http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/20/ipso-2011-ocean-report-mass-extinction_n_880656.html

If the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world's oceans aren't curbed, a mass extinction unlike ( Read more... )

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Did_A_Massive_Solar_Proton_Event_Fry_The_Earth_999.html

Close to the end of the last ice age there was a sudden disappearance of many mammalian species which some paleontologists say was the ( Read more... )

http://cutelildrow.livejournal.com/2345408.htmlRead more... )

One definition of the Left I've seen tendered is that the Left are all about control, the Right all about freedom. But more and more people on both sides of the fence -- the self-identified Right and the self-identified Left -- have clearly become control freaks. The political party they belong to doesn't matter, nor does what they call ( Read more... )

http://xkcd.com/893/

"The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space -- each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."

% Banner Notes - Sad. ( Read more... )

I am currently in the process of reading the last few pages of Philip Wylie's Triumph. This is the fifth or sixth time I've read it since the first time I encountered it in 1967. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's due to the same sort of quirk that makes us slow down to take a look at the horrible, multi-vehicle wreck as we pass it by on the freeway ( Read more... )

http://www.livescience.com/13871-catastrophic-amphibian-declines.html

The people who think this is such a good thing (and yes, such assholes exist) are the same idiots who wanted to suicide the whole world in all-out thermonuclear war with the ( Read more... )

Click to view

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtU_LUDKPCA)

This series of four videos addresses the question of what caused the massive transformation of Jurassic dinosaurs from populations of little diversity to the immense diversity seen among dinosaurs by the end of the Jurassic.

Trolls, take note: No, this isn't a rant on the die-off of bees and other pollinators, so lower those flamethrowers and git.

In his book Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis, Rowan Jacobsen points out that the critical phenomenon in the life of honeybees is the hive, i.e., the colony, not the individual ( Read more... )

Okay, back on program: Here's more about Colony Collapse Disorder. (I know, I know -- I promised some time back to have more on that "shortly," but several things intervened: my cat died; I have other books in the toilet-tank stack to read, and they got in the way; I had the flu or something of the sort for two months, and nearly hacked my ( Read more... )