WARREN, MI (WDIV/CNN) – A Michigan man shot and killed his stepdaughter because he felt she was not honoring her Muslim religion, according to police.
Trust Me, I’m a Scientist
Great article in the latest Scientific American by Daniel T. Willingham. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of “Why Don’t Students Like School?”. His article discusses why so many people choose not to believe what scientists say, so is of direct interest to skeptics.
A friend of mine has long held that a vaccination his son received as an infant triggered his child’s autism. He clings to this belief despite a string of scientific studies that show no link between autism and vaccines. When the original paper on such a link was recently discredited as a fraud, my friend’s reaction was that it will now be more difficult to persuade people of the dangers of vaccination. He is not alone: nearly half of all Americans believe in the vaccine-autism link or are unsure about it.
Vitamin supplements: good for health or a waste of $$
- In the UK we spend about £364 million each year on Vitamin and mineral supplements
- Approx 43% pop these supposed wonder drugs, but as you might expect, its the 55+ folks who are the biggest consumers
Revolutionary new paper computer shows flexible future for smartphones and tablets
Queens University press release reports …
“This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years,” says creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen’s University Human Media Lab,. “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen.”
Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine
An experiment in Minnesota is the first to bolster a long-contested claim that detectors a continent away have found evidence of particles called WIMPs.
WIMPs are theorized particles considered to be leading candidates for dark matter, invisible material believed to make up more than 80 percent of the matter in the universe. In the Minnesota experiment, called COGENT, a hockey puck–sized chunk of germanium deep in a former iron mine attempts to record rare collisions with WIMPS.
Death of a Madman
There is much I’d be tempted to write, but others have already done a far better job than I could ever muster, so I’ll simply draw your attention to the words of two such writers.