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Caster Semenya, woman who rocked athletics world, 'is hermaphrodite' Rick Broadbent and Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg Sex tests carried out on Caster Semenya, the world 800 metres champion, show that she is a hermaphrodite, a source close to the case claimed last night. If the allegation is backed up by the official results, the South African may find herself stripped of her gold medal and banned from racing. The IAAF, the world governing body, refused to comment on the claim last night, but earlier in the day its general secretary, Pierre Weiss, said: “It is clear that she is a...

Just how many communists are there holed up in the Obama White House anyway? John Holdren, Obama's biggest radical and Science Czar, slammed the idea of American exceptionalism and explicitly said that we need to redistribute energy and material resources during the Bali Conference on global warming on July 12, 2007. John Holdren says the US should redistribute the wealth with green policies:

Environmentalists hope the push in Congress for climate change legislation is not overwhelmed by the debate dominating Capitol Hill over changing the U.S. healthcare system. But it might be. Already two months behind schedule and unsure whether enough Democrats will play along, Senate leaders still aim to pass a bill by December when a United Nations summit convenes in Copenhagen to set worldwide goals for reducing carbon dioxide and other pollutants. But as the debate over healthcare legislation rages and with President Barack Obama due to address a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to try to rescue the faltering...

As a member of the American Psychological Association for 36 years, I am filled with indignation at the recent statement of the APA that deems it “inappropriate” for therapists to treat homosexual clients. Such therapy is called reparative therapy and has as its goal the establishment of a heterosexual orientation in place of a homosexual one. This statement of the APA has been issued despite the fact that there are a number of outstanding members of that organization, including two past presidents, who have strongly supported reparative treatment.Issued in August, “Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation” advises treatments that “increase...

The United States Department of Education requires all state and local education institutions to collect data on ethnicity and race for students and staff. This information is used for state and federal accountability reporting as well as for reporting to the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. School district staff and parents or guardians of students enrolling in school are requested to provide this information. If you decline to provide this information, please be aware that the USDE requires school districts to use observer identification as a last resort for collecting the data for federal reporting. Please...

August 29, 2009 — Today’s Evolutionary Just-So Story is brought to you by New Scientist: “Girls Are Primed to Fear Spiders.” Once upon a time, while cavemen were out hunting and gathering, the women back home had to learn to avoid dangerous animals. David Rakison of Carnegie Mellon University put this all into evolutionary terms for the rest of us:...

Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.) is trying to win Senate support for the ruinously expensive cap-and-tax global-warming bill, claiming it will prevent threats to national security, according to the New York Times. He argues that global warming will destabilize the developing world, creating climate refugees and exacerbating conflict. The American military will need to respond to these problems through either humanitarian-relief missions or armed intervention. This argument is flawed for two reasons. First, there is no reason to believe the bill being debated will stop any of this. Second, there is every possibility that the bill might make things worse....

Junk Science: The EPA may be considering closing the watchdog office that exposed the flimsy evidence of man-caused warming. So much for the administration's promise to "restore science to its rightful place."Recently we commented on the plight of Dr. Allen Carlin, the EPA senior research analyst at the National Center for Environmental Economics who dared to say, in essence, that emperor Al Gore and his environmental sycophants at the Environmental Protection Agency wore no clothes. The EPA had been working on an "endangerment finding" that would say carbon dioxide, rather than being the basis for all life on earth, was...

Imagine that you are a teacher of Roman history and the Latin language, anxious to impart your enthusiasm for the ancient world — for the elegiacs of Ovid and the odes of Horace, the sinewy economy of Latin grammar as exhibited in the oratory of Cicero, the strategic niceties of the Punic Wars, the generalship of Julius Caesar and the voluptuous excesses of the later emperors. That’s a big undertaking and it takes time, concentration, dedication. Yet you find your precious time continually preyed upon, and your class’s attention distracted, by a baying pack of ignoramuses (as a Latin scholar...

