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It seems like a peculiar case of genomic overkill: a single-celled bacterium has been found that keeps tens of thousands of copies of its genome. The finding sets a record for most genomes per cell, but also poses an obvious question: what could be the advantage of stashing away as much as 200,000 copies of your genome? The number of genome copies in each cell varies by species. Many bacteria have only one copy; most cells in the human body contain two. Plants are notorious for being genomically promiscuous, picking up extra genomes then losing them again in a cycle...

INHABITANTS OF THE MOON By D. B. Huntington. From the Young Woman's Journal Vol 3 published by the Young Ladies' Mutual Improvement Associations of Zion in 1892 Astronomers and philosophers have, from time almost immemorial until very recently, asserted that the moon was uninhabited, that it had no atmosphere etc.. But recent discoveries, through the means of powerful telescopes, have given scientists a doubt or two upon the old theory.Nearly all the great discoveries of men in the last half-century have, in one way or another, either directly or indirectly, contributed to prove Joseph Smith to be a Prophet.As far...

Nazis! It’s all about Nazis. In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein is making a documentary about how the Nazis utilized the controversial theory of gravity to make bombs that fall from the sky to the earth, and so the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and here, Ben Stein is telling us with a straight face that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like people breed animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong....

A desire to understand the universe seems to be hard-wired into our brains.  However we need a worldview (from the German Weltanschauung which means, literally, "world view").  Continuing with the computer metaphor, a worldview corresponds to a disc operating system, a framework for receiving and processing data. Worldviews have changed over the course of history.  The ancient Greeks thought that otherwise inexplicable events such as thunderstorms and falling in love were the results of whimsical actions of Zeus and Cupid, respectively.  Shakespeare and his contemporaries believed in a heavenly harmony that was replicated here on earth.  Thus the sun ruled...

Mothers And Offspring Can Share Cells Throughout Life ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) — Cutting the umbilical cord doesn’t necessarily sever the physical link between mother and child. Many cells pass back and forth between the mother and fetus during pregnancy and can be detected in the tissues and organs of both even decades later. This mixing of cells from two genetically distinct individuals is called microchimerism. The phenomenon is the focus of an increasing number of scientists who wonder what role these cells play in the body. A potentially significant one, it turns out. Research implicates that maternal and fetal...

Expelled seems to me to be the right-wing analog of Fahrenheit 9/11...An effort to take a preexisting belief about the illegitimate use of power, find some facts to fit to it, and do the rest of the work with insinuation and innuendo... ...But the obvious question for ID proponents is never asked: OK, this great science is being suppressed, so please show me the data, lab notebooks, scientific work papers, unpublished manuscripts, and so on that contain all of these amazing discoveries that nobody will confront. But we never see it... ...One argument the movie makes, without any support that...

A new type of treatment that trains immune system cells to better recognize the AIDS virus may help control the deadly and incurable infection, Australian researchers reported on Friday. Tests on monkeys infected with a similar virus shows the treatment controlled the infection, although it does not cure it, and tests are already planned in people. The treatment is called OPAL, for Overlapping Peptide-pulsed Autologous Cells, and would be categorized as an immunotherapy technique, or a so-called therapeutic vaccine, Stephen Kent of the University of Melbourne and colleagues said. Writing in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Pathogens, they...

Using data recovered from a damaged computer hard-drive that was aboard the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, scientists have recently learned more about why the act of shaking a material can quickly transform it into something completely different. One of the best examples of this phenomenon is ordinary ketchup. Shake the bottle and the semi-solid paste becomes a runny liquid. Food scientists do the shaking in a controlled way by putting ketchup (and other processed foods) into a rheometer (rheo, meaning "flow") to see how its viscosity -- the scientific word for stickiness -- decreases when shaken. Robert Berg...

McClatchy Newspapers State legislators are stepping into the arena of reproductive law again in a bid to regulate the use of birth control - on deer. The House passed a bill Wednesday that makes it illegal to use fertility control agents or chemical substances on deer and other wildlife without a permit from the S.C. Department of Natural Resources. Violators could face a fine of up to $2,500 and two years in prison. The bill must pass the Senate and be signed by governor to become law. Permits would be eligible for scientific research or for wildlife management as approved...

