Health warning:
do not attempt to cuddle pandas.
Mutual support from squirrels.
Humans
are relatively closely related to kangaroos.
Study finds that hand-washing and other body cleaning
leads to less severe moral judgements.
Study finds that love and hate
are very similar in their brain activity - but hate is less irrational.
About 20 dead in a
Russian nuclear sub accident.
More.
US Supreme Court rules that the US Navy
can continue to train with active sonar despite environmental objections.
The Oz Government wants Oz
to have its own “great firewall”. Like China’s only “nicer”. Isn’t it great to have a PM who speaks Mandarin and has a strong affinity with China? NGOs and companies
are getting together in a global internet free speech coalition.
The Obama and McCain campaigns computer systems
were hacked into by a “foreign entity”. The Obama campaign
had a highly sophisticated voter tracking system.
A post
on the economic consequences of the Pax Romana. It includes a logarithmic graph of lead deposits in Greenland ice cores (the time scale used is 1E+1 = 10, 1E+2 = 100, 1E+3 = 1,000, 1E+4=10,000) that show quite clearly it took centuries to get back to the level of economic activity of the height of the Roman Empire. (What gets me is that, 30,000 years ago, the amount of lead being deposited was about the same as now: which implies that industrial activity 30,000 years ago was the same as now. This is passed over in silence in every use of this graph I have seen. A commenter on the above post says it is from minerals being churned up by the glaciers: I am not remotely enough of a geologist to assess that.)