5th Jul 2008 : JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

5th Jul 2008 : Sam Harris and Richard Carrier talk about their differing views on the rapture.

5th Jul 2008 : Some of psychology's most famous experiments are those that expose the skull beneath the skin, the apparent cowardice or depravity pooling in almost every heart.

The findings force a question. Would I really do that? Could I betray my own eyes, my judgment, even my humanity, just to complete some experiment?

5th Jul 2008 :
WASHINGTON -- From climate change to volcanoes and earthquakes, the world's growing challenges have leaders in earth science proposing a merger of agencies that study the planet.

Creation of a new Earth Systems Science Agency is urged in this week's edition of the journal Science, by merging the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey.

4th Jul 2008 : A Christian group promoting intelligent design theory over evolution has sent teaching material to schools that critics say is religious propaganda and sloppy pseudoscience.

The Education Ministry says the unsanctioned material does not breach the Education Act and there are no plans to ban its distribution.

4th Jul 2008 : Pope watchers have been put on notice that the Vatican does not take kindly to facile labels like "retro" or "vintage" when discussing the sartorial choices of Pope Benedict XVI.

After insistent rumours that the pope's red shoes were from luxury house Prada, the Vatican finally put the matter to rest.

4th Jul 2008 : (CNSNews.com) - As the price of oil continues to rise, some are turning to God and prayer for an answer to their financial troubles.

The Pray at the Pump Movement, founded by Rocky Twyman, has been holding prayer vigils at gas stations across the country. On Monday, Twyman decided to take his movement from Exxon and Shell stations straight to the steps of the Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C., hoping to encourage the oil-rich country to raise the amount of barrels they release each day from 200,000 to 1.2 million.

4th Jul 2008 : Principles of sharia law could play a role in some parts of the legal system, the Lord Chief Justice has said.

Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said there was no reason sharia law's principles could not be used in mediation.

However, he said this would still be subject to the "jurisdiction of the English and Welsh courts".

3rd Jul 2008 : Morris Iemma leads a Government whose members have displayed a truly impressive array of human failings. If we limit the list just to convicted criminals, it has harboured in its ranks a drink driver and a pedophile, not to mention a number of serial speeders. So it's no wonder an official visit from a man who can absolve sins is appealing to the State Government. But it's probably also not a surprise that the Government has, yet again, demonstrated bad judgment and made a bad law.

3rd Jul 2008 : Life on Earth might have emerged about 750 million years earlier than previously thought, new research suggests.

Researchers have found unusually light isotopes of carbon, a common indicator of life, in the Earth's oldest mineral deposit, found in the Jack Hills in Western Australia. The carbon dates to more than 4.25 billion years ago, a time known as the Hadean period.

2nd Jul 2008 :
AUSTIN – A former state science curriculum director filed suit against the Texas Education Agency and Education Commissioner Robert Scott on Wednesday, alleging she was illegally fired for forwarding an e-mail about a lecture that was critical of the teaching of intelligent design in science classes.

2nd Jul 2008 : ZANESVILLE, Ohio — With an eye toward courting evangelical voters, Senator Barack Obama arrived here on Tuesday to present a plan to expand on President Bush's program of investing federal money in religious-based initiatives that are intended to fight poverty and perform community aid work.

1st Jul 2008 : July 1, 2008 | With biologist Richard Dawkins leading the way, many scientists today are locked in an unending match of whack-a-mole with Christian creationists, who insist that God created heaven, earth and humanity in its present form, and with disciples of intelligent design who want to expel evolution from its scientific prominence in public schools. If you've been following the battle, you might be inclined to believe that Americans are faced with a choice between believing in God and scientific fact.

1st Jul 2008 : James P. Evans, a physician and molecular biologist, teaches genetics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He also directs the school's Clinical Cancer Genetics Services, counseling patients about genetic testing. On weekends Dr. Evans, under the auspices of the Advanced Science and Technology Adjudication Resource Center — a Congressionally mandated program — teaches the nation's judges about genetics. Dr. Evans, 49, was interviewed recently in New York; he had come to speak at the World Science Festival.

