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The Oxford English Dictionary defines "poison" as "a substance that is capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism when introduced or absorbed." The legal definition of the term is "any product or substance that can harm someone if it is used in the wrong way, by the wrong person, or in the wrong amount." The medical condition of poisoning is even broader: It can be caused by substances that are not even legally required to carry the label "poison." Therefore, can food become poisonous? Of course it can if it is infected, tampered with or altered...

Ho-Hum, Another Feathered Dinosaur --snip-- Last January when the most recent flap about feathered dinosaurs made the rounds (01/21/2009), we listed 18 questions that should be asked before believing the claims made about bird and feather evolution. It would be a good time to review those again (see also footnote 3). The rush to judgment and eagerness to prove dinobird evolution should raise red flags...

The vast majority of dog breeds have emerged only in the last several centuries as a result of artificial selection. As new breeds are regularly developed, the many potential varieties within the dog kind are revealed. One distinction among breeds is their unique coats. Recent genetics analysis found that a huge range of dog fur textures are specified almost entirely by just three genes....

Dinosaur blood from a 65-million-year-old mosquito in amber used to clone live dinosaurs? It sounds like rather fanciful science fiction only fit for the movies, but claims reminiscent of Jurassic Park are becoming more common among scientists. We’re not talking about being able to resurrect dinosaurs from mosquitoes. However, claims abound that soft tissue, DNA and even entire bacteria ‘resurrected’ from a dormant state have survived for millions of years...

For decades, museums and textbooks confidently asserted that mud rocks—such as limestone, siltstone, mudstone, and shale—were formed over vast eons as super-fine sediments slowly settled to the bottom of shallow lakes or seas. But new flume studies are challenging old ways of thinking about mud rock formation...

WITH understandable reluctance, Prime Minister John Howard recently donned the political hair-shirt of a carbon trading system. On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that "I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with". NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: "We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well. "I'm proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle...

If you’ve been following our Picture of the Day, you’ve seen the electric arc on the upper left more than once on these pages. It comes to us from the website, “Sparks and Arcs,” sponsored by John Dyer-- http://www.johndyer.com/sparxarcs.html We also include above a photograph of the comet Hale-Bopp, enhanced to emphasize the rich filamentation of the comet tail. Electric Universe theorists identify comets as plasma discharge phenomena—negatively charged objects moving rapidly through the electric field of the Sun. Some advocates of the Electric Universe have devoted decades to investigating the human past, concluding that Earth’s environment was once bursting...