things we might like to eat from time to time.

I did not read this in depth when it hit a few days ago, but this is a fairly obvious way to jump from resource consumption to environmental protection. And part of the environmental aspects presume that we don't know for certain if global climate change is man made, but by the time we find out for sure it may be too late. So best to reduce our footprint, because that's something we have the knowledge to do now.

This was done 20 years ago and the predictions line up quite well so far. I think the take-away here is: consider that it *is* going to happen, and if so, what can we do now to be prepared? Growing a small vegetable garden and teaching your kids to hunt might not be such a crazy idea.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Looking-Back-on-the-Limits-of-Growth.html

Less irrelevant trivia: As usual, everybody is getting all fuzzy eyed about Watson (who was a flaming asshole) and Crick (who was a really nice guy and the brains of the outfit). But it's easy to forget Rosalind Frankilin who did much of the heavy lifting that Watson & Crick tend to get credit for.

As even they have said, once you see the structure, the general mechanism is pretty obvious.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Teller-Reveals-His-Secrets.html

You guys might enjoy this article.

Also check View All Comments - there is one from The Amazing Randi

While I can't comment on Sweden specifically, the sort of paranoid, blinkered thinking in the parent is at least part of the reason why state-funded schools in little countries like Finland are kicking the crap out of their USA counterparts. One alternative is to, y'know, make the schools actually *good*:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-reform-012012.html

etc.

Um, no he's not a "father" of hydrogen bomb . . . Andrei Sakharov (of Soviet Union) is:

Maybe you haven't heard, but the US and USSR didn't share a lot of nuclear weapons secrets at the time, although the Soviets managed to steal US nuclear secrets with spies.

Putin praises Cold War moles for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets

Vladimir Putin praised Cold War-era scientists on Thursday for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets so that United States would not be the world's sole atomic power, in comments reflecting his vision of Russia as a counterweight to U.S. power.

Spies with suitcases full of data helped the Soviet Union build its atomic bomb, he told military commanders.

"You know, when the States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels," Putin said, according to state-run Itar-Tass.

"The were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!"

China has managed to achieve the same feat: Report Stolen data gives China advanced nuclear knowhow

The Immortal Life Cycle of Turritopsis, with diagrams http://9e.devbio.com/preview_article.php?ch=2&id=6 __ Inmmortal human cells. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html

poormanjoe blathered:

Don't believe in a creator? That's fine, but understand this country was founded by Religous people and we will always be fighting to govern it, because we know our rights are provided by our Creator.

Advocates of a Christian theocracy in America constantly repeat that meme, despite the fact that it's patently untrue.

Christian cultists immigrated to America on the Mayflower specifically so that they could practic religious intolerance free from interference by the English government. Other cults followed their lead over the ensuing century-and-a-half or so, but they were not the only sort of people who immigrated to America. Most of those who came here in the 150+ years before this country was actually founded did so for economic reasons - because land was free for the taking, and opportunities to get rich abounded in the New Woirld.

The founders of the USA - which is to say the delegates to the Continental Congress and its successor bodies - were, admittedly, mostly at least nominally Christian. But the country that they created was, by design, emphatically a secular entity. That, in turn, was because for many decades before (and, indeed, after) the founding of the USA various of those Christian cults mentioned above were in a practically continuous state of war with one another. Take the so-called Great Awakening in Connecticut during the period 1735-1745, a time of tremendous turmoil in the Congregationalist (i.e. - "Puritan) faith. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans even went so far as to hang four Quakers for the crime of not being Puritans. So the founding fathers explicitly made the USA a secular nation, to prevent any of the cults from gaining supremacy over the others and establishing itself as a national religion.

Basically, you and your ilk want to undo that and make the USA into a Christian theocracy. The problem is, you fail to understand that, if the USA became an officially Christian theocracy, chances are that it would be a Catholic one - because adherents of the Catholic Church comprise the single largest denomination in the USA, with more than 65.5 million members (although there are more Protestant adherents collectively, they are fractured into hundreds of denominations with serious doctrinal and dogmatic divisions from one another, and cannot be considered as a single religious entity), with Southern Baptists at just over 16 million members being the next-largest denomination.

