Neil deGrasse Tyson begins this by mentioning that he noticed a "Atheism" book section at Borders. I agree with NDT on the issues he discusses. There's no need for cultural wars over religion. Perhaps some people are biologically wired to make them prone to religious beliefs. He is against scientific ignorance rather than against religion. Einstein's view on "God" is restated toward the end.
Are you watching the new version of "Cosmos," hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson? Excellent work so far. You can get the episodes here, at least for awhile.
As reported by the U.K. Guardian, the unsustainable ways of modern societies is posing a serious threat:
A new study sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that global industrial civilisation could collapse in coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution. Noting that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common."
Alan Turing was an amazing man. London researchers have recently substantiated one of his theories regarding repeated biological patterns:
[The] study, funded by the Medical Research Council and to be published online in Nature Genetics, not only demonstrates a mechanism which is likely to be widely relevant in vertebrate development, but also provides confidence that chemicals called morphogens, which control these patterns, can be used in regenerative medicine to differentiate stem cells into tissue. The findings provide evidence to support a theory first suggested in the 1950s by famous code-breaker and mathematician Alan Turing, whose centenary falls this year. He put forward the idea that regular repeating patterns in biological systems are generated by a pair of morphogens that work together as an 'activator' and 'inhibitor'.
The BBC has the photos. It's gruesome and amazing. A snake ate an entire crocodile.