Below The Beltway

The Scotsman frets about the possibility of a Chimpanzee-Human hybrid:
A LEADING scientist has warned a new species of “humanzee,” created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting.
In an interview with The Scotsman, Dr Calum MacKellar, director of research at the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, [...]

John Derbyshire on Ben Stein’s new film Expelled and the nonsense that is so-called Creation Science:
Western civilization has many glories. There are the legacies of the ancients, in literature and thought. There are the late-medieval cathedrals, those huge miracles of stone, statuary, and spiritual devotion. There is painting, music, the orderly cityscapes of Renaissance [...]

Today’s Washington Post reports on a very interesting link between the ancient world’s most fearsome dinosaur and the daily menu at Popeye’s:
Protein retrieved from a 68 millon-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex bone closely resembles the main protein in chicken and ostrich bones and is only distantly related to lizards’, strengthening the popular idea that birds, and not [...]

Apparently, there’s some thought that the Earth could get sucked into a black hole in the next few months:
It is said that scientists involved in the Manhattan Project to engineer and implement the first nuclear bombs seriously considered the possibility that such a bomb could initiate a chain reaction that would destroy the Earth. Now [...]

Scientists have discovered that humans arrived in North America at least 1,000 years earlier than previously thought:
Scientists have found and dated the oldest human remnants ever uncovered in the Americas — a discovery that places people genetically similar to Native Americans in Oregon more than 14,000 years ago and 1,000 years earlier than previous estimates.
Using [...]

Scientists in Europe have uncovered remains of human ancestors in Europe dating back more than a million years:
Excavations in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain have uncovered the oldest known remains of human ancestors in Western Europe, scientists reported Wednesday.
The fossils of a lower jaw and teeth, more than 1.1 million years old, [...]

An excellent ABC report on a group of creationists who take children on a tour of a museum and lie to them:

Poor kids and their misguided parents.

Google Sky

We’re less than three years away from the end of America’s manned space flight program:
In 2 1/2 years, just as the [international space] station gets fully assembled, the United States will no longer have any spacecraft of its own capable of carrying astronauts and cargo to the station, in which roughly $100 billion is being [...]

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera would make a great backyard telescope for viewing Mars, and we can also use it at Mars to view other planets. This is an image of Earth and the moon, acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
At the time the [...]