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What started out as a convenient collaboration between Dr. Richard Terry, professor of soil science at BYU, and a group of BYU archaeologists, soon became a groundbreaking discovery. Trough the combined efforts of Dr. Terry, Dr. Bruce Dahlin from Howard University, their students, and archaeologists from around the world, they were able to disprove the long-held belief that the Maya depended on the elite class to tax and redistribute their food and other goods. After receiving a collaborative research grant from the National Science Foundation, Terry and his students met up with Bruce Dahlin and his students at the huge...

The New York Times devoted a big chunk of its front page one day last week to noting that much of the spilled BP Deepwater Horizon oil has "dissipated." Most of it, in fact. And to scant noticeable ill-effect -- at least so far -- relative to the apocalyptic rhetoric attending weeks of televised video footage that showed oil rushing from the ocean floor. It's not clear how much oil actually spilled; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute expert Dr. Judy McDowell estimates that between 96 million and 184 million gallons made its way into the Gulf before the leak was capped...

Science is losing its credibility because it has adopted an authoritarian tone, and has let itself be co-opted by politics. In a Wired article published at the end of May, writer Erin Biba bemoans the fact that “science” is losing its credibility with the public. The plunge in the public’s belief in catastrophic climate change is her primary example. Biba wonders whether the loss of credibility might be due to the malfeasance unearthed by the leak of emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, but comes to the conclusion that malfeasance...

The traditional understanding of DNA has recently been transformed beyond recognition. DNA does not, as we thought, carry a linear, one-dimensional, one-way, sequential code—like the lines of letters and words on this page. And the 97% in humans that does not carry protein-coding genes is not, as many people thought, fossilized ‘junk’ left over from our evolutionary ancestors. DNA information is overlapping-multi-layered and multi-dimensional; it reads both backwards and forwards; and the ‘junk’ is far more functional than the protein code, so there is no fossilized history of evolution. No human engineer has ever even imagined, let alone designed an...

Books | Review of: The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi's "The Great Transformation" (1944), published in the same year as Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," is as sacred a text to the opponents of free-market capitalism as Hayek's is to the Chicago School. To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in "The Great Transformation." It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals...

I have a feeling that we'll be staying with this arc of salvation business for a while. However, like the course of exterior history -- which is the arc's shadow in the herebelow -- we may jump around a bit, up and down, back and forth, in and out. For one thing, I can only write things as they occur to me, as none of this has been thought out in advance. Furthermore, dwelling within it simultaneously brings it into being. Not to spark another debate about the Trinity, but another universal trinity as it pertains to man's spiritual development...