Weekly Roundup

In any given week, I come across more stories and things work looking at than I have time (or desire) to write about. I’ve decided to briefly mention stories that I find of interest and provide links. I can’t promise a Weekly Roundup every week, but when I do, it’ll be on Fridays.

Here’s what I found noteworthy this week.

• Seems Utah has a strong itching for a lawsuit. Rep. Chris Buttars has introduced a bill to undermine evolution and teach the controversy. As the Salt Lake Tribune and Dispatches from the Culture Wars note, lengthy discussion on religious motivations will doom this bill to failure if it’s passed.
• L’Osservatore, the official newspaper of the Vatican, had a piece on the debate over intelligent design and evolution. It saw ID for what it is — bad metaphysics — and suggested “if the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another… But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science.”
• For all you physics nerds out there, space.com has a story on a black hole putting a dent in space time. (And people complain that biologist’s don’t know what we’re talking about. Bah.)
• Carl Zimmer has a review on the Darwin exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Wish things this cool could even get as close as Dallas or Houston. Then maybe I could go.
• A little terrorist organization we call Hamas just swept Palestinian elections. World leaders are shocked. Israel refuses to negotiate with any government that includes Hamas members. Anyone else kind of terrified at what these democratic elections have produced?
• Rabbi Marc Gellman has an article on how our obsession with winning really has us all losing. It’s an excellent piece, which should bring much to reflect on.
• National Geographic has an article on two Irishmen murdered over 2,000 years ago. One used hair gel. The other had manicured nails. The contents of their stomachs were still present, and police initially didn’t realize how old they were due to how well they were preserved. Their killings were also quite grisly.
• The Ivory-billed Woodpecker has been invoked in a lawsuit over water resources in Arkansas.
• Space around Earth is filling up with junk, and we need to find a way to clean it up, according to a National Geographic story.
• Need proof that sin sells? Sex.com has just sold for $12 million dollars. That’s the highest price ever paid for a domain name.
• A Florida man who was sentenced to 130 years in prison for robbery and rape walked free after serving 24 years, when DNA evidence proved his innocence.
• Seem those crazy physicists have discovered yet another planet out in space. This time though, it’s not a gas giant but a smaller, more earth-like planet.
• Anyone have strong partisan political feelings? A recent study shows that the brains of strong democrats and republicans are wired to ignore contradictions from members of their favored party. Perhaps we need to strive to actually listen and think, before coming to our conclusions?
• A talking Elmo book asks children, “Who wants to die?”