Did our brains grow big because we learned to cook?

Consider that 60% of the energy expended by a resting baby is consumed by the baby's brain.  A resting adult brain uses 25% of its energy.  Compare this to the average ape brain, which uses only 8% of the apes energy.  In short, having a big brain requires a lot…

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The secret campaign of the Bush administration to let polluters determine US climate policy

All of your suspicions are true and you can now find them in an article that is intensely compelling and distressing.  It’s the current edition (June 28, 2007) of Rolling Stone.

It’s not every day after all that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell.  But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science–especially when it comes from international experts.  So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming

We’re going to see a big debate on it going forward,” Cheney told ABC news, about “the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man.”  We know today, he added, is “not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy is going to” solve the problem.”  Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president’s see-no-evil performance.

The Rolling Stone article argues that the White House has actively worked to distort the findings of climate scientists, playing down the threat of global warming.  This investigation by Rolling Stone goes further, however.  It reveals that

these distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, and a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on environmental quality and enforced by none other than

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Paris Hilton goes to jail and other bites of word salad

If you Google “Paris Hilton Jail” you’ll get 15 million hits. If you Google “Downing Street Memo” you'll get only 800,000 hits. A terrifying real-world topic, “Greenland ice sheet,” will only return 900,000 hits. I suppose it’s because there are no videos of memos or glaciers having sex. What brought…

Continue ReadingParis Hilton goes to jail and other bites of word salad