I am NOT a scientist, BUT… I’ve performed my own global warming study based solely on common sense! I’ve found after many hours of research that man CANNOT be responsible for any change in the earth’s weather. If you someone who thinks that man is capable of controlling the earth's weather, show my carefully crafted study and tell them to explain how it can be done. Here are my facts: The 3,000 scientific robots that measure the temperature of the oceans haven't recorded ANY change in temperature over the last 4 to 5 years!! No Temperature ChangeThere is an estimated...

John Derbyshire finds a rather disturbing comment from Ben Stein in an interview he did with TBN earlier this month, promoting his new film Expelled: The Movie. In explaining his reaction to researching the Holocaust by visiting Dachau and Hadamar, Stein railed against the distortions of Darwinian theory that led to the systematic eugenics murders and genocide of the Nazi regime. However, Stein misses the target by a mile...

April 28, 2008, 7:24 a.m. The Biofuels Disaster Must EndAnother failed energy policy, courtesy of the Washington central planners. By Phil Kerpen & James Valvo Big-government, command-and-control technocrats believe that when central planning fails, the solution is a better plan and smarter planners. They never step back and look at whether planning makes sense in the first place. This was true of the Soviet Union, with tragic five-year plan after five-year plan. It was true of Communist China, with Mao’s revolutionary upheavals. And today, here in the United States, it is true of government energy policy. The 1970s and...

Imagine a world without men: Lauren Bacall but no Bogie, Hillary Clinton but no Bill, no Starsky or Hutch. This isn't just an unlikely sci-fi scenario. This could be reality, according to Bryan Sykes, an eminent professor of genetics at Oxford University and author of "Adam's Curse: A Future Without Men." "The Y chromosome is deteriorating and will, in my belief, disappear," Sykes told me. A world-renowned authority on genetic material, Sykes is called upon to investigate DNA evidence from crime scenes. His team of researchers is currently compiling a DNA family tree for our species. Y Chromosome 'Fatally Flawed'...

In my column last Friday – headlined “Bioperversity” – I suggested that a new book, “Sustaining Life,” from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which claimed that species loss was threatening medicinal discoveries and thus human health, was a typical alarmist crock. It was intended primarily as propaganda to whip up eco-hysteria ahead of next month’s huge United Nations conflab in Bonn to discuss the floundering Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). As if to prove my point, the IUCN the very next day issued a release about the so called “COP9,” that is, the ninth “Conference of the...

Enlarge ImageScience of sleep. The scientists used fluorescent proteins--green and red in these images--to determine whether E. coli bacteria were active.Credit: Gefen et al., PNAS 105 (22 April 2008) Most antibiotics kill only microbes that are growing and multiplying, leaving untouched a select few that are hibernating. A new study suggests that a dose of the right nutrients can awaken these bacteria for just long enough to kill them with antibiotics. If the strategy works in humans, it might provide a more effective way to treat persistent diseases such as tuberculosis and urinary-tract infections. During infections, bacteria may slow...

Lawrence Solomon’s book profiles nearly three dozen top scientists who have resisted the pull of climate alarmism. Once upon a time, the media believed in the open exchange of opinions regarding public policy. People who had doubts about one or another claim put forward by activists and crusaders could express those thoughts without fear of censure or ridicule. And, to be fair, that is still the case in many areas of social policy.But there’s one hot-button issue on which virtually no dissent is allowed: climate change. In a style reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, people disagreeing with any element...

SOLAR BLAST: No sunspots? No problem. Yesterday the blank sun unleashed a solar flare without the usual aid of a sunspot. At 1408 UT on April 26th, Earth-orbiting satellites detected a surge of X-rays registering B3.8 on the Richter scale of solar flares. Shortly thereafter, SOHO coronagraphs photographed a coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun: The expanding cloud could deliver a glancing blow to Earth's magnetic field late on April 28th or 29th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras when it arrives. This strange solar flare came from a patch of sun (N08,E08) where magnetic...

