A military/scientific collaboration has taken a big step towards figuring out why all the bees are dying. They studied many wrecked colonies and found a certain virus and fungus combination in every one.
[T]he bees do not just die — they fly off in every direction from the hive, then die alone and dispersed.
They still don’t know exactly what the combination does to kill them or how it emerged.
From Boing Boing comes an excellent story about Thomas Edison. He wanted to see what heavy magnetism would do to the human brain, so found a boy who was willing to stick his head between two magnetic poles. Luckily, the boy was unharmed. In fact, he had this to say:
“The experiment is bully. I am all right in the magnet. I like to be here for I do not have to work while the experiment is going on and I can take a nap occasionally. But don’t tell Mr. Edison. I hope he will keep me here for a long time.”
Good news! We have replaced our old and broken Triceratops with the new and shiny Kosmoceratops and Utahceratops, both discovered in the Utah desert.
The Utahceratops has a large horn over the nose and short eye horns that project to the side rather than upward, similar to a bison. Its skull is about 7 feet long, it stood about 6 feet high and was 18 to 22 feet long. It is believed to have weighed about 3 to 4 tons.
The Kosmoceratops has similar facial features at the Utahceratops, but has 10 horns across the rear margin of its bony frill that point downward and outward. It weighed about 2.5 tons and was about 15 feet long.
It couldn’t be less surprising that Delaware’s Republican nominee for the Senate — and masturbation opponent — Christine O’Donnell doesn’t understand science, “theories”, and evolution:
Creationism, in essence, is believing that the world began as the Bible in Genesis says, that God created the Earth in six days, six 24-hour periods. And there is just as much, if not more, evidence supporting that.
It goes without saying, O’Donnell probably has a different idea than I do about what constitutes evidence.
Bonus treat: O’Donnell has also spoken out against the dangers of “orgy rooms”:
All this coedness is outside normal life, said Miss O’Donnell. “Most average American adults don’t use coed bathrooms – if they had the option of a coed bathroom at a public restaurant, they wouldn’t choose it.” Coedness “is like a radical agenda forced on college students,” she said.
I agree. That agenda is totally radical.
This is where we contemplate for a moment that, as Andrew Sullivan reminds us, the Tea Party is supposedly all about fiscal sanity, limited government, and constitutional principles, and not about social conservatism.
Neptune takes 164 Earth years to orbit around the Sun.
As the first direct observation of the blue-green gas giant was made on Sept. 23, 1846, Neptune will arrive back in approximately the same spot as where it was first spotted on July 12, 2011.
The world’s biggest clock is being built in Mecca. It’s still incomplete, but one of its faces has already started ticking. The clock tower will be the second tallest building in the world.
More than six times larger in diameter than London’s famed Big Ben, the clock faces, with the Arabic words “In the Name of Allah” in huge lettering underneath and will be lit with two million LED lights.
Some 21,000 white and green coloured lights, fitted at the top of the clock, will flash to as far as 30 kilometres (18.7 miles) to signal Islam’s mandatory five-times daily prayers.
The clock is apparently part of an effort to establish Mecca Time as a rival to Greenwich Mean Time. What this means in practice, I’m not sure. Do they want to move the international date line? Do they just want to change UTC so that it refers to the time in Mecca? Or do they actually want the reference time for the world to be in Mecca? If it’s the last case, then they need to build not the biggest clock but the most precise. But even if they do that, the rest of the world will still prefer England time to be UTC+0, just so we don’t have to rewrite a bunch of software.
Naturally, for proponents of Mecca Time, it’s not just national or religious pride that makes them think they’re so important. They also have “science” to back them up.
A prominent cleric, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawy, said modern science had at last provided evidence that Mecca was the true centre of the Earth; proof, he said, of the greatness of the Muslim “qibla” – the Arabic word for the direction Muslims turn to when they pray.
Also:
This claim that the holy city is a “zero magnetism zone” has won support from some Arab scientists like Abdel-Baset al-Sayyed of the Egyptian National Research Centre who says that there is no magnetic force in Mecca.
“That’s why if someone travels to Mecca or lives there, he lives longer, is healthier and is less affected by the earth’s gravity,” he said. “You get charged with energy.”
Wow. That is a hell of a claim. Zero magnetism zone? I guess that means that compasses don’t work in Mecca? Probably not true.
Kindly, Steve Schimmrich the Hudson Valley Geologist has tried to give this crackpottery the benefit of the doubt (and taught me something about magnetic north):
What they may be talking about, however, is the zero line of magnetic declination. Turns out the north magnetic pole is not in the same place as the north geographic pole (which is fixed and located at the Earth’s rotational axis).
…
Look at the diagram above which shows lines of magnetic declination for the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s very complex, monitored and studied by geophysicists, and changes slightly year-to-year. Note the zero line that passes through the middle of the U.S. This means that if I go to the middle of Minnesota, for example, my compass (which aligns to magnetic north) will point to true north (0° declination from north).
…
Is Mecca on a 0° declination line? Not exactly. It’s close, as you can see on the diagram above, but not right on it (like some sites in the North and South America are). NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center calculates a magnetic declination of 3° E for Mecca.
Or maybe Abdel-Baset al-Sayyed is just sort of nuts. Dr. Sanity excerpts an interview that makes a strong case. It is also hilarious.
Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: The centrality [of Mecca] has been proven scientifically. How? When they traveled to outer space and took pictures of the earth, they saw that it is a dark, hanging sphere. The man said, “Earth is a dark hanging sphere – who hung it?”
Interviewer: Who said that?
Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: [Neil] Armstrong. Armstrong was basically trying to say: Allah is the one who hung it. They discovered that Earth emits radiation, and they wrote about this on the web. They left the item there for 21 days, and then they made it disappear.
Interviewer: Why did they make it disappear?
Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: There was intent there…
Interviewer: So it may be said that this suppression of information was significant.
Dr. ‘Abd Al-Baset Sayyid: It was very significant, since…the Ka’ba [in Mecca]… They said it emits radiation. This radiation is short-wave.
When they discovered this radiation, they started to zoom in, and they found that it emanates from Mecca – and, to be precise, from the Ka’ba.
Interviewer: My God!!
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.
Oh Conservapedia, you never disappoint.
When Sawyer asked if there was a way to reconcile religion and science, Hawking said, “There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.”