If you believe that Southern Baptists would be happy at the prospect of an explicitly Catholic theocracy in the USA, you aren't very well acquainted with Southern Baptists, or their ingrained hatred of and contempt for what they like to call Papists.

So, in conclusion, kindly shut the fuck up, because you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.

1) Global cooling theory was claimed by serious scientists in the 1970s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

2) I never said mammograms, I said self-inspections. And I was there in the 1990s when college campuses had public health representatives giving detailed instructions on how to perform breast self-exams. Since then, doctor's offices have been flooded with hysterical women convinced that they have breast cancer, so they have done away with this recommendation.

3) Many recent studies say that alcohol-based sanitizers are useless, as the alcohol evaporates in a few seconds and does not kill very many germs anyway. The alcohol has to be at a high concentration for it to be effective, but people do not like higher concentrations because it irritates the skin. I work in public health.

4 and 5: check "Dr. Spock's Baby & Child Care". At the time, the medical establishment treated this as the bible of child rearing. Anybody who did not follow Dr. Spock's guidelines was considered a retrograde idiot.

6) Does not contradict anything I said. The recommendation reversal stands.

7) I was at seminars by dermatologists recently who said this stuff. The American Academy of Dermatology today says to avoid sunlight and to get vitamin D only through artificial supplements: "Get vitamin D safely through a healthy diet that may include vitamin supplements. Don't seek the sun."
Source: http://www.aad.org/skin-care-and-safety/skin-cancer-prevention/be-sun-smart/be-sun-smart

8) My dad was part of the studies that promoted hormone replacement therapy in the 90s. Today, it is a dirty word.

9) NASA scientists predicted this. See: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/09/19/nasa-scientists-predicted-new-ice-age-1971

10) Check http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/air/EcoCenter-Air-Acid-Rain-and-Our-Ecosystem.html?c=y&page=2
"In the late 1970s, researchers surveyed 217 lakes above 2,000 feet in the Adirondacks and found that 51 percent were highly acidic. The news was so grim that scientists began attempting to breed more acid-tolerant strains of trout. One New York State employee compared the area to Death Valley. A decade later, a larger study that included 849 lakes higher than 1,000 feet found that 55 percent were either completely devoid of life or on the brink of collapse."

11) If you can find a source today that argues high-carb, low-protein diets are good, let me know. They would be far outside the mainstream establishment today. My specialty is obesity and diabetes research.

12) Psychologists used to promote sex therapy until the mid-1980s, but you won't find anyone advocating it today.

"For someone who is bitching about science, you sure don't have a fucking clue what is going on."

Actually, I am a scientific insider with a PhD. Having insider access has shown me how arbitrary the scientific reasoning process is. People have their agendas, and getting grants is all about putting on a provocative sales pitch. A typical grant identifies a threat to society, and how this research will be the salvation. I have been to more than one seminar where a scientist debunked some opposing theory, then repeated all the exact same mistakes to promote their own, and the room gave a standing ovation. I thought it was done in parody, but they were serious. It made me realize that the scientific establishment can be no smarter than fundamentalists in trailer parks.

Why wouldn't they just run off of your body's energy?

Exactly.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Spotted-Owls-New-Nemesis.html?c=y&page=1

The gentleman who wrote this article complains, "why has it taken nearly 50 years for the contents of this material to be made fully public?" He fails to understand the simplest reason: the public doesn't really care enough. That is to say, some members of the public might care enough to read parts of a translation.

IMO, it's taken as long as it has because the scrolls were anciently written on papyrus or some other cloth or paper and stuffed together for storage. Some were preserved better than others, but still, IIRC, these papyrus and/or whatever-substance fragments can be very difficult to separate ("unroll") and in some cases have been reassembled manually. I am NOT an expert on the DSS. Another factor, of course, is the frequent political turmoil in the Middle East.

