'Burn a Quran Day' Sparks Protests in Afghanistan, Petraeus Says It Can Endanger Troops

A Florida pastor's plan to burn Qurans at his church on Sept. 11 ignited a protest today by hundreds of Afghans, who burned American flags and shouted "Death to America," and drew a comment from the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan that the preacher could be increasing the threat to his troops.

The crowd in downtown Kabul reached nearly 500 today, with Afghan protesters chanting "Long live Islam " and "Long live the Quran," and burning an effigy of Terry Jones, senior pastor from the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida who is planning the event.

I don't know if there is anything that endangers troops more than putting them in Afghanistan, but pissing off the locals probably isn't going to help.

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Evolution in Action: Lizard Moving From Eggs to Live Birth

Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.

Along the warm coastal lowlands of New South Wales (map), the yellow-bellied three-toed skink lays eggs to reproduce. But individuals of the same species living in the state's higher, colder mountains are almost all giving birth to live young.

Only two other modern reptiles—another skink species and a European lizard—use both types of reproduction. (Related: "Virgin Birth Expected at Christmas—By Komodo Dragon.")

Evolutionary records shows that nearly a hundred reptile lineages have independently made the transition from egg-laying to live birth in the past, and today about 20 percent of all living snakes and lizards give birth to live young only.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson - Bad Design

2006 Neil DeGrasse Tyson speaks on bad design in the universe.

Hilarious.

Extract from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time

"There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle parts. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero." -Stephen Hawking

Magnificent.

Jason Clay: How big brands can help save biodiversity

Convince just 100 key companies to go sustainable, and WWF's Jason Clay says global markets will shift to protect the planet our consumption has already outgrown. Hear how his extraordinary roundtables are getting big brand rivals to agree on green practices first -- before their products duke it out on store shelves.

About Jason Clay
Jason Clay is a WWF vice-president who works with big corporations to transform the global markets they operate in, so we can produce more with less land, less water and less pollution.

Charles Darwin's ecological experiment on Ascension isle

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how the architect of evolution, Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem.

By a bizarre twist, this great imperial experiment may hold the key to the future colonisation of Mars.

The tiny tropical island of Ascension is not easy to find. It is incredibly remote, located 1,600km (1,000 miles) from the coast of Africa and 2,250km (1,400 miles) from South America.

Its existence depends entirely on what geologists call the mid-Atlantic ridge. This is a chain of underwater volcanoes formed as the ocean is wrenched apart.

However, because Ascension occupies a "hot spot" on the ridge, its volcano is especially active. A million years ago, molten magma explosively burst above the waves.

A new island was born.

Back in 1836, the young Charles Darwin was coming to the end of his five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no naturalist had gone before.

Aboard HMS Beagle, he called in at Ascension. En route from another remote volcanic island, St Helena, Darwin wasn't expecting much.

"We know we live on a rock, but the poor people of Ascension live on a cinder," the residents of St Helena had joked before his departure.

But arriving on Ascension put an unexpected spring in Darwin's step.

Professor David Catling of the University of Washington, Seattle, is retracing Darwin's travels for a new book. He told the BBC: "Awaiting Darwin on Ascension was a letter from his Cambridge mentor, John Henslow.

"Darwin's voyage of discovery had already caused a huge sensation in London," he explained.

"Henslow assured him that on his return, he would take his place among the great men of science."

At this fantastic news, Darwin bounded forth in ecstasy, the sound of his geological hammer ringing from hill to hill.

Everywhere, bright red volcanic cones and rugged black lava signalled the violent forces that had wrought the island.

Yet, thinks Professor Catling, amid this wild desolation, Darwin began to hatch a plot.

Out of the ashes of the volcano, he would create a green oasis - a "Little England".

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Are we living in a designer universe?

The argument over whether the universe has a creator, and who that might be, is among the oldest in human history. But amid the raging arguments between believers and sceptics, one possibility has been almost ignored – the idea that the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today.

As with much else in modern physics, the idea involves particle acceleration, the kind of thing that goes on in the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Before the LHC began operating, a few alarmists worried that it might create a black hole which would destroy the world. That was never on the cards: although it is just possible that the device could generate an artificial black hole, it would be too small to swallow an atom, let alone the Earth.

However, to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC – and there is every chance that our own universe may have been manufactured in this way.

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