1. Broken symmetry: Answering the solace of quantum

Comment #263369 by mandydax on October 10, 2008 at 6:38 pm

@23. Comment #263287 by Steve Zara

No, probably not.

When a well known but overlooked effect of Special Relativity is taken into account, where the transverse Doppler effect of the Earth's spin and the velocity of the craft are factored in, there is no flyby anomaly. "Thus, GR (General Relativity) does not need to be questioned and the flyby anomaly is merely due to an incomplete analysis using conventional physics," says Mbelek.

2. Look Who's Irrational Now

Comment #250516 by mandydax on September 19, 2008 at 7:57 pm

21% of self-proclaimed atheists believe in either a personal God or an impersonal force. Ten percent of atheists pray at least weekly and 12% believe in heaven.

3. It's no wonder evangelical atheists need to shout so loud

Comment #238181 by mandydax on August 27, 2008 at 5:49 pm

70: UncleJJ:

The article is so poorly researched and badly written, just a string of vindictive sentences with no structure and no line of argument. Pure polemic.

4. Kamikaze bacteria illustrate evolution of co-operation

Comment #235207 by mandydax on August 22, 2008 at 2:35 pm

@2 Ex~

That's exactly what I was thinking. It's brilliant.

5. Supernatural science: Why we want to believe

Comment #234642 by mandydax on August 21, 2008 at 8:28 pm

A subsequent test on the supposed Bigfoot found nothing but the DNA of humans and an opossum, a small, cat-like creature.

6. To learn biology, just pick up the console

Comment #230999 by mandydax on August 15, 2008 at 2:15 pm

@beeline:
Thanks for that link to the Biomorphs emulator. I'm reading TBW at the moment, and I hadn't gotten around to finding it.

7. Darwin's bulldogs

Comment #226329 by mandydax on August 8, 2008 at 1:53 am

@alltruism: Thank you for raising my awareness. ~_^ I caught that, too, so thanks to Richard as well.

8. Brainwashed by a parasite

Comment #224828 by mandydax on August 5, 2008 at 5:29 pm

A similar thing happens with Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite can only carry out its reproductive stage in the guts of felines, and it's been found that rats and mice infected with T. gondii are less afraid of cats and in some cases seek them out, increasing the chances that they will be eaten and thus transmit the parasite to a cat. Extended phenotypes are simply fascinating. I haven't read Richard's book by that title, but he makes reference to it in The Blind Watchmaker:

Replicators that happen to have what it takes to get replicated would come to predominate in the world, no matter how long and indirect the chain of causal links by which they influence their probability of being replicated.

9. A cast-iron case for a secular society

Comment #223974 by mandydax on August 3, 2008 at 9:07 pm

In further developments, a judge has decided in favour of the plaintiff in the case where she was sacked for refusing to sell egg cups that hold the little end of the egg. She claims that such Big-endian egg cups are against her religion as she is a devout Little-endian. The judge in this case ruled that it is discrimination to make the plaintiff do the job she was hired to do if that job forces her to sell things which she considers blasphemous, so her refusal to do so is just and her dismissal from her position unjust. As the defendant in the case is Big-endian Egg Cups, Ltd., the plainiff, a Ms. Nana Nana Booboo, can only be required to do those parts of her job which do not conflict with her beliefs, that is to say, nothing.

10. Former state science director sues over intelligent design e-mail

Comment #203381 by mandydax on July 2, 2008 at 6:52 pm

Good for her. I was so pissed when I read about her getting fired over that.