Also, as technology to analyze ancient stuck-together papyri has improved, reanalysis would seem to be required for much of the analyzed portions for the analyses to be scientifically valid. FWIW. Also. And. Too. For Chemists and ACS Admirers. For gnostics.

I'm sure you can find many other points of view.

Knowledge and technology are all well and good, except when used for evil or to sell advertising, I guess...

A Solar Storm Strikes Earthâ"and Provides a Warning for the Future

New Forecast: Sun's 'Superstorms' Could Doom Satellites

Could The Sun Set Off The Next Big Natural Disaster?

PS: The sun will go supernova in the near future. Please panic accordingly. :-)

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I'm sorry, but brains do a _lot_ more than consciousness/self awareness.

Apropos of what? That's hardly news.

Because an ape's (chimp's) body is more similar to our own, it makes sense that their brains are more similar. You say that most of our brain is for language and hands. Dogs have no hands and a large portion of their brain is devoted to scent association.

?? WTF?. I don't dispute that I wrote that - but *what* is your point?

The dog most studied is Chaser - with a proven vocabulary greater than many people who drive trucks with gun racks.

Either you greatly underestimate the mental capacity of average humans, or Chaser would be more famous than Mr. Ed or Koko.

That doesn't translate - no one in this house knows who those people/things are. And using fame as a measure of relevance/importance is just as stupid as your assertions.

I bet you laughed at the Family Guy skit where Peter goes to the KFC asking for the Colonel, thinking to yourself "Oh my! What a delicious parody on the lack of vocabulary in the South!". What you missed is that the guy behind the counter was smarter than Peter, and was trying to impart his wisdom using the local dialect. "I say you he dead."

I'll take that bet. How much did you just lose? I had to Google to find out what the fuck you're talking about. It's a cartoon show. For children and immature adults. Which fits given your approach to taking in new information. I've never watched that show - and short some sort of catastrophic head injury, am never likely to want to.

Illuminating insight into your basement world though.

Most dogs (mine included) can do most everything an ape can do - and more.

I'm an ape. Get your dog to compile a custom kernel and I'll consider it. Have him complete Hurd and I'll believe you.

You seem to confuse the process of building a binary with running a race. But, please tell us more about *your* abilities - perhaps if we're sufficiently impresses with your claimed accomplishments your dogmatic opinions will gain some credibility. Do you have ninja skills too? Because dogs don't so therefore apes are more like humans (who, unlike you, are not apes but are the third chimpanzee).

I've already pointed out that dogs don't have our language or hands.

Do any of the apes (other than the third chimpanzees) compile code? How many humans can? How hard can make config, etc be?

To avoid public humiliation - *do not* post your education references, your teachers probably tried, but you failed.

Widening an already piss-weak argument hardly strengthens your argument. Now go chase down a rat, rabbit and fox. When and if you catch it, kill it with your teeth. A spurious comparison given that you've not just read my earlier comments about hands, but essentially agreed with it. I'm guessing the almond shaped bit of my dog's brain is some what larger than yours.

I'll give you $100 if you can teach an ape to find a three-dimensional object based on viewing a drawing - or point - or wait - or look where you're pointing. No ape has ever been taught to do any of those things.

Perhaps not, but they do really understand the meaning of color-words: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-milestones-with-thinking-japanese.html http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Thinking-Like-a-Chimpanzee.html

Apropos of what? You have a better way of testing the ability of an animal to differentiate between colours without differentiating between colours.

Many dogs can.

And if you think that response is an argument to my post - you confuse an opinion with an argument.

You are correct. I confused your opinion with an argument. I'm sorry, but brains do a _lot_ more than consciousness/self awareness. Because an ape's (chimp's) body is more similar to our own, it makes sense that their brains are more similar. You say that most of our brain is for language and hands. Dogs have no hands and a large portion of their brain is devoted to scent association.

