Free Republic

In a veiled attack on creationism, the world's foremost academies of science on Wednesday called on parents and teachers to provide children with the facts about evolution and the origins of life on Earth. A declaration signed by 67 national academies of science blasted the scriptural teaching of biology as a potential distortion of young minds. "In various parts of the world, within science courses taught in certain public systems of education, scientific evidence, data and testable theories about the origins and evolution of life on Earth are being concealed, denied or confused with theories not testable by science," the...

Nuclear reactors could be built more efficiently using supercomputers to artificially "evolve" designs, say engineers from the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They have found they can speed up the extremely complex process of designing a reactor and generate novel designs from scratch by simulating natural selection. Designing a nuclear reactor normally involves input from various specialists and the resulting structure can be uniquely influenced by this collaborative process. "The design that comes out of this lengthy process is typically sub-optimal," says Louis Qualls, a nuclear systems specialist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. "If you...