30th Jun 2008 : This week sees the anniversary of one of the greatest landmarks in the history of science. Tomorrow we commemorate the great day, exactly 150 years ago, that Charles Darwin unveiled his theory of evolution by natural selection, the most authoritative scientific challenge to Biblical accounts of our origins in, well, the history of the universe.

30th Jun 2008 :
How's this for a coincidence? Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born in the same year, on the same day: Feb. 12, 1809. As historical facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it's just a coincidence, it's a coincidence that's guaranteed to make you do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution and the Civil War in the same sentence? Why would you, unless you're writing your dissertation on epochal events in the 19th century? But instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It's not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exact coevals. Rather, it's because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world.

30th Jun 2008 : Astronomers can deduce that the early universe expanded at a mind-boggling rate because regions separated by vast distances have similar background temperatures.

They have proposed a process of rapid expansion of neighbouring regions, with similar cosmic properties, to explain this growth spurt which they call inflation.

28th Jun 2008 : A short video clip of Richard's recent appearance on Doctor Who.

28th Jun 2008 : FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found. Thus it seems slightly less egregious that, according to another poll, 10 percent of us think that Senator Barack Obama, a Christian, is instead a Muslim. The Obama campaign has created a Web site to dispel misinformation. But this effort may be more difficult than it seems, thanks to the quirky way in which our brains store memories — and mislead us along the way.

28th Jun 2008 : A US sniper uses the Qur'an as target practice in Baghdad. A US Marine hands out coins to residents in Fallujah that ask in Arabic on one side: "Where will you spend eternity?" The other side is inscribed with a Biblical verse: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16." An American soldier who performed two tours in Iraq is denied promotion when his superiors learn he is an atheist, after he refuses to pray during Thanksgiving dinner (pdf). An anti-Islamic poster adorns the door of the Military Police office at Fort Riley, Kansas, featuring a quote from conservative pundit Ann Coulter: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity." And as the New York Times reported this week, some cadets at West Point and the Naval Academy feel pressured by their schools to adopt a Judeo-Christian worldview.

28th Jun 2008 : When Seagate Technology, the $11 billion-a-year maker of hard drives for the Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox, went searching for a consultant to run one of its management workshops in the fall of 2006, it bypassed the usual list of Silicon Valley gurus. Instead, Seagate's executive director of software engineering, Gabriel Lawson, invited Laura Day—a stylish New Yorker with no tech experience—to train his Colorado-based team. "She was amazing," Lawson tells NEWSWEEK, recalling Day's quick insights into the poor coordination between the company's research and marketing teams. "Anybody who can afford her will get 100 times their money's worth." What exactly is Day's expertise? While she likes to downplay it as mere "intuition," her clients prefer another explanation: she's a psychic.

28th Jun 2008 : In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, P.Z. Myers details his expulsion from a screening of Expelled, Ben Stein's documentary which claims that the scientific community is limiting academic freedom by not allowing Intelligent Design to be taught or discussed in the schools.

27th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2007) — Although psychiatrists are among the least religious physicians, they seem to be the most interested in the religious and spiritual dimensions of their patients, according to survey data published in the December issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Ever since Freud described religious faith as an illusion and a neurosis there has been tension and at times hostility between religion and psychiatry. Psychiatrists are less religious on average than other physicians, according to previously published data from the same survey, and non-psychiatrist physicians who are religious are less willing to refer their patients to psychiatrists.

27th Jun 2008 : The following clips were filmed in front of a live audience at Cheltenham Science Festival. Richard Dawkins provides a gripping insight into Darwin's theory of evolution and all that it implies.

27th Jun 2008 : People who believe that God is involved in worldly affairs are less likely to participate in national elections than others, according to a new survey.

The study, which included nearly 1,700 U.S. men and women with an average age of 53, suggests that a person's view of God is a variable that determines whether he or she will donate money to a campaign, read political news, or even vote.

26th Jun 2008 : As I write this from home, preparing to take a quick summer vacation, I am wearing one of my favorite T-shirts. It has a picture of some generic, primitive organism—maybe part blue-green algae, part bacterium or worm—and says in bold letters: "Proud of My Ancestry." I guess that tells you where I stand on the evolution debate.

26th Jun 2008 : "All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

26th Jun 2008 : MADRID (Reuters) - Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans.

