On:

Three years ago, a college student in Arizona found a rare fossil because he happened to look down while walking on the sidewalk. Now, at another university?this time in Canada?a new faculty member found a cache of valuable fossils?stuffed under a ping pong table.

One of these is a pregnant fossil of an ancient dolphin-like creature called an ichthyosaur. In LiveScience.com, Andrea Thompson quotes newly-hired University of Alberta professor Michael Caldwell as saying, “It was pretty amazing to realize this valuable discovery had sat under a pingpong table for 25 years, but I suppose that after 100 million years in the dirt, it’s all relative.”
read more

On:

Billy Graham, the minister who evangelized George W. Bush, was not a supporter of Martin Luther King. Now that the voters have struck a strong note against religious fundamentalism in government, this is something worth thinking about.

Using previously unpublished documents, religious studies professor Michael Long says that the popular evangelist largely opposed King’s tactics of civil disobedience. He never dreamed of or worked for a world of racial reconciliation, economic justice and peace.
read more

On:

This is the season of giving, and a lot of people are going to ask for a new television for Christmas. But flat screen TVs could pump hundreds of thousands of tons of extra carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.

In the Independent, Ben Russell warns that these new televisions could increase emissions by 700,000 tons a year by 2010. This is not because the new sets actually emit CO2 gas, it’s because they use so much more power, and producing all that electricity is what increases CO2 emissions.

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
read more

On:

We’ve learned that we can’t always count on politicians to do the right thing. The recent election shake-up makes us ask the question: “What makes a person go into the rough-and-tumble world of politics, anyway?” The answer could be: DNA.

A research group made up of both political scientists and geneticists is trying to prove that political genes exist, by studying twins and brain scans. with extensive studies of twins, genes and brain scans. In LiveScience.com, Anna Jo Bratton quotes political scientist John Alford as saying, “The idea goes back more than 2,000 years. In 350 BC, Aristotle wrote, ‘Man is by nature a political animal.'”
read more