Below The Beltway

Albert Einstein, and particularly his famous quote that “God does not play dice with the universe,” has been cited many times as an example of a scientist who, on some level accepted the idea of a supernatural being.
Apparently, that wasn’t the case:
Albert Einstein described belief in God as “childish superstition” and [...]

Forty-Seven years ago today, Alan Shepard became the first American in space

National Review’s John Derbyshire continues his attack on Ben Stein’s movie Expelled:
In an interview with the Trinity Broadcasting Network, Ben Stein said the following amazing thing in an interview with Paul Crouch, Jr.
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great [...]

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.