Civilisation would most likely be finished in the event of a zombie outbreak, claim Canadian mathematicians who have calculated the possible devastation caused by an attack by the fictional monsters. Using models developed to calculate the effects of more plausible pandemics, the team from the University of Ottawa have discovered that unless man struck back quickly and aggressively then they would be doomed. The scientific paper, which is published in a book “Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress”, looks at an attack by the undead creatures, who infect the living with a bite. In their study, titled When Zombies Attack!, the...

"Evolution, a religion? You must be nuts! I shall scoff at thee, mine theist!" I probably would get this type of remark from any evolutionist to whom I might suggest such a thing. Yes, evolution (or, at least, belief in it and Darwinist defense of it) is a religion and its believers are just as religious as their theistic counterparts. This fact can be a stumbling block to most atheists, but it is quite true. I should begin this essay by explaining what it is that constitutes a religion. I have expounded on this point elsewhere and I will do...

Scientists in Japan microscopically confirmed islam is the correct religion Please study and embrace islam to win Paradise. As you can see in this wonderful video from Egyptian national TV studio the seated scientist from Japan presented his findings of the effect of the holy Quran islam and the islamic prayer call (the athan) on water molecules under electron microscopy. The egyptian scientist B.sc.Ms.Ph.D explained the water molecules took beautifull shapes everytime they are exposed to air vibrations from reading the holy Quran or saying the word islam or the muslim call to prayer the athan. The scientist added because...

CNSNews.com) - The bill meant to combat global warming that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June would decrease the Gross Domestic Product of the United States by $2 trillion to $3 trillion between 2012 and 2030, a study shows. The study on the economic impact of the American Clean Energy and Security Act was commissioned by the American Council for Capitol Formation (ACCF), a non-profit that examines tax and environmental policy, and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), the nation’s largest manufacturing trade organization.

WASHINGTON – Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, the nation's top car salesman in recent weeks, has cited the Obama administration's best-seller list of mostly smaller, fuel-saving cars like the Ford Focus to describe the success of the Cash for Clunkers rebate program.

Over the years I've been a harsh critic of elements in the larger conservative movement and by proxy the modern Republican Party who pay lip service to various forms of pseudoscience, creationism being a prime example. But here we look at the other side of the coin with an incomplete survey of some of the bizarre anti-science beliefs, medical quackery, pseudoscience, and full blown conspiracy theories with questionable roots in science, some of which are sadly gaining considerable traction due to recent political shifts. They're by no means held exclusively by the left, but nevertheless readers are far more likely...

--- snip The damage to national economies will be enormous. The human suffering will be incalculable. We have the power to change course. But we must do it now. As we move toward Copenhagen in December, we must “Seal a Deal” on climate change that secures our common future. I'm glad that the Chairman of the forum and many other speakers have used my campaign slogan “Seal the Deal” in Copenhagen. I won't charge them loyalty. Please use this “Seal the Deal” as widely as possible, as much as you can. We must seal the deal in Copenhagen for the...

"One cause of the blunders that have made the Met Office a laughing stock is less widely appreciated, however. It is that the multi-million pound computer it uses to assist its short-term forecasting for Britain is also one of the four main official sources of data used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict global warming. In this respect the IPCC's computer models have proved just as wrong in predicting global temperatures as the Met Office has been in forecasting those mild winters and heatwave summers." "In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has...

Cloud ships on course to beat climate change, says Copenhagen study It is hoped that the clouds produced by the "cloud ships" could cancel out the greenhouse effect Ben Webster, Environment Editor, and Hannah Devlin They sound like ideas from a Jules Verne novel, but giant engineering schemes designed to alter the climate offer the cheapest way of avoiding catastrophic global warming, according to a growing number of scientists and green-minded entrepreneurs. Most of the schemes have been dismissed as impossibly expensive or impractical, such as the proposal to create a space sunshade by using rockets to deploy millions of...

A 260-million-year-old fossil is the oldest known tree-dwelling creature, according to researchers. Scientists described the finding as the earliest evidence in the fossil record of an "opposable thumb"... they described how the animal's elongated hands and fingers would have helped it to grip and climb... The fossilised creature, named Suminia getmanovi, has been dated to late Permian period, 100 million years earlier than the first known tree-dwelling mammal. It was first discovered in Russia in 1994. But for lead author Jorg Frobisch, from the Field Museum in Chicago, US, said this study was the first opportunity to examine its whole...

