The Guardian reported last Friday on a potential new hydrogen fuel process, discovered by medical doctor Randell Mills, that would allow us to tap water for heat with roughly the same efficiency as coal. Supposedly, prototype heaters making use of this process have already been demonstrated and the process replicated independently. The only problem is that it appears to be physically impossible.

Apparently, despite the amount of coddling the human race receives from its safety-conscious societies, the human genome is still evolving, finding 9% of our genes evolving rapidly, and another 13% showing signs of negative selection.

This cheers me immensely, as I'd figured that by this point we were simply breeding for brutality. But then, I'm a cynical sort.

The Abstract Factory has posted an entertaining, if violent, fantasy of how a debate with a creationist might run.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize winners have been officially announced. Highlights from this year include testicular implants for neutered dogs (medicine), Nigerian spam scams (literature), and an alarm clock that runs away and hides when you press snooze (economics).

Thus advances mankind.

No, not an obscure conspiracy theory about what happened in New Orleans, but rather a link to a somewhat disturbing article about how parasitic hairworms can actually control grasshoppers into drowning themselves, so they'll have easy access to water after they've eaten up their host.

I didn't apply an emotion tag to this entry because the only thing that would apply is "vaguely weirded out", and that's too long for a tag.

I find myself very curious as to the exact mechanism, however; in other cases where parasites have some form of behavioural control, such as with the aggression from rabies, or the odd weaving in the orb spiders mentioned in the article, the effect comes from triggering a behaviour already common (aggression), or interrupting an existing sequence (having a spider repeat only the first two stages of web weaving over and over again). I have no idea how the worms manage to convince grasshoppers to go swimming. That's not something grasshoppers really do, and I have a hard time seeing that as a reaction to something like thirst.

From an interesting article titled, Masculinity Challenged, Men Prefer War and SUVs:

It makes you wonder a bit about the real motivation behind the current White House stances on gay rights, war, and the environment.

NASA's Deep Impact program was a great success, both for NASA and for science in general... but it seems to have had some drawbacks. A superstitious Russian loon by the name of Marina Bai is suing NASA for "moral sufferings", after earlier claims that the experiment would "deform her horoscope". All this, despite the fact that astrologers aren't known for using advanced optics, and the comet, Tempel 1, isn't even visible to the naked eye.

Independence day has just ended, and in the spirit of a holidy, I have something positive to report: some parts of the U.S. are making significant progress in improving their environment, meeting the Kyoto standard even though the White House failed to support it — and rather than going bankrupt doing it, they're actually coming out ahead economically. The trick appears to be to take a large number of little steps, all couched in terms of solving other problems that citizens want dealt with (such as traffic congestion or energy costs), redirecting saved money from energy into public transit, and nudging businesses to support public transit. Portland, Oregon's carbon dioxide emissions are at pre-1990 levels now.

DarkSyde has posted an excellent summary of the major pieces of evidence supporting the common descent theory. It's a good reference to have nearby in case creationists attack.

Some of them make as long as 34 years.