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Fake South Florida butt doctor Ron Oneal Morris pleaded guilty to one count of practicing healthcare without a license and was sentenced to 336 days in state prison. Morris was accused of injecting “super glue” and Fix-A-Flat into the buttocks of women in order to help give them curvier figures. Morris, who was born a man but identifies as a woman, will begin serving her sentence on January 7, 2014.

Every cell in your body has a little clock ticking away in it. Your heart may be “younger.” Tumors are the "oldest." Embryonic stem cells, the body’s master cells, look just like newborns with a biological age of zero.

A bustling airport would hardly seem the place to find a new species of reclusive animal, but a team of California biologists recently found a shy new species of legless lizard living at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport. What’s more, the same team discovered three additional new species of these distinctive, snake-like lizards that are also living in some inhospitable-sounding places for wildlife: at a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley and on the margins of the Mojave desert.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has launched a review of whether it should take North Pacific humpback whales off the endangered species list. NOAA Fisheries is responding to a petition filed by a group of Hawaii fishermen saying the whale should no longer be classified as endangered because its population has steadily grown since the international community banned commercial whaling nearly 50 years ago. There are more than 21,000 humpback whales in the North Pacific, compared with about 1,400 in the mid-1960s.

TORONTO – Theories abound as to why women go into menopause, but the latest hypothesis being put forward suggests it may be men — or specifically their preference for younger mates —that has led to women’s loss of fertility at a certain age. Researchers at McMaster University believe that over tens of thousands of years, a lack of reproduction among older women has given rise to menopause as an unintended result of evolutionary natural selection. Using computer modelling, the researchers found that over time, competition among men of all ages for younger mates left older females with much less chance...

Certain measures of brain anatomy were even better at judging learning potential than traditional measures of ability such as IQ and standardized test results, says study author Kaustubh Supekar of Stanford University. These signatures include the size of the hippocampus — a string bean–shaped structure involved in making memories — and how connected the area was with other parts of the brain. The findings suggest that kids struggling with their math homework aren’t necessarily slacking off, says cognitive scientist David Geary of the University of Missouri in Columbia. “They just may not have as much brain region devoted to memory...

Coelacanths: Evolutionists Still Fishing in Shallow Water by Timothy L. Clarey, Ph.D., and Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A recent report, published in Nature,1 on the genome sequence of the so-called living fish fossil, the African coelacanth, has some evolutionists scrambling to defend their story. This is because the coelacanth's DNA is similar to other types of fish and not land animals, thus forcing the evolutionists to postulate that the coelacanth evolved slowly.1 Although modern coelacanths are found in water about 500 feet deep, Axel Meyer, a member of the study team believes that ancient coelacanths may have lived in shallow...

The Massachusetts public school system has taken the tired mantra "You can be whatever you want to be" to new heights of absurdity. It is now possible for any student to declare what his sex is regardless of whether it is the biological opposite of what she was born as. The new transgender manifesto, which includes punishments and counseling for students who object to... --snip-- Which brings us to the next point; namely that the extreme leftist movement behind this recent insanity displays the characteristics of a sex cult. America's past and present are littered with such cults. It's just...

Scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute have for the first time visualised the molecular changes in a critical cell death protein that force cells to die. The finding provides important insights into how cell death occurs, and could lead to new classes of medicines that control whether diseased cells live or die. Cell death, called apoptosis, is important for controlling the number of cells in the body. Defects in cell death have been linked to the development of diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative conditions. Insufficient cell death can cause cancer by allowing cells to become immortal while...

‘Tis the season for twinkling lights, wrapping paper, and virgin birth. For billions of Christians around the world, the holidays are a time to celebrate Jesus’s birth to the Virgin Mary. But for many animals, virgin birth is far from a miraculous event. Researchers have discovered a growing number of species that reproduce without assistance from the opposite sex. Known formally as parthenogenesis, virgin birth occurs when an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg cell. The development of an embryo usually requires genetic material from sperm and egg, as well as a series of chemical changes sparked by fertilization. In...