The dog most studied is Chaser - with a proven vocabulary greater than many people who drive trucks with gun racks.

Either you greatly underestimate the mental capacity of average humans, or Chaser would be more famous than Mr. Ed or Koko. I bet you laughed at the Family Guy skit where Peter goes to the KFC asking for the Colonel, thinking to yourself "Oh my! What a delicious parody on the lack of vocabulary in the South!". What you missed is that the guy behind the counter was smarter than Peter, and was trying to impart his wisdom using the local dialect. "I say you he dead."

Most dogs (mine included) can do most everything an ape can do - and more.

I'm an ape. Get your dog to compile a custom kernel and I'll consider it. Have him complete Hurd and I'll believe you.

I'll give you $100 if you can teach an ape to find a three-dimensional object based on viewing a drawing - or point - or wait - or look where you're pointing. No ape has ever been taught to do any of those things.

Perhaps not, but they do really understand the meaning of color-words:
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/09/new-milestones-with-thinking-japanese.html
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Thinking-Like-a-Chimpanzee.html

Many dogs can. Most collies and Jack Russells (other breeds as well, those are the ones I've mostly trained) easily learn 400+ words and concepts (around, under, over)

http://www.koko.org/world/signlanguage.html

- and colour recognition (get in the red car).

Most likely "red car" means "car that smells like leather seats" and "red ball" means "ball that smells like $FOO"

It took a year for this story to get to UK and back? Sad.

Coal mine fires aren't unique to the US.

From this:

China has the most coal fires, but India, where largescale mining began more than a century ago, accounts for the world’s greatest concentration of them. Rising surface temperatures, and toxic byproducts in groundwater and soil, have turned the densely populated Raniganj, Singareni and Jharia coal fields into vast wastelands. Subsidence has forced relocations of villages and roads—then re-relocations, as fire fronts advance. Rail lines give way; buildings disappear. In 1995, a Jharia riverbank was undermined by fire and crumbled; water rushed into underground mines, killing 78. Perhaps the most terrifying spectacle is the unquenched fire itself: many blazes smoldered quietly in old underground tunnels until recently, when modern strip pits exposed them to air. The revitalized flames erupted, engulfing the region in a haze of soot, carbon monoxide and compounds of sulfur and nitrogen. Burning coal also releases arsenic, fluorine and selenium. (Studies in China have suggested that the millions of people who use coal for cooking are being slowly poisoned by such elements.) Even so, workers continue to labor in this highly toxic environment.

No, no, it looks like the next item on the list is maple syrup.

We wouldn't take credit away from Benjamin Franklin. Nor for introducing the French to potatoes. http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2009/07/03/ben-franklin-patriot-foodie/ - I think lacrosse is the next thing on the national "to-do".

Putting the actual generating elements in seawater is a maintenance nightmare.

Images here:
http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/The-electric-wave-model-8.jpg

How is this different than the "corn plastic" that's been around for years? Like the stuff mentioned here... http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/plastic.html

George Koval did at least as much, and likely more, than the Rosenbergs did to help Russia with their nuclear technology. An interesting article was recently published in the Smithsonian about him.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Iowa-Born-Soviet-Trained.html

A natural resource (accidentally ignited by humans) has destroyed a town completely.

Yes, Centralia is pretty bad, and the street and houses falling into the ground is pretty bad too, but trivial point; a LOT of the coal was surface air exposed. IIRC, if that much coal is exposed to air for long enough, it will gradually smolder.

Worse: underground, a cavern of coal can generate TREMENDOUS heat. Early attempts at fighting coal mine fires of this size with water were abandoned - the heat was high enough that it would break the water into oxygen and hydrogen and further feed the fire.

Smithsonian Magazine had a great story on this a couple of years ago.

After Colbert requested that the Smithsonian declare him a national treasure and put his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery - they agreed and put the portrait by the restrooms - perfect!

They got lots of publicity and increased attendance, he gave them free plugs over multiple episodes - win-win.

