Category: Academia

Spray-On Glass is Coming

It appears that a Turkish company has perfected the invention of “liquid glass” in a breakthrough that will likely make it and its German patent holder fantastically wealthy. With the United States pouring billions into these wars (while cutting educational budgets) and countries like China spending equally on new research (here), we will increasingly be the consumers rather than the inventors of such new technology.

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Meteorite Sets Off Firestorm of Litigation in Lorton

There is a fascinating property dispute brewing in Virginia. Dr. Marc Gallini and Frank Ciampi almost became galactic fodder when a meteorite came crashing into Examining Room No. 2 at their Williamsburg Square Family Practice. They decided to give the meteorite to the Smithsonian for a $5000 payment of “appreciation.” Now, the landlord Deniz Mutlu and his family have reportedly notified the Smithsonian that the meteorite is theirs, His brother and fellow landlord, Erol Mutlu, wrote to the museum that they would come to retrieve it by the end of the day.

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Virginia School Pulls Diary of Anne Frank From Shelves After Objection to Sexual Explicit Reference

The Culpepper County Public Schools has become the latest addition to the dubious list of schools banning Anne Frank’s ‘Diary of a Young Girl.” The move to pull the books from all of the shelves in the county reportedly came after one parent found a passage to be sexually explicit.
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Teacher Resigns After Sending Home 5-Year-Old Special Needs Student With Bag of Human Feces

Elementary school teacher Sue Graham in Yakima, Washington has resigned after being reprimanded for sending a bag of human feces home with a five-year-old student from her special education class. She sent home the feces with a sticky note reading “This little turd was found on the floor in my room.” Her husband, Ron Graham, also resigned.

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China Leads World in Research Growth

While we continue to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into Iraq and Afghanistan, China is now leading the world in research growth. The recent report on Chinese investment in new science is startling in comparison to our own illogical policies of raising our debt limits to fund these foreign operations while states sell off public lands and cut back on school budgets, here.

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How Do You Spell Absurd? School District Quarantines All Copies of Merrian Webster Dictionary

The good people of Menifee Union School District have taken a stand against indecency. Across the district in every school library Merriam Webster’s 10th edition dictionary has been locked away because one parent complained that it contained a definition of “oral sex.”

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The Stark Truth: A Step-By-Step Guide on How You Die From Hypothermia

I saw this article on Reddit and found it so well-written and informative I could not put it down. It is how you die (or possibly survive) from hypothermia. It is written by Peter Stark, a contributor to Outside and author of Driving to Greenland.
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Study: Paleolithic Women Dug Farmers

If you really want to impress women, join the Grange or the FFA. That is the finding of a remarkable study of the DNA of most British men that shows that they are direct descendants of farmers who left Iraq and Syria over 10,000 years ago. It turns out that hunter-gatherer women dug the fact that they could grow food and dumped those bronzed spear-throwing hunks for guys with farmer’s tans.
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Joan of Arc: Study Finds Sacred Relic Contains Mummy and Cat Bones

For centuries, the Archbishops of Tours (Chinon, France) have protected one of the holiest relics of the Church: the charred bones of Joan of Arc. Kept in a bottle and showing signs of the burning, the bones were a prized possession in France where Joan of Arc is the national heroine. New tests, however, reveal that the bottle contains the bones of a cat and an Egyptian.

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