The House of Representatives has approved an addition to the healthcare reform package. It calls for the creation of a “Healthy Teen Initiative”, and allocates $50 million to so-called “comprehensive” sex education. “This was a vote to bring science back into government”, said James Wagoner, president of Advocates For Youth and a leader of the coalition that promoted the amendment. The committee, he continued, “has taken an important step toward ensuring young people get the critical sexual health information they need to make responsible decisions about their lives.” Mr. Wagoner’s statement is astonishing, because Advocates for Youth’s sexual education curricula...

Professor William Calvin Unhinged! Calls on scientists to use 'interventional activism' to combat global warming! 'Climate will change our ways of doing science' - Claims 'long term thinking can be dangerous' Monday, August 03, 2009- By Marc Morano – Climate Depot [Climate Depot Editorial Note: Dr. Calvin should consider heeding the wisdom of Dr. Richard Lindzen. See: MIT Climate Scientist Lindzen: 'Ordinary people see through man-made climate fears -- but educated people are very vulnerable' - July 6, 2009 ] By William Calvin, Neuroscientist at the University of Washington School of Medicine; Author of “A Brain for All Seasons: Human...

Note: The following text is a quote: American Forces Press Service Navy Task Force Assesses Changing Climate Special to American Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, July 31, 2009 – Rapidly diminishing sea ice, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, increased storm severity -- all are possible consequences of a climate that mounting evidence suggests is changing significantly. As the scientific community works to understand the changing climate, the chief of naval operations has created a task force, headed by Rear Adm. David Titley, the Navy's senior oceanographer, to better understand and evaluate its implications for maritime security. “Task Force Climate Change was...

A majority of adults in Canada, the United States and Britain believe global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities, according to a poll by Angus Reid Strategies. At least 51 per cent of respondents in the three countries agree with this statement. Conversely, 21 per cent of Britons, 19 per cent of Canadians and 17 per cent of Americans believe global warming is happening but is mostly caused by natural changes. Also, 20 per cent of respondents in the U.S., 16 per cent in Canada and 16 per cent in Britain...

More Dangerous than Smoking? Men who have had sex with men since 1977 have an HIV prevalence 60 times higher than the general population and 800 times higher than first time blood donors, the FDA reports. When it comes to combating cigarettes, the government not only restricts, taxes and bans smoking, it also funds and encourages anti-smoking messages and advertisements. Given the immense health risks of male homosexual sex, shouldn’t the federal government do a comprehensive study on the matter, tax sodomitic establishments, and educate the public and especially young people about the dangers of “gay” sex? Speaking Friday at...

Its become a mantra on the left… "Manmade Global Climate Change!" "We must HALT it!" "We're DOOMED!" +++++++snip+++++++ Thankfully real scientists are now fighting back. Successfully! Atmospheric Chemist Roger L. Tanner: "I have very little in common with the philosophy of the Heartland Institute and other 'free-market fanatics,' and I consider myself a progressive Democrat. Nevertheless, we scientists should know better than to propound scientific truth by consensus and to excoriate skeptics with purple prose." ++++++++snip++++++++ In a final coup d'état, Climate Depot exposes this little gem: UN IPCC's William Schlesinger admits in 2009 that only 20% of IPCC scientists...

The fatal flaw with radioactive dating methods --snip-- This illustrates the problem with the radioactive dating of geological events. Those who promote the reliability of the method spend a lot of time impressing you with the technical details of radioactive decay, half-lives, mass-spectroscopes, etc. But they don’t discuss the basic flaw in the method: you cannot determine the age of a rock using radioactive dating because...

The staggered phase out of energy-wasting light bulbs begins on Sept. 1 in Germany. The unpopularity of the energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs that will replace them is leading consumers and retailers to start hoarding the traditional bulbs. As the Sept. 1 deadline for the implementation of the first phase of the EU's ban on incandescent light bulbs approaches, shoppers, retailers and even museums are hoarding the precious wares -- and helping the manufacturers make a bundle. The EU ban, adopted in March, calls for the gradual replacement of traditional light bulbs with supposedly more energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs (CFL). The...

