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The House of Representatives has approved an addition to the healthcare reform package. It calls for the creation of a “Healthy Teen Initiative”, and allocates $50 million to so-called “comprehensive” sex education. “This was a vote to bring science back into government”, said James Wagoner, president of Advocates For Youth and a leader of the coalition that promoted the amendment. The committee, he continued, “has taken an important step toward ensuring young people get the critical sexual health information they need to make responsible decisions about their lives.” Mr. Wagoner’s statement is astonishing, because Advocates for Youth’s sexual education curricula...

Professor William Calvin Unhinged! Calls on scientists to use 'interventional activism' to combat global warming! 'Climate will change our ways of doing science' - Claims 'long term thinking can be dangerous' Monday, August 03, 2009- By Marc Morano – Climate Depot [Climate Depot Editorial Note: Dr. Calvin should consider heeding the wisdom of Dr. Richard Lindzen. See: MIT Climate Scientist Lindzen: 'Ordinary people see through man-made climate fears -- but educated people are very vulnerable' - July 6, 2009 ] By William Calvin, Neuroscientist at the University of Washington School of Medicine; Author of “A Brain for All Seasons: Human...

Note: The following text is a quote: American Forces Press Service Navy Task Force Assesses Changing Climate Special to American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, July 31, 2009 – Rapidly diminishing sea ice, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, increased storm severity -- all are possible consequences of a climate that mounting evidence suggests is changing significantly. As the scientific community works to understand the changing climate, the chief of naval operations has created a task force, headed by Rear Adm. David Titley, the Navy's senior oceanographer, to better understand and evaluate its implications for maritime security. “Task Force Climate Change was...

A majority of adults in Canada, the United States and Britain believe global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. At least 51 per cent of respondents in the three countries agree with this statement. Conversely, 21 per cent of Britons, 19 per cent of Canadians and 17 per cent of Americans believe global warming is happening but is mostly caused by natural changes. Also, 20 per cent of respondents in the U.S., 16 per cent in Canada and 16 per cent in Britain...

Its become a mantra on the left… "Manmade Global Climate Change!" "We must HALT it!" "We're DOOMED!" +++++++snip+++++++ Thankfully real scientists are now fighting back. Successfully! Atmospheric Chemist Roger L. Tanner: "I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other 'free-market fanatics,' and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose." ++++++++snip++++++++ In a final coup d'état, Climate Depot exposes this little gem: UN IPCC's William Schlesinger admits in 2009 that only 20% of IPCC scientists...

The fatal flaw with radioactive dating methods --snip-- This illustrates the problem with the radioactive dating of geological events. Those who promote the reliability of the method spend a lot of time impressing you with the technical details of radioactive decay, half-lives, mass-spectroscopes, etc. But they don’t discuss the basic flaw in the method: you cannot determine the age of a rock using radioactive dating because...

The staggered phase out of energy-wasting light bulbs begins on Sept. 1 in Germany. The unpopularity of the energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs that will replace them is leading consumers and retailers to start hoarding the traditional bulbs. As the Sept. 1 deadline for the implementation of the first phase of the EU's ban on incandescent light bulbs approaches, shoppers, retailers and even museums are hoarding the precious wares -- and helping the manufacturers make a bundle. The EU ban, adopted in March, calls for the gradual replacement of traditional light bulbs with supposedly more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). The...

Researchers found that attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Once those daughters become adult they tend to be good looking themselves and so the pattern is repeated as women over the generations become steadily more aesthetically pleasing. As attractive couples are less likely to have boy than a girl, men, in contrast, remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the scientists claim. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. In a study...

Facilitated variation is the first comprehensive theory of how life works at the molecular level, published in 2005 by systems biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in their book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. It is a very powerful theory, is supported by a great deal of evidence, and the authors have made it easy to understand. It identifies two basic components of heredity: (a) conserved core processes of cellular structure, function and body plan organization; and (b) modular regulatory mechanisms that are built in special ways that allow them to be easily rearranged (like ®Lego blocks) into...

It's now more than 50 years since the revolution began. Sexual "liberation" has been endlessly ballyhooed by the national media, promoted in the movies, embraced by Playboy guys and Cosmo girls as a freedom more delicious than Eden's apple. No American under 40 can honestly remember a time when sex on TV was taboo, when "living together" meant married, when "gay" meant happy, and when almost every child lived with both parents.   If truth be told, the revolution has been a disaster. Before the push to loosen America's sexual mores really got under way in the 1950s, the...

Last month, the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization affiliated with George Mason University, released "Science Suppressed: How America became obsessed with BPA," a report which accuses the media "of ignoring the extensive research of respected scientists and major health agencies in the United States and around the world, which found BPA was not only safe but played an important role in ensuring food safety."   It also confirms what countless previous studies have said; BPA is safe. If you're unfamiliar with Bisphenol A (BPA), it is a chemical used to make lightweight, versatile, durable, high-performance plastics.  It's...

The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings: Ø The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary. Ø Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of...

SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise. The judge referred to the theory’s “breathtaking inanity,’’ which is a fine description of Stephen Meyer’s July 15 op-ed “Jefferson’s support for intelligent design.’’ Well, yes, Thomas Jefferson died 33 years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species.’’ And Meyer’s idea that the DNA code implies a code...

Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.....she and colleagues say barking is the auditory signal associated with an evolved behavior known as mobbing, a cooperative anti-predator response usually initiated by one individual who notices an approaching intruder. A dog barks because she feels an internal conflict an urge...

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect. The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago AKA the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. "In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in...

For example, we now know that: Birds adapted to the diverse environments several distinct times because many birds that now live on water (such as flamingos, tropicbirds and grebes) did not evolve from a different waterbird group, and many birds that now live on land (such as turacos, doves, sandgrouse and cuckoos) did not evolve from a different landbird group.Similarly, distinctive lifestyles (such as nocturnal, raptorial and pelagic, i.e., living on the ocean or open seas) evolved several times. For example, contrary to conventional thinking, colorful, daytime hummingbirds evolved from drab nocturnal nightjars; falcons are not closely related to hawks...

The most complete skeleton of a type of pot-bellied dinosaur, a therizinosaur, has been discovered in southern Utah. Such remains shed light on the evolution of leafy and meaty diets back in paleo times, suggesting that iconic predators like Velociraptor may have evolved from less fearsome plant-eating ancestors. The newly discovered dinosaur, dubbed Nothronychus graffami, lived some 93 million years ago. When alive, the animal would have stood at 13 feet (4 meters) and sported a beaked mouth and forelimbs tipped with 9 inch- (22 cm)-long sickle claws. Its stumpy legs, large gut and other features suggest the lumbering giant...

-- Scientists have confirmed the oldest penis-like structure in an ancient fish specimen. The discovery of the 400 million-year-old reproductive organ is one of the earliest examples of internal fertilization in vertebrate animals. Understanding the anatomy of these ancient fish could reveal further details in the evolution of vertebrates -- including humans. The research is published in today's advanced online ahead of print edition of Nature. Earlier this year the team, led by Australian palaeontologist Dr John Long, predicted some ancient fish from the Devonian era, had an attachment to their pelvic bone, which were used by males to fertilize...

(CNSNews.com) - A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters of Americans would like teachers to have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution, with an even higher number reported among Democrats...

A thorough and entertaining refutation of the "settled science" of global warming.