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This sickens me. A study out of Columbia University reviewed more than 1,100 parole hearings for four Israeli prisons presided over by eight different judges over ten months. The reviewer found a bias toward rejecting inmates petitions for parole as sessions got closer to lunch time. In fact, they found a startling trend.
For a gal who’s best-known for disappearing, Amelia Earhart sure has been popping up a lot lately. Google her, and you’re bound to come up with several recent headlines — some of them even claim we may be on our way to finally discovering what happened to the famous aviator in 1937, when she and navigator Fred Noonan vanished over the Pacific Ocean. But when you get down to it, are researchers really any closer to solving the mystery?
There’s been a prickly pear of a problem that’s confounded science since it abandoned bewitching as a medical diagnosis and split from the church: If life on Earth didn’t begin with the breath of God blowing life into Adam and starting with a rib for Eve, how exactly did it begin? Rational science has come up with some equally fantastic ideas of how life started here over the years. One of my favorites has been the primordial soup, a Frankensteinian theory that suggests life began on Earth as the result of an interplay between gases found in the early atmosphere, water and electricity in the form of lightning.
Study finds 41 Cases of Imprisonment based on False Confessions
by Josh Clark | September 23, 2010
Steve Ignorant, the frontman for the anarchist punk band Crass counseled in the song “Big A Little A” that when dealing with the authorities, “silence is a virtue, use it for your own protection.” Those wise words are lost on “the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led,” according to a New York Times article on a recent study out of the University of Virginia School of Law that found at least 41 confessions given by inmates at correctional facilities have been overturned later by DNA evidence.
Leigh cuts my hair. She cuts all of the kids’s hair too. She has been doing this for more than 10 years. It started because one day we were at a K-mart and they had a bunch of remaindered books on a table for a quarter each. One of the books was “How to cut [...]
We interrupt this programming to inform you that a living, self-replicating bacterial cell has been made synthetically. The idea of life as chemistry has just scored some serious cred.
If Stanley Miller and Harold Urey had lived to see today, they’d probably be pretty excited. Back in 1952, the two scientists took a stab at recreating Earth’s early atmosphere in a beaker, by adding water, hydrogen, ammonia and methane and then zapping it with an electrical charge. Boom! Amino acids, some of the building blocks of life and protein precursors, soon appeared.
Within the booming field of synthetic biology, the folks at the J. Craig Venter Institute took a slightly different approach. Keep reading to learn what it was.
When I was a young boy, my grandmother sat me on her knee and breathed words to me that I have always carried with me. I remember it distinctly: geckos crawled on the screens of her porch between the 2x4s stained to look like red cedar. The shuffleboard court just beyond shimmered through the balmy air, illuminated blindingly by the white sunlight that shone down on her little patch of Fort Myers.
Carried on fumes of gin and the jangly rattle of her thick bracelets, she said to me, “Josh, it will always be a bad idea to clone the Neanderthals. I know you don’t know what those are right now, but you will someday. And I want you to remember; no matter how they want to bring them back, it’s a bad idea. The Neanderthals died off for a reason.”
Apple pushed Intel to develop Light Peak cabling – “it reviewed evidence that Apple began talks with Intel in 2007 to develop a new cabling standard with the capacity to handle “massive amounts of data” and replace a variety of existing ports, including USB, FireWire, and DisplayPort…” Canadian team makes cancer diagnostic breakthrough – “Researchers [...]
Early Risers Are Mutants – “Don’t hate those people who are perky and efficient after only a few hours of sleep. They can’t help it. New research suggests that a genetic mutation may explain why some people sleep less…” The Amazing Story of the Diver and the Whale – “The following incredible photos have been [...]
We’ve largely come to hold DNA evidence as the ultimate weapon in criminal investigation, as well as one killer obstacle on the road to the perfect crime. Humans are constantly spurting fluids, shedding skin flakes and dropping hairs. Just one genetic sample left in the wrong place is enough to cinch it. At least it’s been that way till now.
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