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New idea in mortuary science: Dissolving bodies with lye

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Can't they just make me into a green battery? ... Getting the public to accept a process that strikes some as ghastly may be the biggest challenge. Psychopaths and dictators have used acid or lye to torture or erase their victims, and legislation to make alkaline hydrolysis available to the public in New York state was branded "Hannibal Lecter's bill" in a play on the sponsor's name - Sen. Kemp Hannon - and the movie character's sadism.

40 votes | Post comment »

Conservatives Happier Than Liberals

Posted by theangryindian from Live Science

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

50 votes | 3 comments

Bizarre DNA of Platypus tells a story about us

Posted by Jeff from Seattle Times

There are genes for egg laying, evidence of the animal\\\\\\\'s reptilian roots. Genes for making milk, which the platypus does in mammalian style despite not having nipples. Genes for making snake venom, which the animal stores in its legs. And there are five times more sex-determining chromosomes than scientists know what to do with.

40 votes | Post comment »

Abu Dhabi Aims to Build First Carbon-Neutral City : NPR

Posted by Mikep2 from NPR

Morning Edition, May 6, 2008 · In Abu Dhabi, there's an area of nothing but wind-swept desert. But 10 years from now, if all goes according to plan, a city of 6 square kilometers housing 50,000 people will rise in the United Arab Emirates - and it will be carbon neutral.

20 votes | 1 comment

Parachuting Dog Helped Win WWII | LiveScience

Posted by ecproject from Live Science

The Allied airmen and women of World War II were certainly brave and skilled in battle, but even they couldn't win the war on their own.

Plagued in the early, low-tech years of the war by dangerous afflictions such as altitude and decompression sickness, pilots got some help behind the front lines from a team of American physiologists who studied the effects on the body of flying.

Their research, which involved at least one parachuting dog, and the technology it initiated was a key to the Allied victory in the air, says Jay B. Dean of the University of South Florida College of Medicine.

26 votes | Post comment »

Balding penguin's wetsuit lets him swim again

Posted by Jeff from MSNBC

What's black and white and warm all over? A penguin in a wetsuit, naturally. Sounds like a joke, but it's quite serious for biologists at the California Academy of Sciences, who had a wetsuit created for an African penguin to help him get back in the swim of things.

40 votes | Post comment »

The Science of Sexuality | Sex and Relationships

Posted by Shemuses from Alternet

We should stop ignoring scientific findings that do not mesh with our political beliefs.

25 votes | Post comment »

A Developer, His Deals and His Ties to McCain

Posted by angelorus2000 from Feeds.feedburner

David D. Kirkpatrick and Jim Rutenberg, of The New York Times, write:

41 votes | Post comment »

The pope's US visit: Media, White House, Congress embrace spokesman for religious obscurantism

Posted by Sandyenglish from

It is a measure of the profound decay of American democracy that when the president of the United States welcomed the Roman Catholic pontiff to Washington last week, a major concern was that the representative of a 2,000-year-old religious institution, steeped in reaction and hostility to science and human progress, might seem to criticize the US government from the left.

20 votes | Post comment »

Clues To Ancestral Origin Of Placenta Emerge In Genetics Study

Posted by Sandyenglish from Science Daily

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have uncovered the first clues about the ancient origins of a mother's intricate lifeline to her unborn baby, the placenta, which delivers oxygen and nutrients critical to the baby's health.

45 votes | Post comment »

What the Humble Fruit Fly Can Teach Us About Sex

Posted by Shemuses from Alternet

Research that traces bisexuality in fruit flies to a genetic variation challenges assumptions about sexual attraction.

25 votes | 1 comment

Witness This: A Lunar Eclipse

Posted by robynoratocom from

"Oh, I'm bein' followed by a moonshadow..." A videographer catches a breathtaking lunar eclipse from British Columbia, Canada.

20 votes | Post comment »