"When I asked the author how this happened, he failed to see any problem with citing a paper he never read while writing a paper outside his field"

Holy hell.

This is so friggin' cool: what's basically a fossilized mummified dinosaur was found in Canada.


I'm also seeing the potential for a whole new sub-genre of mummy movies, comics, stories...

All the flat-Earthers and anti-evolution people I ever heard were motivated by their religious views.

Although all main religions, by and large, are fine with scientific discoveries, some of their smaller branches insist on a literal interpretation of one sacred book or another, and refuse to accept science when it runs counter to their worldview. 

To some people, the "conspiracy" about the shape of the world or about the origin of species is nothing less than a plan to get people to turn their back on the Bible or the Quran; the profit of it lies either in getting people to abandon God so that they'll become pawns of some worldwide atheistic system, or in damning the souls of the innocent because Satan ordered scientists to do so.

Now I'll say that I was raised Catholic, not precisely the most progressive institution in the world... and the priests in charge of catechism never argued that the Earth was flat, or that it was any younger than what science told us. Most of Genesis was presented to us kids as an allegory, a way to reach a truth deeper than the literal story put down on the page. But to a literalist, if you say...



...it means that there is water "below" the Earth, and waters "above" it, and that the world is isolated from the water above by some kind of transparent dome. To a literalist that is a fact, and an unassailable fact at that (because it's in the Bible). Any argument to the contrary must be wrong, or a lie, no matter how much evidence seems to point to the contrary.

Scientists have cloned an endangered Black Footed Ferret.  Very cool.  And look at that face.  

YES!

That kind of comparison is what comes to mind whenever I hear an argument along the lines of "why are they spending so much money to explore other planets when there are so many needs right here on Earth?"

The answer is that (1) space exploration is really not that expensive when compared to other government programs, (2) it delivers the most incredible returns for every buck invested (better than bitcoin!); (3) if we were to shut down space programs right now and pump the money into other things, it would have a barely discernible impact, if any impact at all. It would probably be used for political pork or be managed to death from one agency to the next.

Have to share part of what an astronomy teacher friend of mine just wrote to me about Perseverance:

"Mind blowing. So precise, so collaborative, so other worldly. While the use of technology has dramatically impacted what NASA can amazingly achieve in space, it seems like the rest of the world struggles here on the ground . . . Texas power grid, the relentless T***p [my asterisks] tweets for 4 years, the ugly side of social media, etc.

NASA has always been a beacon of hope, the agency that has dared to go beyond.

Very cool day for the rover and its team. The ultimate video game challenge due to the time delay in communication transmission. I wonder who is controlling the rover so it does not crawl into trouble.

Would love to see them find a microbe! Just to make our world a little smaller and pop our egos."



Oh, yes, please, please find a microbe! I want to see the creationist, anti-science types faced with that!