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How's this for a tinfoil hat conspiracy, brought to you by the American Life League--
Planned Parenthood's strategy in this great world is to:
Phase one: Get kids addicted to sex.
Phase two: profit! Through selling birth control, STD testing, and abortion.
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Back in December, Rees Kassen wrote an editorial for Nature arguing that if scientists want political decisions to reflect good science, they have to get involved. Read more
As much crap as Oklahomans get for being backwards hicks, Oklahoma is a state of many faces. Slowly but surely, the faces of the politicians are starting to represent the diversity of Oklahoma (not just middle-upper-class 'straight' Evangelical white male Oklahomans).
To counter the insane, homophobic rhetoric of Sally Kern, we have an openly, happily transgender Brittany Novotny giving the witch a run for her money. Read more
This seems to be fairly big news. The Heartland Institute is a conservative and libertarian "think" tank that cut its teeth on denying the dangers of cigarette smoking back in the 1990s. These days the Heartland Institute seems to be focused on Anthropogenic Climate Change Denialism and Science Denialism in general.
A piece of one of the revealed documents suggesting that the Heartland Institute wants to "dissuade teachers from teaching science." Read more
for astronomers:
Discovery and Depth
"...the current situation calls for bold leadership and tough decisions and not merely the proverbial rearrangement of the chairs in the dining hall of the Costa Concordia as it approached the Isola del Giglio."14 Kulkarni (2011)
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On We Beasties, Kevin Bonham reports that scientists have genetically enabled E. coli to digest a sugar found in algae. Bonham writes, "Scientists have been picking this bug's locks for decades, and it's already been engineered to make not just ethanol, but many other useful products as well." With the ability to metabolize sugar from a source as prolific, low-maintenance, and renewable as algae, E. coli could become a much bigger player in biofuel production. Meanwhile, Greg Laden considers the State of the Union address from an environmental perspective. Read more
We've written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending. Read more