The Scrapbook did not expect that the New York Times would express much joy at the appointment of Rep. Tim Scott of South Carolina to the Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint. Mr. DeMint is a conservative Republican, Mr. Scott is a conservative Republican, and the governor who anointed Scott, Nikki Haley, is a conservative Republican, too. And the truth be told, The Scrapbook would prefer to underplay the “historic” nature of Scott’s ascent to the Senate. Yes, he is the first black Republican in the upper chamber since Edward Brooke (1979) and the only African American in the Senate...

The new standard for teaching science in public schools should prohibit teaching religious beliefs like evolution as if they were the equivalent of scientific theories. Science should be defined as using experimentation and observation to discover information about physical reality. Explanations of what happened in the ancient past cannot be verified using experimentation and observation. ----------advertisement----------- Contrary to a popular myth pushed by those who want to make science a substitute for religion, science has yet to produce a new explanation for the development of life or the origin of the universe. The idea that the universe came out of...

Most probiotic bacteria that are added to foods, such as yoghurt, to aid the digestive system are not reaching their intended target in the intestine. Instead, the majority are being destroyed in the stomach before they can do any good. Now, UK scientists have come up with a coating to overcome this problem.1Probiotic bacteria are added to food such as yoghurt drinks to aid the digestive system. © Shutterstock Probiotics are bacteria that naturally live in the small and large intestine. They provide health benefits by producing nutrients, compete with pathogenic bacteria for binding sites and stimulate the immune system....

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) -- An Alaska scientist whose observations of drowned polar bears helped galvanize the global warming movement has been reprimanded for improper release of government documents. An Interior Department official said emails released by Charles Monnett were cited by a federal appeals court in decisions to vacate approval by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of an oil and gas company's Arctic exploration plan. The official, Walter Cruickshank, deputy director of BOEM, said in a memo that an inspector general's investigation contained findings that Monnett had improperly disclosed internal government documents, which he said were later used against...

We knew liberals were different, but just how different is revealed in a new study of the human brain indicating that not only do liberals and conservatives share different moral sentiments, but that markedly differing brain structures underlie those sentiments. The study’s “findings demonstrate that variation in moral sentiment corresponds to individual differences in brain structure and suggest that moral values possess deep-rooted biological bases distributed across distinct brain regions,” say University of California, Santa Barbara, post-doctoral researcher Gary J. Lewis and three research collaborators in the August 2012 issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JCN). “People differ in...

... The first question about life is “Is it a process or an entity, an activity or a thing?”. Is life a substance or force permeating living beings which is not present in non living entities? Or is life the activities that go on in living beings? ...

This post requires an understanding of r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Biology, and it's relation to our political ideologies. For a quick rundown of this, please see our main page here. In a previous post we posited that homosexuality may be an extreme form of the reversal in sex specific behaviors which is seen in r-selected populations, where females become more “masculine,” so as to better protect and provision the young they raise alone, while males become more effete, so as to avoid the conflict which is dangerous and disadvantageous under conditions of r-selection. In that post, we examined the...

What do women want? The conventional biological wisdom is that men select mates for fertility, while women select for status — thus the commonness of younger women’s pairing with well-established older men but the rarity of the converse. The Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher model is an exception — the only 40-year-old woman Jack Nicholson has ever seen naked is Kathy Bates in that horrific hot-tub scene. Age is cruel to women, and subordination is cruel to men. Ellen Kullman is a very pretty woman, but at 56 years of age she probably would not turn a lot of heads in a...

By blending optical and atomic force microscope technologies, Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory researchers have found a way to complete 3-D measurements of single biological molecules with unprecedented accuracy and precision. Existing technologies allow researchers to measure single molecules on the x and y axes of a 2-D plane. The new technology allows researchers to make height measurements (the z axis) down to the nanometer -- just a billionth of a meter -- without custom optics or special surfaces for the samples. "This is a completely new type of measurement that can be used to determine the z position...

Mysterious Asian ‘corpse flower’ parasite actually steals huge chunks of its host’s DNA – but what does it do with it? 'Eureka' finding rewrites relationship between parasite and host Scientists puzzled over WHY flower 'steals' genes Parasitic plant cannot live without its host A corpse flower in Sarawak, Malaysia: The 'corpse flower' - a parasitic plant which lives in the jungles of Borneo does something far more sinister than simply living off its host The 'corpse flower' - a parasitic plant which lives in the jungles of Borneo does something far more sinister than simply living off its host. The...