25th Jun 2008 :

25th Jun 2008 : Is the matter in the universe arranged in a fractal pattern? A new study of nearly a million galaxies suggests it is – though there are no well-accepted theories to explain why that would be so.

Cosmologists trying to reconstruct the entire history of the universe have precious few clues from which to work. One key clue is the distribution of matter throughout space, which has been sculpted for nearly 14 billion years by the competing forces of gravity and cosmic expansion. If there is a pattern in the sky, it encodes the secrets of the universe.

25th Jun 2008 : IT is blasphemous, will get you arrested and has sparked debate about Australia's lack of a Bill of Rights.

Meet Cradle of Filth, an extreme metal band from England. Their offensive shirt that claims 'Jesus is a (expletive deleted)' and depicts a nun masturbating.

24th Jun 2008 : Condoms will be handed out to pilgrims en route to a papal Mass at Randwick Racecourse on World Youth Day as part of a protest against the Catholic Church's attitude to homosexuality, contraception and abortion.

A coalition of religious, atheist, gay and lesbian groups will stage the rally in Taylor Square from midday on Saturday July 19 before marching to the main event of the week-long World Youth Day celebrations.

24th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (June 24, 2008) — Researchers have determined that there are hundreds of biological differences between the sexes when it comes to gene expression in the cerebral cortex of humans and other primates. These findings indicate that some of these differences arose a very long time ago and have been preserved through evolution.

24th Jun 2008 : Nine academic, scientific and cultural institutions around the city are holding a Year of Evolution, a series of exhibitions, seminars and lectures to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin next February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, "The Origin of Species."

24th Jun 2008 : You have to admire the integrity of conspiracy theories. They're great Mobius strips of self-contained false reasoning and evidence able to contort to meet any external challenge to the perfection of their closed loops. Sept. 11 deniers will insist a lack of plane wreckage on the apron of the Pentagon is proof the building was struck by a missile. Show them a photograph of an engine lying on the lawn and they'll exclaim "Aha! That was planted!"

23rd Jun 2008 : In early 1858, on Ternate in Malaysia, a young specimen collector was tracking the island's elusive birds of paradise when he was struck by malaria. 'Every day, during the cold and succeeding hot fits, I had to lie down during which time I had nothing to do but to think over any subjects then particularly interesting me,' he later recalled.

23rd Jun 2008 : Humans are fundamentally social animals. Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction.

22nd Jun 2008 : Richard Dawkins'public lecture at the University of Liverpool on his book 'The God Delusion'. Date: Monday 25th February 2008

22nd Jun 2008 : A brilliant scientific mind in 17th century Florence, Galileo, was forced to renounce his work and writings concerning the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus, who had suggested that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the universe.

22nd Jun 2008 : The novelist Ian McEwan has launched an astonishingly strong attack on Islamism, saying that he "despises" it and accusing it of "wanting to create a society that I detest". His words, in an interview with an Italian newspaper, could, in today's febrile legalistic climate, lay him open to being investigated for a "hate crime".

22nd Jun 2008 : The US presidential race is drawing a lot of attention, especially from folk interested in the direction America takes on science, health, environment, and energy.

But, lest we forget, 35 Senate seats and all 435 positions in the House of Representatives are also up for grabs this November.

20th Jun 2008 : Research by the Orthodox Jewish organisation Aish found that just over a third of people thought religions like Christianity and Judaism would still be practiced in Britain in 100 years' time.

Although four in 10 people said they would choose to be a member of the Christian religion, almost the same number said they would rather practice no religion at all.

21st Jun 2008 : Since renowned British biologist Richard Dawkins ("The God Delusion") introduced the concept of the 'selfish gene' in 1976, scientists the world over have hailed the theory as a natural extension to the work of Charles Darwin.

In studying genomes, the word 'selfish' does not refer to the human-describing adjective of self-centered behavior but rather to the blind tendency of genes wanting to continue their existence into the next generation. Ironically, this 'selfish' tendency can appear anything but selfish when the gene does move ahead for selfless and even self-sacrificing reasons.

20th Jun 2008 : In this conversation with D.J. Grothe, P.Z. Myers explains the purpose and impact of his blog, and whether his priority is to advance science education or atheism.

20th Jun 2008 : June 19, 2008 -- Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.

