A U.S. appeals court, of course just following the dictates of the federal government, tells the dying to just suck it up and deal with it:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to experimental drugs not approved by regulators, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Tuesday.
Newsweek revisits its spectacularly wrong global-cooling warning of 1975:
The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today.
We were wrong then. We have often been wrong, because climate change is really hard to predict. But we are right this time. Works for me.
No Republican presidential candidate can be much short of "life begins at conception" and hope to get through the primaries without a lot of finessing. Rudy Giuliani has to say the judges he would appoint would be the sort to have pro-life sensibilities and that we should all be federalists. Mitt Romney has to say he was against abortion after he was for it and hope he is believed:
I imagine my house without me. What would it be like? Well, it would be an empty house, useless and pointless. That's what the Earth without humans would be like, too, useless and pointless. But lots of Earth-first types -- you know, humans are the problem -- are getting their jollies out of Alan Weisman's book "Earth Without Us":
Happy 38th moon-landing anniversary. I can still remember how stunning it was to see Armstrong take that first step and hear him speak those words. It was the greatest step ever taken in human exploration. What would the world be like today if we had used that as a starting point instead of . . . just . . . losing . . . interest?
Turns out all those people who've been saying the world is getting smaller were right:
New measurements reveal that Earth is smaller than was previously thought—though not by much.
If you're a planning a trip around the world, you may be pleased to hear that you have about 0.1 inch (2.5 millimeters) fewer to travel.
Go ahead, jack up those gas prices.
A new study pinpoints how a portion of the brain known as the dentate gyrus, responsbile for episodic memories, creates the phenomenon known as deja vu.
This is fascinating, don't you think? Some of us were talking about it at work the other day, and it reminded us of some new brain research:
Another sign of the blazing speed of the information superhighway: 240 million years ago, a giant star exploded,
Astronomers identified the star as SN 2006gy. They estimated its size at more than 100 solar masses, which makes it one of the largest stars ever observed. The Milky Way, with a population of 400 billion stars, has only a few known to be as big.
Being immersed in video editing this week and therefore only half paying attention to the national news, I would expect to miss a few things. But have we really made such astounding leaps in space travel in the last few days?
Nevertheless, the discovery in the Gliese 581 system, where a Neptune-size planet was discovered two years ago and another planet of eight Earth masses is now suspected, catapults that system to the top of the list for future generations of space missions.
In their efforts to capture the public's attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It's probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far.
"Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster," says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
