Home    About    Contact    Subscribe   

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Today's Lunch Break:
The evangelical atheists and Mormon anti-evolutionists have joined forces

Those who know me well know that science is a subject very dear to my heart. When given the chance to speak at my graduation convocation for the College of Life Sciences a year ago, I spent my entire alloted time quoting Elder John Widtsoe and Dr. Francis Collins and gushing about the beauty of biology and evolution.

Those who know me well have probably also had me pestering them to check out The Mormon Organon, a blog written by my former BYU professor. The following excerpt is from his latest post, and is today's featured LB article.

Continue reading...


Monday, Mar 30, 2009

Today's Lunch Break:
Space storm alert: 90 seconds from catastrophe

While the disaster movies would have you believe that it's going to be an asteroid, nuclear war, or virus outbreak that kills most of us off, it may be nothing less than a case of bad weather.

Well, space weather, that is. A large enough ejection of coronal mass from the sun (a phenomenon often coinciding with solar flares) would disrupt the Earth's magnetic field, induce large currents in wires, melt transformers, knock out continental power grids, and render large sections of our interconnected and electricity-dependant infrastructure completely useless.

Continue reading...


Saturday, Jan 17, 2009

With windchill, it hit -10 F last night. And our house is chilly too, even though the space heater has been running nonstop for days. So except for getting food, I've stayed in bed all morning, reading.

Whence comes my fascinating fact of the day: since baby girls are born with all the eggs they'll ever have, part of each of us was inside our maternal grandmother's uterus.

My mom's mom died 15 years before I was born, but half of my genetic material resided inside her for nine months.

Intellectually, I have no problem understanding this. But somehow my mind is irrevocably blown by this fact of biology.


Friday, Jan 16, 2009

Lara and I are still without a car (ever since the deer incident), and I was reminded this week why I've been so slow in looking for a new one.

I meet with a pathologist in Baltimore twice a month as part of my branch's ovarian cancer study, and I rented a zip car to get there. There are many reasons for not owning a car, including the freedom from liability, the extra money saved from insurance and fuel expenses, and the daily pleasure reading while riding the train or bus. This week, however, it was the horrendous DC traffic that really made me grateful for public transit.

But I digress. What I do miss about owning a car is NPR.

Continue reading...





subscribe [RSS] :: designed by elliott :: powered by blogcfc