Roberta Corson recalled her father’s dissection lab as a happy place. Her father, David L. Bassett, was an expert in anatomy and dissection at the University of Washington. For more than 17 years, he was engaged in creating what has been called the most painstaking and detailed set of images of the human body, inside and out, ever produced. In 3-D. Working closely with William Gruber, the inventor of the View-Master, the three-dimensional viewing system that GAF Corporation popularized as a toy in the 1960s, Dr. Bassett created the 25-volume “Stereoscopic Atlas of Human Anatomy” in 1962. It included some...

In her PA "I'm the WINNER speach", Hillary promised to end the "War on Science". Was she endorsing, or CALLING OUT mr. gore?

Who knew a “free� source of energy could be so expensive? The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) recently estimated that billions of dollars in investment will be needed to transmit wind-generated electricity from the areas of Texas most suitable for wind generation — West Texas and the Panhandle — to the areas of the state that need energy the most — the I-35 corridor and the upper Gulf Coast. These costs will be borne by Texas ratepayers. How did this happen? Subsidies, incentives, and renewable energy mandates have paved the way for Texas’ wind-energy boom. Today, Texas leads the...

We've all goofed up and flubbed up things we've previously done time and again. It turns out the root of these brain farts may be a special kind of abnormal brain activity that begins up to 30 seconds before a mistake even happens. The solution to such screw-ups could be a kind of mind-reading hat, a device to predict and even prevent mindless errors that can threaten lives. When people blunder after performing the same task over and over, scientists had suspected that such lapses were due to momentary hiccups in concentration. Still, little was known about what the brain...

As the legend goes, when the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez landed in what is now Mexico in 1519, he ordered the boats that brought him and his men there to be burned. Obama seems to have something similar planned for NASA. Although the MSM has largely ignored Barack Obama's plans for NASA, the issue is likely to bubble up during the general election campaign, if he's the Democratic nominee. Here's why. There's a potential confluence of two events - one possible and one planned: an Obama presidency and a mission shift already underway at NASA. The Space Shuttle program will...

Earth Day 2008 is an opportunity to celebrate the progress we've made toward building a cleaner future for our world — more importantly, it is a time to rededicate ourselves to facing and solving the problems that continue to threaten the long-term health of our environment. None of those challenges is more critical than the need to find new and "greener" ways to help meet global energy demands. The world's thirst for energy continues unabated. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, global demand for all forms of energy is expected to grow by 54 percent between now and the...

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.

A PATIENT has spoken of her joy after having part of her sight restored by a "bionic eye". Linda Moorfoot suffers from the eye condition retinitis pigmentosa, which causes blindness. But now, thanks to technology being developed in the United States, she has been able to enjoy watching her grandchildren dance and play football. Scientists have also revealed their latest development – a tiny camera which they hope to actually insert into the eye within the next five years. The current technology tested by Mrs Moorfoot uses an external camera worn on a pair of dark glasses. This sends images...

For U.S. Army Major Todd Schmidt, it all comes back to a quote attributed to Joan of Arc: “All battles are first won or lost in the mind.” Preparing to deploy to Afghanistan in 2004, then-Captain Schmidt knew he would encounter poverty and illiteracy on a scale unknown to most Americans, and he figured he would want to do something to help for humanitarian reasons. When he got there, he found that helping made strategic sense as well. Schmidt is the founder of Operation Dreamseed, a nonprofit organization that started as an effort to distribute school supplies to kids in...

In 1971, biologists moved five adult pairs of Italian wall lizards from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring island of Pod Mrcaru. Now, an international team of researchers has shown that introducing these small, green-backed lizards, Podarcis sicula, to a new environment caused them to undergo rapid and large-scale evolutionary changes. “Striking differences in head size and shape, increased bite strength and the development of new structures in the lizard’s digestive tracts were noted after only 36 years, which is an extremely short time scale,” says Duncan Irschick, a professor of biology...

Edward Lorenz, an MIT meteorologist who tried to explain why it is so hard to make good weather forecasts and wound up unleashing a scientific revolution called chaos theory, died April 16 of cancer at his home in Cambridge. He was 90.A professor at MIT, Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere--or a model of the atmosphere--could trigger vast and often unsuspected results. These observations ultimately led him to formulate what...

