Elements Song
hat-tip Ana

Images from the Refurbished Hubble Space Telescope
NASA has released a collection of new images taken by the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope after the recent successful repair mission. During the mission, NASA astronauts added new, more sensitive, instruments and repaired two others, among other tasks.Go here for a collection of images with detailed captions an

The Man Who Diffused the Population Bomb
Solve world hunger,  check.OK so there are still hungry people in the world. But the statistics in this story about Norman Borlaug (whom I have never heard of before now either) would be completely unbelievable, pure fantasy, utopic if it weren't for the stubborn fact that they are true.Doing some reckoning with those statistics In 1999, the Atlantic Monthly estimated that Borlaug's efforts combined with those of the many developing-world agriculture-extension agents he trained and the crop-research facilities he founded in poor nations s

Franciscan University of Steubenville Bioethics Conference
The Value of Human Life ConferenceInstitute of BioethicsFriday, October 23, 2009 - Sunday, October 25, 2009 Some philosophers hold that only some human beings have full moral worth and that human beings at the earliest stages of their development are of no more worth than dogs or cats. Other thinkers hold that every human being, no matter what stage of his or her development, has a profound and equal inherent worth. Can that belief be defended by reason? Does human life have value in itself or is it merely of instrumental value? When does human life become valuable? On what basis do human beings have basic rights? When do human beings actual