19th Jun 2008 : "What we have found is the first evidence that bacteria can use sensed cues from their environment to infer future events," says Saeed Tavazoie, an associate professor in the department of Molecular Biology, who conducted the study along with graduate student Ilias Tagkopoulos and post-doctoral researcher Yir-Chung Liu.

18th Jun 2008 : In 1981, Michael Dowd would have counted himself among the millions of conservative Christians who blame Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the idea of a godless, purposeless universe for the moral decline of society. That year, as a freshman at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., Dowd felt a rush of indignant anger in biology class when the professor held up a textbook that taught evolution. As he stormed out of the classroom, Dowd could not have imagined that he would come to view evolution as a spiritually inspiring idea that religion must embrace.

18th Jun 2008 : Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace's paper outlining the theory of natural selection was a milestone in the history of science - but how did it come about?

In an exclusive video interview, filmed for The Daily Telegraph, Sir David Attenborough discusses their breakthrough with Roger Highfield. Their work, he says, was not only an intellectual triumph - it was "one of the most heartening examples of good behaviour in science".

18th Jun 2008 : Cosmologists are not your run-of-the-mill thinkers, and Max Tegmark is not your run-of-the-mill cosmologist. Throughout his career, Tegmark has made important contributions to problems such as measuring dark matter in the cosmos and understanding how light from the early universe informs models of the Big Bang. But unlike most other physicists, who stay within the confines of the latest theories and measurements, the Swedish-born Tegmark has a night job. In a series of papers that have caught the attention of physicists and philosophers around the world, he explores not what the laws of nature say but why there are any laws at all.

17th Jun 2008 : A short while ago professor of astrophysics Øystein Elgarøy was a profiled liberal Christian who defended his faith in articles and at debates. But then he discovered that he actually agreed more with his opponents.

17th Jun 2008 : Stephen questions whether the U.S. should boycott the Olympics, introduces enemies at home, and discusses intelligent design with Kenneth Miller.

17th Jun 2008 : BISMARCK, N.D. - Parts of a rare mummified dinosaur that has attracted worldwide interest went on display in North Dakota's state museum.

People from across the country and even England gathered Saturday at the Heritage Center on the state Capitol grounds for the unveiling.

"It is a fascinating fossil, and it's one which we're going to be disinterring secrets from ... for many years to come," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England and a member of the international team of more than 50 researchers working on the project.

16th Jun 2008 : The Vatican has banned the makers of Angels & Demons, the latest Dan Brown thriller to be filmed, from shooting scenes not only in the Vatican but in any church in Rome on the ground that it is "an offence against God" and "wounds common religious feelings".

16th Jun 2008 : European researchers today said they discovered a batch of three "super-Earths'' orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well.

They said their findings, presented at a conference in France, suggest that Earth-like planets may be very common.

16th Jun 2008 : Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait.

The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex.

The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

15th Jun 2008 :

15th Jun 2008 :

15th Jun 2008 :

15th Jun 2008 : Britain's most famous scientist, Stephen Hawking, has accused the government of making "disastrous" cuts to research funding that threaten the country's international standing.

Hawking has released correspondence accusing ministers of putting science at risk through basic "bookkeeping errors" that have led to an £80m budget shortfall and warning that several university physics departments may be forced to close.

13th Jun 2008 :
Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on June 15, 2008

Scientists have confirmed for the first time that an important component of early genetic material which has been found in meteorite fragments is extraterrestrial in origin, in a paper published on 15 June 2008.

13th Jun 2008 : KERRY O'BRIEN, PRESENTER: For decades now, Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has waged a sustained campaign maintaining global pressure on China to relax its iron fist on Tibet and grant a genuine autonomy within the People's Republic.

But rarely has the Dalai Lama been in the headlines more than since the sometimes violent demonstrations that began in Tibet on March 10 this year and raged on and off for two weeks.

In the inevitable Chinese crackdown, an unknown number of Tibetans were killed. The Chinese acknowledge 21 deaths; demonstrators say it
was more than 200.

13th Jun 2008 : Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks personally being circumcized and the stories and myths behind the procedure with On Faith's Sally Quinn.

13th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 12, 2008) — When you grab a cold beverage out of the cooler this summer, what is really going on between your brain, your eyes and your hands?

