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At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.
View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.
The Research Blogging Editor's Selectionies are out! Hosted by Krystal D'Costa, this award is roughly similar to the Academy Awards, but for blog posts about peer reviewed research. And I won one!!!
My post "A word or two about tobacco, and some neat and new research." It was said of this post "At Greg Laden's blog, readers are treated to a bit of botany related to tobacco and we learn that physical evidence has been found linking the Maya to tobacco use."
Is there a relationship between language density and habitat diversity? Tim DeChant explores this question at Per Square Mile with respect to Italian dialects.
A post at EvoAnth reports that four genes for skin tones have been discovered, shedding further light on this variable physical trait.
Navajos don’t eat fish, according to teofilo at Gambler’s House--and the taboo may apparently be traced linguistically.
At Body Horrors, Rebecca Kreston discusses the dangers of unsanitary shaving practices linked to an important Hajj ritual that may be leaving devotees susceptible to a blood-borne disease.
Thank you, thank you very much, oh, I see the music is playing I must get off the stage now.
But seriously, if you don't happen to be familiar with Research Blogging Dot Org you should check it out. It is a kind of central link clearing house for science bloggers (who are legit science bloggers, not fake ones) blogging about current (but sometimes I sneak in an older one) peer reviewed research papers. I always recommend it to teachers as a great way to get a quick handle on current research in your area.
OK, back in my seat now. They are announcing the next Selectionie.
... is a conference planned by the Center for Inquiry. This conference will be the focus of discussion in this Sunday's Atheist Talk Radio.
For details about the radio show and an opportunity to suggest questions or topics for discussion, CLICK HERE.
Regarding the conference itself:
FEMINISM AND SECULARISM.
Given the role religion has played in the repression of women, they would seem to be natural allies, and, indeed, many feminists have been outspoken and influential secularists. However, the relationship between secularism and women's issues remains largely unexamined.
UNTIL NOW.
Join us on May 18-20, 2012, for the "Women in Secularism" conference, sponsored by the Center for Inquiry. This historic conference will discuss and celebrate the many contributions women have made to the secular movement, while critically examining both the successes and failures of secularism in addressing women's concerns.
This bill is up for consideration now. Do something:
Call the Senate switchboard at 202-224-3121
Ask for your Senators and make your voice heard
Ask your friends to call too
Keep calling every week until this important bill passes
Report your call here
Using a technique called gravitational microlensing, an international team found a handful of exoplanets that imply the existence of billions more.
The findings were released at the 219th American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, alongside reports of the smallest "exoplanets" ever discovered.
Gravitational microlensing is a method that uses the gravity of a far-flung star to amplify the light from even more distant stars that have planets.
Astronomers used a number of relatively small telescopes that make up the Microlensing Network for the Detection of Small Terrestrial Exoplanets, or Mindstep, to look for the rare event of one star passing directly in front of another as seen from Earth.
The team witnessed 40 of these microlensing events, and in three instances spotted the effects of planets circling the more distant stars.
That would mean that there about bout 10 billion earth-size planets in this galaxy. Details here.
Kepler has discoverd theree planets around the star KOI-961, and they are a mere 0.78, 0.73 and 0.57 times the radius of Earth, rocky like the earth, but alas, they are too close to the star so there can't be any liquid water on them. But still, there are hardly any rocky exoplanets known, and the small ones are hard to find.
And the possibility of life being on them is, well, just have a look:
Imagine a "primordial soup" on some planet somewhere from which there occasionally emerges a thing that could locomote, and as it locomoted around it would scrape up some of the dust that lay around on the planet, and occasionally eat other things that had come out of the "primordial soup" and it would thus grow. Eventually it would wear out as its molecules, put together by some chemical process of abiogenecis in the aforementioned soup, and thusly worn out, molecules broken down by ultraviolet rays from the nearby star, it would eventually stop moving and remain exposed to the elements and dry out and become part of the dust, to be scraped up and consumed by other things.
Imagine that dozens of shallow seas of primordial soup on this planet each produced a range of such things, and they moved around on the planet, some staying in the soup, some going onto land, interacting, competing, cooperating, eating each other, sliding past each other, being born of the soup and dying, the dust sometimes being blown back into the soupy seas or being scraped up by other things.
The things are alive, right?
What if there was a form of thing on some other planet that had crawled out of the ooze and over time evolved, changed, varied, but over even longer periods of time, a self replicating version of this thing, or set of things, developed a way of perfectly identifying copies of itself that were not perfect, and destroying them. Say this emerged in several lineages of things, and this invariance gave some advantage to the things that did this. All other things, the ones that vary and change over generational time, are out-competed and those lineages disappear. So eventually, there are dozens of lineages of distinct but invariant things walking, sliding, coasting, flying, around on the surface of this planet, replicating but always duplicating perfectly, for hundreds of thousands of generations.
These things are alive, right?
Not according to Edward Trifonov, who defines life as:
Don't like Gnome 3.0 or Unity? Linux Mint 12 offers Gnome 2 like option.
The latest version of Mint channels Gnome 2.0 goodness via two different approaches: Firstly, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions add Gnome 2.0 features to the Gnome 3.0 shell. Secondly, Mint now ships with Mate, a maintenance fork of Gnome 2.0 that can co-exist with a Gnome 3.0 installation.
, will speak about his book and related matters at about 2:00. The event is at the Southdale Library. 
