Deepak Chopra writes: When Michael Steele, the hapless chairman of the Republican Party, lost his bearings and called Rush Limbaugh's style ugly and incendiary, everyone knew it was the truth. But it was a perfect example of an inconvenient truth. The right wing has long used ugly, incendiary speech...

BBC Medical Science -- Nanotechnology has been used for the first time to destroy cancer cells with a highly targeted package of "tumour busting" genes. The technique, which leaves healthy cells unaffected, could potentially offer hope to people with hard-to-treat cancers where surgery is not possib...

Ilargi reports: There are two separate issues today in the US that occupy my mind. One is the Wall Street Journal revelation that at least $50 billion in taxpayer money ostensibly doled out to save AIG has gone straight to a consortium of the world's largest banks. That is worrisome because it shoul...

James Howard Kunstler writes: Isn't that a question, though.... The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex sys...

Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry call to action: There are moments in a nation’s—and a planet’s—history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are wr...

Chip Ward writes: Common to sudden catastrophes is the shock of finding the world upside down. The water is suddenly on top instead of under; the rumbling earth swallows houses and spits out lava; the mud wall slides down from above; the flames roar up; the wind spins; the tower topples. In an insta...

BBC Anthropological Science -- The earliest footprints showing evidence of modern human foot anatomy and gait have been unearthed in Kenya. The 1.5-million-year-old footprints display signs of a pronounced arch and short, aligned toes, in contrast to older footprints. The size and spacing of the Ken...

Bloomberg -- A NASA satellite launched from California failed to reach orbit today, crashing into the sea near Antarctica and dooming a $273 million mission to study global- warming gases. “The mission is lost,” National Aeronautics and Space Administration spokesman Steve Cole said in a telephone...

BBC Animal Science -- Animals are bound in space. Space is limited. They must compete for that space in order to survive. Good space is where they live and bad space is where they die. The migration of wildebeest is one of the most familiar events on the globe. Each year, over a million wildebeest a...

James Howard Kunstler writes: The public perception of the ongoing fiasco in governance has moved from sheer, mute incomprehension to goggle-eyed panic as the scrims of unreality peel away revealing something like a national death-watch scene in history's intensive care unit. Is the USA in recession...