By the time a story hits the front page of CNN’s Web site, it’s probably been digested many times over in smaller journalistic circles. And having seen what national/international media can do to the facts of various industries, I take whatever I read there with a huge grain of salt.
Still, it’s curious to find that some people with genetic variations may want to propagate them through selective embryo screening.…
Scientists have announced that their estimates of the universe’s age were just a little off. So the hydrogen that comprises about half a typical human’s body mass is not 13 billion years old, it’s 13.7 billion years old.
Doesn’t that make you feel young as an Elf?
I’ve always wondered, though, how scientists can live with the idea that Earth is at the center of the universe.…
The Christian Science Monitor reports that NASA has announced a plan to establish a permanent base on Luna’s south pole by the year 2020. That’s just 13 years and a few weeks away.
That’s more than a lifetime for a space program initiative. Many things can derail the progress of reaching out to other planetary bodies in the Solar System.
One has to wonder if the American people have the collective willpower to pull this off.…
If you’re interested in speculating about evolution and things like that, I came across several interesting shows on The Science Channel over the past week. I don’t normally watch much television, but I needed to take a break from working on Web sites (the Compuserve IMPs site, btw, is coming along).
The first show was “Before the Dinosaurs”. I didn’t see all of it, but what I did see explained at least one of the mass extinctions that occurred long before there were dinosaurs.…
Here in Texas there are a few wild animals roaming the countryside. I know that television shows claim there are about 2,000,000 feral pigs running around. A feral animal is a once-domesticated animal that has “gone wild”. Feral dogs are also a problem, as are feral cats. But ranchers and farmers are more likely to complain about the pigs and the coyotes than anything else.…
I came across an interesting proposal published by NASA in 2003 for colonizing Venus. While Venus is not exactly my idea of paradise, the proposal makes a reasonable case for moving there over moving to Luna or Mars. In fact, if the proposal’s ideas are borne out by research and development, we could — theoretically — colonize planets like Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus (all of which are gas giants with huge gravitional fields).…