As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

Breaking News: Scientists call on UN Climate Committee to admit they are wrong and renounce Global Warming claims and policies This was sent by Lars Larson . Yesterday, one of the scientists involved was on his radio show with news of this new information. Please pass it around! Tell the president and McCain, since they seem to be out of the loop! The UN's Climate Committee leadership and policies were today challenged by four scientists, including one Nobel Peace Prize winner, from around the world to admit that CO2 centred Global Warming theories are now disproved by observations and to...

Introduction On March 29th I attended the second fully edited prescreening of the soon to be released movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The event was hosted by the Directors Guild of America at one of their lovely theaters on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Ben Stein, the co-writer, producer, and main actor in the film was also present to help introduce the documentary and for a Q&A session following it. Overall scope First of all I personally felt that the film was very well produced and executed. Even though much of it focused on interviews of several different persons in...

GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world. "If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

Energy: The world's poor are learning what happens when government subsidizes the burning of food. It's time to end this madness and let the market decide if any biofuels make sense. For most Americans, the rising prices at the supermarket are definitely an annoyance, but hardly a threat to life and health. It's a different story in countries like Haiti, where food inflation has led to real hunger and, last week, to riots. News reports say the poorest Haitians are trying to get by on cookies made with dirt, vegetable oil and salt. Food riots also have roiled Egypt and...

THE next time you stop at a gas station, wincing at the $3.50-a-gallon price and bemoaning society’s dependence on petroleum, take a step back and look inside your car. Much of what you see in there comes from petroleum, too: the plastic dashboard, the foam in the seats. More than a tenth of the world’s oil is spent not on powering engines but as a feedstock for making chemicals that enrich many goods — from cosmetics to cleaners and fabric to automobile parts. In recent years, this unsettling fact has motivated academic researchers and corporations to find ways to make...

BISMARCK, North Dakota (AP) - The U.S. government estimated Thursday that up to 4.3 billion barrels of oil can be recovered from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana, using current technology. The U.S. Geological Survey called it the largest continuous oil accumulation it has ever assessed. The Bakken Formation encompasses some 25,000 square miles (64,750 sq. kilometers) in North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, in three layers. About two-thirds of the acreage is in western North Dakota, where the oil is trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles (3 kilometers) beneath the surface....

In trying to assure the market that there is a future for advanced biofuels, the US Congress may have gone too far. Its 2007 mandate for the production of such fuels, intended to convince technologists that a substantial market was guaranteed, may in fact be hampering the technology's development. The targets are so ambitious that many now expect them to be cut back, thus creating an uncertainty just like the one Congress intended to dispel. Several companies are moving forward with demonstration plants — partially sponsored by the US Energy Department — to produce ethanol from cellulose in corn (maize)...

A plan to hold a presidential debate on science and technology issues in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, next week has failed. Now organizers hope to stage the event on 9 May in Oregon. But with candidates careful to avoid missteps, that plan faces tough odds. Launched in December, ScienceDebate2008 is a grass-roots movement to hold a national discussion on science and technology issues, including stem cell research, climate change, and science education. Dozens of the nation's science organizations are behind it, including the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS),...

Enlarge ImageSpotted. Gentile Francesco Ficetola collects water to test for the DNA of bullfrogs (inset).Credit: Claude Miaud; Mathieu Berroneau (inset) Scientists have hit upon a way to spy on invasive wetland species without ever having to see them: They simply detect their DNA in the water. The technique worked for bullfrogs, and such DNA scans could eventually be used in rapid surveys of biodiversity. The North American bullfrog (Rana catesbeiana) has successfully invaded countries around the world, including at least five in Europe. Tracking the frog in southwest France, Gentile Francesco Ficetola has tromped through more than 2500 wetlands....