"It is still a mystery, really," says UBC computer science professor Prof. Dinesh Pai. "No one has ever completely mapped out the processes at the level of specific neurons, muscles and tendons."

12th Jun 2008 : People with higher IQs are less likely to believe in God, according to a new study.

Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.

12th Jun 2008 : VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

12th Jun 2008 :
This Father's Day, one of most popular pastors in America will open his megachurch to homosexual dads, an event that would usually signal an extreme weather alert from old guard Republican evangelical leaders.

But by welcoming gay fathers into his Southern California flock, Rick Warren, author of the "The Purpose Driven Life," is not just living up to the highest standards of Christian fellowship, he's turning the page on a particularly embarrassing part of our politics.

10th Jun 2008 : Colossal structures larger than the visible universe – forged during the period of cosmic inflation nearly 14 billion years ago – may be responsible for a strange pattern seen in the big bang's afterglow, says a team of cosmologists. If confirmed, the structures could provide precious information about the universe's earliest moments.

10th Jun 2008 :

10th Jun 2008 : Matthew, a 26-year-old chimp, is headed to court in Europe as part of a human effort to classify him as a person.

Beyond the legal challenges, anthropologists say chimpanzees are not humans, though without a clear definition of what it means to be human, backing that claim up is a challenge perhaps fit for some great courtroom drama.

10th Jun 2008 : A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

10th Jun 2008 : As three soldiers are blown up, teenager caught on a lethal mission reveals how he was groomed to kill British troops.

The surroundings were grim and forbidding, a notorious jail run by Afghanistan's feared security service for those taken prisoner in the bloody war with the Taliban.

9th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 9, 2008) — One of the great scientific challenges is to understand the design principles and origins of the human brain. New research has shed light on the evolutionary origins of the brain and how it evolved into the remarkably complex structure found in humans.

he research suggests that it is not size alone that gives more brain power, but that, during evolution, increasingly sophisticated molecular processing of nerve impulses allowed development of animals with more complex behaviours.

8th Jun 2008 : ScienceDaily (Jun. 6, 2008) — A team of researchers at Harvard University have modeled in the laboratory a primitive cell, or protocell, that is capable of building, copying and containing DNA.

Since there are no physical records of what the first primitive cells on Earth looked like, or how they grew and divided, the research team's protocell project offers a useful way to learn about how Earth's earliest cells may have interacted with their environment approximately 3.5 billion years ago.

7th Jun 2008 : Nietzsche said that if a human being put his ear to the heart chamber of the world and heard the roar of existence, the "innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe," he would surely break into pieces. But a newspaper, pumping its inky current of despair, might serve as well. On a single day, Thursday, May 15th, the Times contained the following. The lead article was about the earthquake in China, now estimated to have killed more than fifty thousand people. It was titled "Tiny Bodies in a Morgue, and Unspeakable Grief in China," and was accompanied by a photograph of two parents sitting next to their dead child. A story about the recent cyclone in Myanmar estimated the number of deaths at anywhere between 68,833 and 127,990. The journalist mentioned a man named Zaw Ayea, twenty-seven, who found his sister's body; his mother and two younger brothers are missing. He cannot speak: "He stares straight ahead with a strangely placid expression on his face. His friends say he has been in shock since the cyclone."

7th Jun 2008 : I don't know how World Youth Day is going down in your household but in mine it's fanning the flames of militant atheism.

As the family member with the oldest pedigree as a non-believer, I find myself in the odd position of fervently preaching religious tolerance to cool the antagonism World Youth Day is engendering around my dinner table.

7th Jun 2008 : W00t! Great news from the Lone Star State: two seats on the State School Board were being challenged by creationists, and both creationists lost (free registration may be required to read that story).

Yeehaw!

As they say down there.

So the two incumbents, one a moderate Republican and the other a Democrat, retain their seats. Texans, you may breathe a momentary sigh of relief.

