http://polyscience.org Sat, 13 May 2006 02:19:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here I was, re-opening shop, only to disappear after a week or so. Now I'm moving on, permanently. As in, leaving the business of science writing. Over the last six months or so, my interests have been slowly shifting, and I find myself interested in "science" as a general concept ... http://polyscience.org/2006/05/moving-on-onthepharm/ Back in July of 2005, Google launched Google Moon, a map of the moon similar to their map of the Earth. Of course it doesn't have roads and such because there aren't any, and you can't see things like the remains of the Apollo moon missions for reasons that I ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/google-mars/ In the last 12 months, we've seen a storm of Evolution/Intelligent Design debates. The arguable culmination of these proceedings has been the court case in Dover, PA in which Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design (ID) was merely creationism re-branded as pseudoscience and should not be taught ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/intelligent-design-great-britain/ Drudge report has a copy of the press release scheduled to be released today at 2pm. NASA's Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/nasa-to-report-potential-liquid-water-on-enceladus/ Gladiator is probably one of my most favorite movies of all time. I can recall reading Entertainment Weekly back in 2000 when it first came out that gladiators often weren't killed during combat simply because to do so was too expensive. Since then, I've read conflicting reports from various sources ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/gladiator-rulebook/ Hot on the heels of budget concerns due to priority shifts, NASA has decided to cancel its Dawn asteroid missions citing cost overruns and the mission's relatively low priority. The Dawn mission was originally supposed to study the two largest main-belt asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, but estimated cost overruns of ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/nasa-scraps-missions/ Jupiter seems to be growing a second red spot as you can see in the image above. The official name is Oval BA, but Red Jr seems to be a better choice. Red Jr first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. It is the ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/jupiter-second-red-spot/ I really like the BBC. They're all about making their content freely available. First it was all 9 of Beethoven's symphonies, and now they're releasing their wildlife archives for free as well. Access to the BBC's extensive news archive is seen as giving the British public a chance to share and ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/bbc-wildlife-archives/ Research out of Queen's University in Canada has come up with some surprising findings: namely that conventional wisdom that terminal patients would rather die at home than anywhere else isn't nearly as important to them as dying under the care of competent doctors. (Why is it that conventional wisdom turns ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/how-you-die-matters/ I don't often criticize the pharmaceutical industry, because I am a capitalist at heart, and there are enough other, often ill-informed people out there to do it for me. I don't begrudge the pharmaceutical industry its high prices on patent medicines. I do think that some of their practices are ... http://polyscience.org/2006/03/overpriced-avastin/