I really think Fafnir’s onto something:

Leprechauns are all over the universe grabbin onto matter with their tiny leprechaun hands an holdin it together. hen you walk down the street insteada plummeting into pace it is because leprechauns are holdin you down onto the earth. Of course leprechauns are pretty small so when you jump you break free for a little while until the leprechauns grab you again!

I was really hoping that the new conservative agenda would stick to things like locking up innocent people for years at a time without due process, making homosexuals into second-class citizens, and other light pastimes. But now of course, they want to get rid of evolution as well. Because, you see, this is a Christian nation, and therefore the scientific truths that we hold dear should reflect our Christian heritage.

I think all the benefits of modern pharmaceutical and medical technologies that have devolved from experiments predicated on evolution and natutal selection should be rejected by those who deny the foundations on which they are built. If the basis goes against the Bible, are not the fruits of that research also tainted? That’s why I have some respect for the Christian Scientists. They may be nuts for not using band-aids, but at least they stand on their principles.

William Dembski, noted crackpot “intelligent design theorist,” is attempting to abuse information theory to support his notion that evolution is impossible. His first paper is dedicated to setting up a new mathematical framework for his theories, but really contains no new contribution. Its own claim is that:
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From ScienceNow:

And in a surprise move, a U.S. House committee has recommended that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) post its grantees’ papers on a free Internet site. Scientific societies and for-profit publishers were stunned by the language, which they say would drive traditional journals out of business.

This sounds like good news, but we’ll see if it makes it past the House (=cutting room) floor.

For more information on open access publishing, check out the Open Access News Blog.

The BBC reports on a study by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee:

It advises the government to consider allocating funds to universities and other organisations to create online repositories where their research can be stored, and viewed by the public free of charge.

This is one solution to the problem, but not necessarily the best one. It is going to take some gradual change to make this happen. What I find refreshing about this story is that it really is an issue to the House of Commons and that the government in the UK is really looking after its own interest, which is to say the public interest, rather than jumping into bed with big business from the outset. The government pays for this research through taxpayer money and the elected officials actually show an interest in looking after their investment. Compare that to the culture of corporate subsidy and handouts we have here in the US.

Of course, who knows what is going to happen with this report…

From April’s issue of Nature Neuroscience, a note entitled “Imaging gender differences in sexual arousal” by Turhan Canli and John Gabrieli:
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I’m hereby giving the prize for most-hated thing to cancer, in all its multifarious forms.

Download Prof. Biswas’s exciting game Quantum Focus! It will teach you about quarks and uncertainty and all that good stuff that they write about in plays like Copenhagen so that the vast majority of middle-class folks who know nothing about physics can feel privy to secret knowledge. Esoteric no more! Physics demystified and fun! Safe for all ages.

I sometimes cruise PLoS Biology, a free online biology journal that is slowly gaining a reputation, and they had a really cool article on Neural Activity When People Solve Verbal Problems with Insight. It’s worth a read through the abstract and introduction. There’s some fMRI stuff, a lot of brain anatomy that I know very little about, and some hand waving about Archimedes, but it’s pretty interesting to see (if you didn’t know already) how neuroscientists investigate problems like “insight.” Although many of my friends were Course 9 (Cog Sci), but I never really took any of those classes, hence my “gee whiz!” attitude.

From a ScienceNow article (subscription required):

The fossil record is chock-full of angiosperms, a testament to the extraordinary explosion of flowering plants that began around 140 million years ago. Today, angiosperms boast a diversity of 250,000 to 300,000 species, compared to 10,000 kinds of ferns… Most major lineages of polypod ferns, which comprise more than 80% of today’s fern species, arose and diversified a mere 100 million years ago, after the major riot of flowering plants… “The idea that the polypods took advantage of the angiosperms– that’s hot!” says David Barrington of the University of Vermont in Burlington.

In fact, one might call it the hotness if one were into California slang… scientists are fun and funny folk.