6th Jun 2008 : Billboard on I-95 reaches out to atheists in the region

6th Jun 2008 : Since 1839, the world inventory of photographs has been accumulating at an accelerating pace, multiplying into a near infinitude of images, into a resemblance of a Borgesian library. This haunting technology has been with us long enough now that we are able to look at a crowd scene, a busy street, say, in the late 19th century and know for certain that every single figure is dead. Not only the young couple pausing by a park railing, but the child with a hoop and stick, the starchy nurse, the solemn baby upright in its carriage - their lives have run their course, and they are all gone. And yet, frozen in sepia, they appear curiously, busily, oblivious of the fact that they must die - as Susan Sontag put it, "photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction ..."

6th Jun 2008 : Circumcision and other forms of male genital mutilation have always been a puzzle. The ritual mutilations can leave the man vulnerable to infection and even death. So why do some societies insist on such a risky ritual for their men?

There may be an evolutionary explanation, according to Christopher Wilson, of Cornell University in New York, US. It could function to reduce a young man's potential to father a child with an older man's wife, he says.

6th Jun 2008 : A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old.

Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

Details of the work have been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

5th Jun 2008 : And controversy follows evolution's staunch champion

5th Jun 2008 : P.Z. Myers is the evolutionist creationists love to hate: They hate him so much that he was expelled from an advance screening of "Expelled," even though the anti-evolution movie includes an interview with him.

During a visit to Seattle, the biology professor, blogger and "godless liberal" recounted the tale with relish - and then predicted that old-time creationism will be making a comeback.

Not that he's looking forward to that: Myers bases that prediction on his view that efforts to undermine evolutionary theory without referring to religion, using a concept known as intelligent design, have fallen short. Back in 2005, a federal judge ruled that intelligent design was basically a religious concept, and thus should not be taught in public-school science classes.

5th Jun 2008 : GENEVA (AFP) - It doesn't pay to be smart and ignorance really is bliss if you want a long life -- at least if you're a fly, according to new research by a Swiss university.

Scientists Tadeusz Kawecki and Joep Burger at the University of Lausanne said Wednesday they had discovered a "negative correlation between an improvement in a fly's mental capacity and its longevity".

As part of their research project, the results of which are published in the journal Evolution, they divided into two

5th Jun 2008 : KEVIN RUDD wears his Christianity on his sleeve more prominently than any Labor leader since the devout Catholic Arthur Calwell.

It is a stance that yielded political dividends at last year's election, when Labor achieved its highest level of support from regular churchgoers since 1993.

But now the Prime Minister faces a decision that may alienate socially conservative Catholics and born-again Protestants.

The Rudd Government is considering overturning the Howard government's ban on Australian overseas aid being used to fund abortions in poor countries.

4th Jun 2008 : LONDON, Jun. 4, 2008 (Reuters) — Speeches and a scientific meeting next month will kick off 18 months of events to celebrate the impact and lasting legacy of Charles Darwin, whose theories on evolution are still causing waves 150 years later.

4th Jun 2008 : DALLAS — Opponents of teaching evolution, in a natural selection of sorts, have gradually shed those strategies that have not survived the courts. Over the last decade, creationism has given rise to "creation science," which became "intelligent design," which in 2005 was banned from the public school curriculum in Pennsylvania by a federal judge.

Now a battle looms in Texas over science textbooks that teach evolution, and the wrestle for control seizes on three words. None of them are "creationism" or "intelligent design" or even "creator."

4th Jun 2008 : What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC's 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.

And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination's growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn't make a bit of difference.

3rd Jun 2008 : A New York judge today dealt a serious blow to the widow and children of John Lennon, who are seeking to force the removal of the John Lennon song "Imagine" from a controversial film about intelligent design, creationism's PR-savvy cousin. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed argues that advocates of the theory of intelligent design face persecution in the academy. Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected the plaintiff's request for an injunction against further distribution of the film, finding that the makers of Expelled were likely to prevail in their argument that the use of "Imagine" was fair use under copyright law.

3rd Jun 2008 : One of the most important experiments in evolution is going on right now in a laboratory in Michigan State University. A dozen flasks full of E. coli are sloshing around on a gently rocking table. The bacteria in those flasks has been evolving since 1988--for over 44,000 generations. And because they've been so carefully observed all that time, they've revealed some important lessons about how evolution works.

