Harry's Place

After Barack Obama’s reelection last November, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal declared that the GOP needed to “stop being the stupid party.”
“… It’s time for a new Republican Party that talks like adults,” he said. “We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. I’m here to say [...]

I’m not a toxicologist, a criminologist or a statistician (and I’d be interested to hear from anyone with expertise in these fields). But I think Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes a compelling case for a causal relationship between the rise and fall of violent crime rates in the US and other countries and the [...]

In fairness, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio isn’t the only politician who had Christian fundamentalist sensitivities in mind when he answered a question about the creation of the Earth.

At least Obama didn’t start wittering about the gross domestic product.

A report from Joe Palca of NPR news:
Scientists working on NASA’s six-wheeled rover on Mars have a problem. But it’s a good problem.
They have some exciting new results from one of the rover’s instruments. On the one hand, they’d like to tell everybody what they found, but on the other, they have to wait because [...]

You can gauge the post-election state of much of the Republican party– desperately trying not to offend its religious-right base while also striving to signal that it is rooted in reality– by Florida Sen. (and possible 2016 candidate for president) Marco Rubio’s answer to a question.
The question: How old do you think the Earth [...]

When I posted about Missouri Republican Congressman Todd Akin’s assertion that women’s bodies are capable of preventing pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape,” I failed to note that he is a member of the House of Representatives Science Committee.
The committee’s jurisdiction includes “all matters relating to science policy and science education including: the Office of [...]

This is a guest post by Amjad Khan
Muslim apologists today like to talk a great deal about the ‘Golden Age of Islamic Science’ and the great contribution Islam and Muslims made to a number of important scientific fields. Some go so far as to suggest that it was the Muslims who gave Europe the Enlightenment. [...]

RIP Sally Ride, first American woman in space.
Ride flew into orbit aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1983 to become America’s first woman in space. She took a second trip aboard the same shuttle one year later.
The first woman in space was Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, who orbited the earth 48 times in 1963.
“As the [...]

University of Maryland physicist Bob Park writes:
In 1977, smallpox, the most deadly and persistent human pathogenic disease, was eradicated from Earth by the World Health Organization following an unprecedented agreement allowing quick-response teams to freely cross every a border to administer vaccine in case of an outbreak. It was a moving demonstration of what can [...]

Crossing the sun. Watch it live, via NASA:

Live video by Ustream
Unfortunately the clouds have descended here in southwest Virginia, precluding a firsthand view, which probably wouldn’t be advisable anyway.