Won’t Someone PLEASE Think of the Children?
The monthly discomfort many women see as a curse could pay off someday as Japanese researchers say menstrual blood can be used to repair heart damage… Link to article at Yahoo News
The monthly discomfort many women see as a curse could pay off someday as Japanese researchers say menstrual blood can be used to repair heart damage… Link to article at Yahoo News
There are a series of studies I’ve been looking for and cannot seem to locate. I first heard about the work being done on kittens back when I was an undergrad studying various theories of visual perception, and I heard later that the same work was done on humans. The work must be at least fifteen years old. The studies involved inverting the visual fields of subjects and setting them loose to make their way in the world. The visual fields, after X number of days/weeks, righted themselves spontaneously, in spite of subjects still wearing inverting-glasses/apparati. Once the glasses were removed, the subjects found their visual fields inverted again on their own. Dennett may have even referenced these in one of the Brainstorms books.
Does anyone have a title and journal reference for me on these studies? I’ve come up empty handed for ages trying to find them. (They seem to be referenced anecdotally often, but I’ve yet to track down the source of the anecdotes!) Leave a comment or drop me an email if you can help!
Like hundreds of young men joining the Army in recent years, Jeremy Hall professes a desire to serve his country while it fights terrorism. But the short and soft-spoken specialist is at the center of a legal controversy. He has filed a lawsuit alleging he’s been harassed and his constitutional rights have been violated because he doesn’t believe in God. The suit names Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
“I’m not in it for cash,” Hall said. “I want no one else to go what I went through.”
Known as “the atheist guy,” Hall has been called immoral, a devil worshipper and — just as severe to some soldiers — gay, none of which, he says, is true. Hall even drove fellow soldiers to church in Iraq and paused while they prayed before meals.
If he was black or asian instead of an atheist, the fact that this is a civil rights issue would be a lot more obvious to the clueless. America doesn’t deserve someone like this putting his life on the line for us. He certainly will never be recognized for what it takes to join an organization that thinks you’re the enemy.
Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator Mohammed Maree were arrested April 10. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.
The message only had one word. “Arrested.” Link to article on CNN
Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday. The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age… Link to CNN.com article
Lawmakers have agreed to make it illegal for employers and insurance companies to deny applicants jobs and health care coverage because DNA tests show they are genetically disposed to a disease… Link to article at CNN.com
I’ve seen this article linked a few places around blogtown today, but I haven’t read much commentary on it. I’ve seen the usual cracks about Ben Stein being mad at these lizards, etc., but I’m curious if anyone has been taking the other side. Given that we are all evolution-appreciators here, we understand that these lizards, having evolved in isolatioin at an amazing pace that should’ve taken millions of years, are a beautiful elegant demonstration of evolution in real-time. But I’m curious if there are creationists in their own little corner of the internet using these lizards as evidence against evolution. As if to say, “See?! We can be 6,000 years old after all! These lizards prove it!”
I think part of me is just exasperated with seeing the utter ridiculousness of some of the arguments that occur online, as if they’re anything other than a giant waste of time, but that’s probably the stressed-out dissertation-writer speaking.
I’d be interested (in that morbidly, gawking-at-horrors sort of way) to see links any of you might’ve stumbled upon that support my intuition that creationists are mis-understanding the news about these rapidly evolving lizards.
Italian wall lizards introduced to a tiny island off the coast of Croatia are evolving in ways that would normally take millions of years to play out, new research shows.
In just a few decades the 5-inch-long (13-centimeter-long) lizards have developed a completely new gut structure, larger heads, and a harder bite, researchers say.
A wall-mounted gadget designed to drive away loiterers with a shrill, piercing noise audible only to teens and young adults is infuriating civil liberties groups and tormenting young people after being introduced into the United States… Link to CNN.com article
In the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, narrator Ben Stein poses as a “rebel” willing to stand up to the scientific establishment in defense of freedom and honest, open discussion of controversial ideas like intelligent design (ID). But Expelled has some problems of its own with honest, open presentations of the facts about evolution, ID—and with its own agenda…. Link to SciAm article.
John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, and his sons are suing the filmmakers of “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” for using the song “Imagine” in the documentary without permission.…. Link to Reuters article.