2nd Jun 2008 : A doctor tells her patient to lose weight, and the patient thinks: "If my doctor really believed that, she wouldn't be so fat." A movie aficionado pans the latest Tom Cruise flick because Cruise is a Scientologist. A home­owner ignores a neighbor's advice on lawn care because the neighbor is a ... you name it: Democrat, ­Re­publican, Christian or atheist. These examples illustrate classic uses of ad hominem attacks, in which an argument is rejected, or advanced, based on a personal characteristic of an individual rather than on reasons for or against the claim itself.

2nd Jun 2008 : The debate about 'values based' education is hotting up. John Kaye and Stephen O'Doherty outline the opposing positions on the role of religion in schools.

JOHN KAYE Greens NSW MP and education spokesman: Alarm bells start sounding when young people leave school confused about the boundaries between faith and evidence. They get even louder when the penny drops on the massive state and federal funding that supports the growth of schools that systematically mislead their students. And they reach a crescendo when governments are caught accepting the distortion of education in faith-based private schools.

1st Jun 2008 : A COUPLE of years ago I received a letter from an American soldier in Iraq. The letter began by saying that, as we've all become painfully aware, serving on the front lines is physically exhausting and emotionally debilitating. But the reason for his writing was to tell me that in that hostile and lonely environment, a book I'd written had become a kind of lifeline. As the book is about science — one that traces physicists' search for nature's deepest laws — the soldier's letter might strike you as, well, odd.

1st Jun 2008 : AMHERST - In 1971, five pairs of Italian wall lizards were transplanted by biologists from their home island of Pod Kopiste, in the South Adriatic Sea, to the neighboring but subtly different island of Pod Mrcaru, where none lived, as an experiment in evolution.

How, if at all, would these creatures change?

Largely insect eaters, the half-foot long reptiles would find themselves on an island where insects were in short supply but plants were not.

1st Jun 2008 : When I mention the Japanese puffer fish, or fugu, to friends and students who are even slightly pop-culture savvy, I get a predictable response: That's the fish that almost killed Homer Simpson! The fugu is an actual fish, and a beautiful little advanced bony one. Among its claims to fame is that it protects itself from being eaten by secreting a potent neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin that blocks nerve impulses and can kill a person in a high enough dose. That's part of the reason humans eat it, though: If carefully prepared and not eaten in excess, it can provide a peculiar tingle to the lips—and the thrill of a little danger. In the well-known episode of The Simpsons, Homer discovers the joys of sushi, overindulges in poorly prepared fugu, thinks he has only a day to live, and typical sitcom hijinks ensue (ruined slightly for us science geeks, who know that fugu poisoning leads to rapid paralysis, which would tend to interfere with hijinks).

31st May 2008 : So Sharon Stone thinks the Sichuan earthquake was caused not by friction between tectonic plates on the Longmenshan fault, but by Beijing being "not nice" to the Dalai Lama. Given that Tibet has been under Chinese rule since 1951, karmic retribution must have a 57-year time lag, but that didn't stop Stone musing on the seismic catastrophe: "I thought, 'Is that karma?' When you are not nice, bad things happen to you."

30th May 2008 : (CNN) -- Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.

30th May 2008 : FRANCE plunged into a heated debate about its marriage laws today after learning that a court had annulled the union of two Muslims because the husband said the wife was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

Politicians, feminists and human rights activists denounced the verdict, handed down last month but reported in the national press only on Thursday, as an affront to the legal equality of men and women and a violation of a woman's privacy.

30th May 2008 : COLUMBIA -- The Senate passed a bill today that would allow displays in public buildings of the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer as historical documents.

The bill, without the Lord's Prayer amendment, already passed the House and now returns there for legislators to determine whether they agree with the Senate's change. If they agree, the bill goes to Gov. Mark Sanford.

Passage came with one prominent opponent. Senate President Pro Tempore Glenn McConnell said the Lord's Prayer amendment is "constitutional quicksand" that will draw a court challenge and unnecessary legal fees.

29th May 2008 : A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings.

Arthur Firstenberg says he is highly sensitive to certain types of electric fields, including wireless Internet and cell phones.

29th May 2008 : The 380 million-year-old specimen has been preserved with an embryo still attached by its umbilical cord.

The find, reported in Nature, pushes back the emergence of this reproductive strategy by some 200 million years.

Until now, scientists thought creatures from these times were only able to develop their young inside eggs.