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Have we figured out who these guys are? They seem so fake to me, the person who sent me this picture thinks they are real, and it upsets them.

The 15th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), as we discuss the state of the world. Find more from us on Bret’s website (https://bretweinstein.net) or Heather’s website (http://heatherheying.com).

Physicist says imaging techniques prove the president's bulge was not caused by wrinkled clothing. George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. “I don’t know what that is,” he said on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. “I’m embarrassed to say it’s a poorly tailored shirt.”......

Explanation: Follow the handle of the Big Dipper away from the dipper's bowl, until you get to the handle's last bright star. Then, just slide your telescope a little south and west and you might find this stunning pair of interacting galaxies, the 51st entry in Charles Messier's famous catalog. Perhaps the original spiral nebula, the large galaxy with well defined spiral structure is also cataloged as NGC 5194. Its spiral arms and dust lanes clearly sweep in front of its companion galaxy (left), NGC 5195. The pair are about 31 million light-years distant and officially lie within the angular...

Rapper Snoop Dogg will not be watching the remake of the miniseries “Roots,” and is calling on others to follow his lead. In a profanity-filled video on Instagram, the 44-year-old rap star and actor slammed the History Channel’s remake of the landmark 1977 miniseries about slavery, which began airing Monday. “I’m sick of this s—. How the f— are they going to put ‘Roots’ on, on Memorial Day?” he said in the video posted Monday. “They going to just to keep beating that s— into our heads about how they did us, huh?” Starting the video by saying “No disrespect,”...

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- FIFA has banned Uruguay striker Luis Suarez from all football activities for four months for biting an opponent at the World Cup, ruling him out of the rest of the tournament and the start of the upcoming Premier League season. The ban also covers Uruguay's next nine international games, which goes beyond the next four months and rules him out of next year's Copa America. FIFA also fined the Liverpool striker 100,000 Swiss francs ($112,000).

Think religion, think ritual: history, perhaps sacred writings, proscribed sets of moral laws, and potentially a sacrifice or two. There are plenty of organizations and cultures around the world that claim they adhere to a certain set of beliefs, but could adoration and a cult following for a technology firm be the next step? The University of British Columbia's Dr. Kirsten Bell believes that much of the aforementioned applies to Apple. After observing launch videos, and recently attending the iPad mini launch for TechNewsDaily, the social anthropologist said that Mac fandom has some strikingly similar parallels between a religion or...

Creative types are thought to be more likely to suffer from mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A new large-scale study of the Swedish population helps confirm this link. Last year, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm found that families with a history of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia were more likely to produce artists and scientists. They built on this evidence in a new study, published this month in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, which covers a larger population sample and a wider scope of psychiatric diagnoses...

Has the committee which runs the Nobel Peace Prize been infiltrated by satirists or opponents keen on discrediting the organisation? Norwegian radio reports this morning, carried by Reuters, suggested that the European Union is to be awarded the prize for supposedly keeping the peace in Europe for the last sixty years. Was this a Nordic spoof? Apparently not. It is only a few years since President Obama was ludicrously awarded the Nobel peace prize for winning the 2008 election and not being George Bush. Since then Mr Obama has continued the war in Afghanistan, stepped up drone attacks and got...

The Bill O'Reilly of pseudo-documentaries, self-promotional blowhard Michael Moore, presents Sicko, a distortion of reality from start to finish that purports to address a crucial issue: health care. Having declined to review Moore's smash, Fahrenheit 9/11, and having missed his anti-business Roger and Me and anti-gun Bowling for Columbine, this writer was prepared to laugh, or at least chuckle, at the mess that constitutes today's mongrel health care system in America (and I've covered health policy for newspapers and non-profits). But this hooey, billed as a comedy, is as funny as a heart attack.

'Atkins hormone' discovered 05 June 2007 They are loved and endorsed by celebrities and dismissed as an unhealthy diet craze by critics. But 'low carb', high protein and high fat diets have proven their metabolic worth: scientists in the US have discovered a fat-burning role for a specific hormone stimulated by these eating regimes. The work has also raised the intriguing question of whether the Atkins diet could make you live longer. A group of researchers led by Steven Kliewer at Southwestern University in Dallas, Texas found that a growth hormone called fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF21) stimulates fat metabolism in...

