February 2012
10 posts
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John Fairfax and Sylvia Cook
After adventurer John Fairfax became the first person in recorded history to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, he said he couldn’t have done it without the help of “a great teacher,” a pirate. The navigational skills needed for his six-month trip in 1969 from the Canary Islands to Florida had been honed during Fairfax’s three years as a buccaneering smuggler, he...
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The Politics of Dead Children / Have sanctions...
Two weeks after the hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I began looking in earnest for trustworthy sources of information about the effects of sanctions on Iraq. I was joined in my search by a half-dozen or so e-mail acquaintances who approached the question from a broadly similar viewpoint: If sanctions are killing Iraqi babies, then Osama Bin Laden has a...
Remains of runaway Ohio girl missing since 1999...
The skeletal remains of a 14-year-old Ohio runaway missing since 1999 have been found while the home where she was last seen was being demolished.
Lima police said Saturday the remains of Nicholle Coppler were found in a crawl space as the home’s foundation was being dug out. Lima Police Chief Kevin Martin announced the remains found earlier this month at the Lima home were identified...
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Female Utopias
Another important subgenre is feminist utopias and the overlapping category of feminist science fiction. Writer Sally Miller Gearhart calls this sort of fiction political: it contrasts the present world with an idealized society, criticizes contemporary values and conditions, sees men or masculine systems as the major cause of social and political problems (e.g. war), and presents women as equal...
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Parthenogenesis
On June 26, 2007, International Stem Cell Corporation (ISCC), a California-based stem cell research company, announced that their lead scientist, Dr. Elena Revazova, and her research team were the first to intentionally create human stem cells from unfertilized human eggs using parthenogenesis. The process may offer a way for creating stem cells that are genetically matched to a particular woman...
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White People
The main hypotheses which attempt to account for white skin suggest it is an adaptation to inadequate ultraviolet radiation. As humans moved out of the tropics, a conspicuous latitude gradient of skin tones follows the out of Africa dispersion, it is argued natural selection for sufficient ultraviolet penetration to enable vitamin D production gave rise to the evolution of skin pigmentation by the...
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The Worst Disease You Can Get: Fatal Familial...
FFI has been discovered in only 28 families worldwide; it is an autosomal dominant gene mutation, meaning that a parent with the disease has a fifty percent chance of passing it on to his or her child (2)… the hallmark of FFI, which the aforementioned conditions don’t necessarily show, is the complete inability to sleep. The brain wave patterns that appear on FFI patients’...