Researchers found that attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Once those daughters become adult they tend to be good looking themselves and so the pattern is repeated as women over the generations become steadily more aesthetically pleasing. As attractive couples are less likely to have boy than a girl, men, in contrast, remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the scientists claim. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. In a study...

Facilitated variation is the first comprehensive theory of how life works at the molecular level, published in 2005 by systems biologists Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart in their book The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma. It is a very powerful theory, is supported by a great deal of evidence, and the authors have made it easy to understand. It identifies two basic components of heredity: (a) conserved core processes of cellular structure, function and body plan organization; and (b) modular regulatory mechanisms that are built in special ways that allow them to be easily rearranged (like ®Lego blocks) into...

It's now more than 50 years since the revolution began. Sexual "liberation" has been endlessly ballyhooed by the national media, promoted in the movies, embraced by Playboy guys and Cosmo girls as a freedom more delicious than Eden's apple. No American under 40 can honestly remember a time when sex on TV was taboo, when "living together" meant married, when "gay" meant happy, and when almost every child lived with both parents.   If truth be told, the revolution has been a disaster. Before the push to loosen America's sexual mores really got under way in the 1950s, the...

Last month, the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS), a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization affiliated with George Mason University, released "Science Suppressed: How America became obsessed with BPA," a report which accuses the media "of ignoring the extensive research of respected scientists and major health agencies in the United States and around the world, which found BPA was not only safe but played an important role in ensuring food safety."   It also confirms what countless previous studies have said; BPA is safe. If you're unfamiliar with Bisphenol A (BPA), it is a chemical used to make lightweight, versatile, durable, high-performance plastics.  It's...

The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism. Key findings: Ø The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary. Ø Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of...

SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise. The judge referred to the theory’s “breathtaking inanity,’’ which is a fine description of Stephen Meyer’s July 15 op-ed “Jefferson’s support for intelligent design.’’ Well, yes, Thomas Jefferson died 33 years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species.’’ And Meyer’s idea that the DNA code implies a code...

Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.....she and colleagues say barking is the auditory signal associated with an evolved behavior known as mobbing, a cooperative anti-predator response usually initiated by one individual who notices an approaching intruder. A dog barks because she feels an internal conflict an urge...

No one knows exactly how much Earth's climate will warm due to carbon emissions, but a new study this week suggests scientists' best predictions about global warming might be incorrect. The study, which appears in Nature Geoscience, found that climate models explain only about half of the heating that occurred during a well-documented period of rapid global warming in Earth's ancient past. The study contains an analysis of published records from a period of rapid climatic warming about 55 million years ago AKA the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. "In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in...

For example, we now know that: Birds adapted to the diverse environments several distinct times because many birds that now live on water (such as flamingos, tropicbirds and grebes) did not evolve from a different waterbird group, and many birds that now live on land (such as turacos, doves, sandgrouse and cuckoos) did not evolve from a different landbird group.Similarly, distinctive lifestyles (such as nocturnal, raptorial and pelagic, i.e., living on the ocean or open seas) evolved several times. For example, contrary to conventional thinking, colorful, daytime hummingbirds evolved from drab nocturnal nightjars; falcons are not closely related to hawks...

The most complete skeleton of a type of pot-bellied dinosaur, a therizinosaur, has been discovered in southern Utah. Such remains shed light on the evolution of leafy and meaty diets back in paleo times, suggesting that iconic predators like Velociraptor may have evolved from less fearsome plant-eating ancestors. The newly discovered dinosaur, dubbed Nothronychus graffami, lived some 93 million years ago. When alive, the animal would have stood at 13 feet (4 meters) and sported a beaked mouth and forelimbs tipped with 9 inch- (22 cm)-long sickle claws. Its stumpy legs, large gut and other features suggest the lumbering giant...