... But most football people, and especially football coaches, are of the "Football Is Not a Matter of Life and Death -- It's More Important Than That" school of thought. However, when Randy Shannon, recently named head coach of the University of Miami Hurricanes, says that football can be a matter of life and death, that is not hyperbole, it is autobiography...

NASA expects to decide by the end of the year whether to use conventional solar arrays or a nuclear battery to power the 2009 Mars Science Laboratory rover. NASA clearly would prefer to use a so-called multi-mission radioisotope thermoelectric generator, or MMRTG, a device that converts heat from decaying Plutonium-238 into electricity. But federal environmental regulations require the U.S. agency to give the general public a chance to weigh in before making a final decision on the rover, which will be roughly the size of a compact car and equipped with 10 instruments.

Just the facts . . . at least as we know them BY LEONARD PITTS JR.KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS September 15, 2006 I beg your pardon.Apparently I made a major error of fact in a recent column. It turns out, contrary to what I wrote, that there never was a Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the United States.It wasn't hijacked airliners that brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Nor did any airplane plow into the Pentagon. Nor did United Flight 93 come to earth in a field in Shanksville, Pa. Rather, the U.S. government staged this...

Doctors expose BMI shortcomings Doctors have questioned a common measure of obesity after research found that "overweight" heart patients had better survival rates than those described as "normal". They say the finding exposes shortcomings in the use of Body Mass Index (BMI), which has formed the basis of defining healthy and abnormal weight for more than 100 years. Many experts now say that waist circumference or waist-to-hip ratio, which indicate levels of abdominal fat, are more accurate guides. BMI, invented by ADVERTISEMENT the Belgian statistician and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet in 1869, is calculated by dividing a person's weight in kilograms...

Dan Simmons comments -- The deeper question here is whether we want to turn major political decisions and huge efforts at terraforming Terra over to scientists (as Kim Stanley Robinson fictionally argues is necessary in his series of much-applauded global warming novels.) I love science. I consider it one of the few decent thought-systems ever created by the human species. Its very reliance on self-correction is what sets it apart from all the myriad of religions, political systems, ideologies, and self-help creeds that begin with "self-evident" propositions and go downhill from there. On the other hand, just as real democracies...

The public space travel business is picking up suborbital speed thanks to a variety of private rocket groups and their dream machines. Joining the mix is Blue Origin's New Shepard Reusable Launch System. It is financially fueled by an outflow of dollars from the deep pockets of billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. The Bezos-backed Blue Origin, LLC commercial space outfit has recently turned in a draft environmental assessment (EA) for their West Texas launch site to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation (AST) in Washington, D.C. The document is the best glimpse yet of...

"It never occurred to me in my earlier creations of these freewheeling monthly or bimonthly "Messages from Dan" that I would have to write a Message about a previous Message. But it seems obvious that I must do just that. (For those visitors who may have missed the April 2006 Message, please find it in the archives linked above—or be warned that what follows here will be very cryptic, at best.)"... Other forum-posters were incensed that I could not see the true evil stalking the world today—the United States of America, with the mendacious madman George W. Bush at the...

"The invasion of Iraq was not an act of revenge or justice. (Just as the bombing of the Ploesti fields was not an act of pique at the occupied Romanians.)From the Time Traveler's perspective -- and from the Bush Administration's perspective -- the Iraq invasion is seen as the second move in a very serious chess game in which the only absolute goal is to neutralize an opponent's ability (and stated goal) to acquire and deliver weapons of mass destruction more devastating than fully fueled Boeing 737's."......" The point here is that we can argue that the second move in...

For those of you who love/hate the Baby Einstein series of toys, here is a Bush bashing version http://www.babybushtoys.com/ Its pretty funny, and I am a conservative who loves to laugh at himself, as well as those he supports, at times. It is rather telling, this obsession with his supposed lack of intellect. Reveals something of their circle-jerk behavior.