In Stalin's Russia any dissenter from the Party Line was guilty. Innocence had to be proved. It's a standard tyrant's trick. During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witchhunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. The accused witches had to prove their innocence. That's what Al Gore has done to science: He and his friends have flipped innocence and guilt from normal science to Stalinist science. In Al Gore's America, any "global warming denier" is guilty until proven innocent. He or she must have been bought off by Big Oil.   Skeptics, no matter how well-qualified,...

After seeing a new non-fiction film starring Comedy Central’s Ben Stein, you may not only be able to win his money, but also his career. Stein is that whiny little guy with the monotone voice that makes him seem funny and an unlikely "character" for TV appearances. But that career may be over come April 18 when a movie he co-wrote, narrates and appears in, called "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," is released. Directed by one Nathan Frankowski, "Expelled" is a sloppy, all-over-the-place, poorly made (and not just a little boring) "expose" of the scientific community. It’s not very exciting. But...

GENEVA (Reuters) - British physicist Peter Higgs said on Monday it should soon be possible to prove the existence of a force which gives mass to the universe and makes life possible -- as he first argued 40 years ago. Higgs said he believes a particle named the "Higgs boson," which originates from the force, will be found when a vast particle collider at the CERN research centre on the Franco-Swiss border begins operating fully early next year."The likelihood is that the particle will show up pretty quickly ... I'm more than 90 percent certain that it will," Higgs told...

British scientist Peter Higgs, whose work is the cornerstone of modern physics, said Monday he is putting champagne on ice in the hope a new experiment confirms his theories on how the universe works. Higgs, a veteran professor at Edinburgh University, told journalists in a rare interview that he hopes a vast experiment in the tunnels deep underground the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border could finally prove the existence of an elusive and unstable particle to which he has lent his name. The so-called "Higgs Boson" has been dubbed the 'God Particle' because so many have searched for it...

THE scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome is to publish a book explaining why he now believes in the existence of God and is convinced that miracles are real. Francis Collins, the director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man “closer to God”. His book, The Language of God, to be published in September, will reopen the age-old debate about the relationship between science and faith. “One of the great tragedies of our time is this impression that has been...

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video...

A new brain-scan study may help explain what's going on in the minds of financial titans when they take risky monetary gambles — sex. When young men were shown erotic pictures, they were more likely to make a larger financial gamble than if they were shown a picture of something scary, such a snake, or something neutral, such as a stapler, university researchers reported. The arousing pictures lit up the same part of the brain that lights up when financial risks are taken. "You have a need in an evolutionary sense for both money and women. They trigger the same...

Changes in the sun's intensity are not behind modern climate change, new evidence suggests. # 'Adapt to climate change, don't fight it' | IPCC 'underplays climate change' # New climate change security threats|Warming blamed for ice shelf collapse The research, carried out by physicists at Lancaster University, undermines claims by climate sceptics that cosmic rays are key drivers in cloudiness and temperature. The theory claims that variation in solar activity leads to a corresponding variance in cosmic rays. Solar activity 'not behind climate change' Solar activity is not linked to Earth temperature changes, says research However, the Lancaster team, whose...

HUMAN-cow embryos have been created in a world first at Newcastle University in England, hailed by the scientific community, but labelled "monstrous" by opponents. A team has grown hybrid embryos after injecting human DNA into eggs taken from cows' ovaries, which had most of their genetic material removed...

Take a minute to think about the following: When was the last time you made a mathematical calculation in your head or by hand (yes which means not using a calculator)? Surely, some of you avoid math like the plague – especially when your teenage child comes around looking for help on their math homework – but you must admit that even in this compalculator era it comes in handy to be able to tally your bills in your head or figure out the miles per gallon you’re getting while driving along in traffic. Surely it seems reasonable to expect...

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe. Scientists say that...

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Scientists in Japan have designed artificial molecules that when used with rats successfully reversed liver cirrhosis, a serious chronic disease in humans that until now can only be cured by transplants. Cirrhosis is the hardening or scarring of the liver, and is caused by factors such as heavy drinking and Hepatitis B and C. The disease is especially serious in parts of Asia, including China. Cirrhosis occurs when a class of liver cells starts producing collagen, a fibrous material that toughens skin and tendons. Such damage cannot be reversed although steps can be taken to prevent...