No, really. Ever wonder why the hair on your head can grow long, while all your other hair, wherever it is, never grows long like that? I was sitting here, relaxed, with my shirt open, working on the last little things I need to write so I can set aside my novel draft, and I looked down at my chest and noticed my hair looks thicker now. I realized that’s a function of having lost weight… same hair, less surface area, right? Kind of weird but nice. And suddenly I was overwhelmed with a feeling of gratitude to nature that …

I found a link over at 2Blowhards for a very interesting article over at New Scientist: Both male and female students at McMaster University were shown pictures of the opposite sex of varying attractiveness taken from the website ‘Hot or Not’. The 209 students were then offered the chance to win a reward. They could either accept a cheque for between $15 and $35 tomorrow or one for $50-$75 at a variable point in the future. Wilson and Daly found that male students shown the pictures of averagely attractive women showed exponential discounting of the future value of the reward. …

Does this kind of idea run through your mind when you think of cell phones? I don’t know which is worse–the loss of the sense that walking along a great urban street is a glorious shared experience or the blurring of distinctions between different kinds of places. But these cultural losses are related, and the cell phone has played a major role in both. It sure doesn’t run through mine. But apparently Paul Goldberger thinks of it, and is concerned that we should too. He’s so concerned he wrote an article about these “cultural losses”, titled “Disconnected Urbanism”, for the …

This is kind of scary: Bill McGuire of the Guardian Unlimited reports that global warming could in fact trigger a new ice age. Or, rather, the resumption of the ice age that never really ended, for that ice age never actually let up. We’re in a warm period, an interglacial period, actually. And it might be we could trigger the resumption of an ice age. Something to think about. The fact that we don’t know, but we’re affecting it, is scary. Because the way we affect things seems to accelerate everything. Anyway, thanks to Rob from about pip for sharing …

This is just damn cool. Gold “nano-bullets” could seek and destroy inoperable human cancers, suggest new studies by US scientists. The tiny silica particles are plated with gold and heat up when near infrared light (NIR) is shone on them. This kills the cancer cells. Tests on human breast cancers, both in the test tube and in tumours in mice, were highly successful, the researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The nanoshells are designed to absorb near infrared light and convert that light to heat,” explains Jennifer West, who led the study at Rice University, …

I’ll say it again. Evolution is not a theory. Evolution is something we know happened. We see it happen in nature even now, with creatures like cichlids in Lake Malawi, who speciate unusually rapidly. We see plenty of evidence for it in the fossil record. Anyone who spends any amount of time looking at the world around them will sense the genius in Darwin’s simple, elegant, and brilliant insight of how the world came to be as it is now. The claim that Darwinism is in trouble is to claim there is the crisis to cover one’s own ignorance, and …

I honestly shouldn’t be shocked by what I read in this article at Forbes.com, but the unpretty picture that it paints about the net in Korea is kind of surprising… and perhaps misguided. I am very surprised to see that 60% of divorces cite infidelity with people met online as their causes. This is a shocking statistic… but I don’t think there is anything magical about the internet that induces adultery. I am skeptical that the marriages were so good to begin with, and I think probably infidelity was a major citation of the cause of divorce in the past …

I was looking on the blog of another Friday Fiver and saw the most amazingly beautiful picture of the Northern Lights. It made me remember when I was a kid and my dad was driving us home to Prince Albert from a day of music lessons in Saskatoon. Sometimes at night it would get so dark we could see out across our arm of of the Milky Way, the ocean of miniscule lights. One night, I don’t remember why, he stopped and I remember looking off into the haze of light far past the distinct points of light. I remember …

I am clapping my hands and quietly cheering… There is something a little breathtaking in a level of science-phobia that can see ‘negativizing’ disease, suffering and death, as harmful and repressive. One is reminded of Woody Allen’s retort to a character’s reproach, in ‘The Front’, that he really wanted success: ‘So what should I want, a disease?’ Does Marglin seriously think that disease, suffering and death (the death of other people, remember, as well as one’s own) would be a source of joy and pleasure if only it weren’t for the ‘scientific medical system of knowledge’? Has the postmodern left …

That’s right, it’s what I’ve been saying all along and now thanks to some scientists in Ireland, you’ll finally believe me: Sex is better for your health than no sex. At least, The best that modern science can say for sexual abstinence is that it’s harmless when practiced in moderation. Having regular and enthusiastic sex, by contrast, confers a host of measurable physiological advantages, be you male or female. And health is important. So there. Sob. Well, thanks for the link, Adam.