So NASA should learn from this and do the same - "resist" initially, then give in, and name the toilet Colbert (or something similar - to provide him with enough comic fodder).

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2008/04/stephen-colbert-declared-a-national-treasure/

For your own safety, please read to the end of this comment before replying.

1. How can the Athenians have fought a war against another civilization at a time when all good archaeology and paleontology tells us humans didn't yet live in developed cities or fight wars?

Because all good archaeology might be wrong, and temple-based civilization, with the possibilities of undiscovered cities, may be 11,000 years old.

2. How can Plato's source have known about Atlantis? It's not mentioned in any of the preserved archives of the ancient Egyptians.

Err... we have a very small fraction of material from ancient Egypt, thanks to the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. Hell, we know things about PLATO that are only attested to in secondary sources. There's no reason Atlantis couldn't be the same.

3. How can knowledge of this so-called war and apocalypse have survived until ca. 350 BCE when the Greeks didn't have reliable information about their own history going back before 1000 BCE? Hint: if you say "but the Iliad..." I am going to beat you repeatedly with a copy of the collected works of Milman Parry.

It is far easier for me to find out about the War of the Roses or the Hundred Years War than it is to find out about what happened in my hometown 100 years ago. Obviously a huge apocalyptic war is going to leave far more footprints in history than anything that happened in the Greek Dark Age, which was after all pretty goddamned black, to the extent that writing itself was lost.

Ok, if you've got this far I'll give you the REAL reason why we should take Plato seriously on Atlantis: Plato ALSO tells us that originally human beings had two halves and were four-legged, joined at the back. They split in two to create the humans we have today, and the natural sexual affinities that are observed in humans are the result of us seeking our other half. Those of us who should have been joined to another of different sex are heterosexuals, and those who should have been joined to another of the same sex are homosexuals.

Since this is obviously true, the story of Atlantis must be true as well. I mean, Plato wouldn't just make stuff up for the sake of a good story, would he?

Oh, yeah: "The Iliad." (ducks)

It looks more like some wiseacre added ">a flock of pink flamingos to one of the support tees...

Well, Trash Island is probably a good example of what waste plastic, including plastic bags, can cause. In addition, PLA (corn based plastic) seems to still have a lot of issues as well.. As with all things, there is no silver bullet, but even people being aware of the issue is a big step forward.

Although your exaggerations do allow for a much more pronounced emotional impact on the reader, if you were interested in perspective (i.e. proper science) here's what your source's source has to say:

1. Coal fires are a natural occurrence albeit aggravated, and sometimes caused, by human mining.

2. In China, which has the by-far greatest collection of coal fires, "estimated" 20 - 200 million tons of coal burn every year in coal fires. That is an incredible range... 20 to 200...mmm... that's some good science. Assuming 200 million tons of coal, and all of it man-caused, you get "nearly" 1 whole percent of the carbon dioxide emissions "due to fossil fuels being burned".

As a side-note, "the world's Co2" weighs in at about 3x10^15 kg, or 3x10^12 tonnes, or 3,000,000 million tonnes, or 3,000 billion tonnes. All of human activity (fossil fuel burning and everything else) produces 27 billion tonnes of CO2 each year. That's right. ALL human activity contributes less than 1% to "the world's Co2" each year.

Please do not let Wikipedia think for you. The FSM did not bestow brains (the very image of His Compacted Noodlieness) upon us so that we might neglect our duties to rigorous science (or in this case, simple math).

The Smithsonian had a great article on this late last year. (Hit cancel on the single page print dialog.)

Smithsonian, the official mag of the Smithsonian Institution. I always tell people, if you can't find at least one article of interest in any given issue, than you are a very boring person.

This article from Smithsonian Magazine describes the Maine Solar System Model and the guy who put it all together, with a budget of $0. Everything from labor to the land to house the planets on was donated.

Think we can hire him to manage some Open Source projects for us? <grin>

there is evidence that the rate of speciation is actually much higher than we might think...