-- Scientists have confirmed the oldest penis-like structure in an ancient fish specimen. The discovery of the 400 million-year-old reproductive organ is one of the earliest examples of internal fertilization in vertebrate animals. Understanding the anatomy of these ancient fish could reveal further details in the evolution of vertebrates -- including humans. The research is published in today's advanced online ahead of print edition of Nature. Earlier this year the team, led by Australian palaeontologist Dr John Long, predicted some ancient fish from the Devonian era, had an attachment to their pelvic bone, which were used by males to fertilize...

(CNSNews.com) - A Zogby poll commissioned by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute says more than three-quarters of Americans would like teachers to have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of Darwinian evolution, with an even higher number reported among Democrats...

A thorough and entertaining refutation of the "settled science" of global warming.

Every year, millions of dragonflies fly thousands of kilometres across the sea from southern India to Africa. So says a biologist in the Maldives, who claims to have discovered the longest migration of any insect. If confirmed, the mass exodus would be the first known insect migration across open ocean water. It would also dwarf the famous trip taken each year by Monarch butterflies, which fly just half the distance across the Americas.

> Male Magellan penguins Harry and Pepper have been together since 2003. The pair nested together and even incubated an egg laid by another penguin in 2008, but their relationship hit the rocks earlier this year when a female penguin, Linda, befriended Harry after her long-time companion died. This did not go over well with Pepper, who became violent. The three penguins were separated for some time following the fight. >

WASHINGTON — If the Senate doesn't pass a bill to cut global warming, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer says, there will be dire results: droughts, floods, fires, loss of species, damage to agriculture, worsening air pollution and more. She says there's a huge upside, however, if the Senate does act: millions of clean-energy jobs, reduced reliance on foreign oil and less pollution for the nation's children.

We should be concerned about the people who are going to be running the country during the next 3 1/2 years. This is about one of the Czars. Book he authored in 1977 advocates for extreme totalitarian measures to control the population Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? Or both? These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack...

Forced abortions. Mass sterilization. A "Planetary Regime" with the power of life and death over American citizens. The tyrannical fantasies of a madman? Or merely the opinions of the person now in control of science policy in the United States? These ideas (among many other equally horrifying recommendations) were put forth by John Holdren, whom Barack Obama has recently appointed Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology -- informally known as the United States' Science Czar....

Snippets: Former Vice President Al Gore, whose "An Inconvenient Truth" video epistle on the claims of global warming has not weathered recent scientific research, now has promised at a conference in the United Kingdom that the impending virtual energy tax under the U.S. "cap-and-trade" legislation will bring about "global governance." He cited the "cap-and-trade" legislation in the U.S. Congress that  by President Obama's own estimate would cause utility bills to skyrocket for American consumers. Those taxes are good, Gore said.

Modern glaciers, such as those making up the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, are capable of undergoing periods of rapid shrinkage or retreat, according to new findings by paleoclimatologists at the University at Buffalo... The proof of such rapid retreat of ice sheets provides one of the few explicit confirmations that this phenomenon occurs. Should the same conditions recur today, which the UB scientists say is very possible, they would result in sharply rising global sea levels, which would threaten coastal populations...The researchers used a special dating tool at UB to study rock samples they extracted from a large fjord...

Note: The following text is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ______________________________________________________________________ FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE July 9, 2009 DECLARATION OF THE LEADERS THE MAJOR ECONOMIES FORUM ON ENERGY AND CLIMATE We, the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States met as the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate in L’Aquila, Italy, on July 9, 2009, and declare as follows: Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our...

What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: “I wish you were dead!” In a recent Wall Street Journal opinion article, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss declared “the inconsistency of belief in an activist god with modern science.” Krauss’s essay was the latest eruption of a vituperative argument going on in the scientific community over “accommodationism.” Accommodationists hold that even atheists...

Sediment column at the mouth of the Amazon River. Credit: NASA The Amazon River has been around for 11 million years ago and in its shape for the last 2.4 million years ago, according to a study on two boreholes drilled in proximity of the mouth of the Amazon River by Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil. Until recently the Amazon Fan, a sediment column of around 10 kilometres in thickness, proved a hard nut to crack, and scientific drilling expeditions such as Ocean Drilling Program could only reach a fraction of it. Recent exploration efforts by Petrobras lifted...