Congressman Paul Broun (R-Ga.) said last week that evolution and the big bang theory are ‘lies straight from the pit of Hell.’

‘God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell,’ said Broun, who is an MD. ‘It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior.’

He continued:

‘You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.’

According to NBC News, Broun’s comments were part of a larger speech given at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th. A clip of the video was distributed by the The Bridge Project, a liberal watchdog group.

Broun is a high-ranking member of the House Science Committee, of which Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) is also a member.

Akin made […]

No Comments

Who’s to blame for the Sept. 11 attack on the US consulate in Benghazi?

If you believe Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz, the answer is the State Department. He complained in an interview with The Daily Beast yesterday that US guards were replaced with Libyan nationals in the months before the attack.

‘The fully trained Americans who can deal with a volatile situation were reduced in the six months leading up to the attacks,’ he told the website. ‘When you combine that with the lack of commitment to fortifying the physical facilities, you see a pattern.

No Comments

A three-year study conducted in St. Louis, Missouri showed that when effective contraception is available to women for free, the number of abortions and teen births sharply decline. According to the Associated Press, the results are eagerly awaited by Obama administration officials hoping to make the case for a similar national program that has been bitterly contested by some on the right.

The study tracked 9,000 women, mostly poor or lacking health insurance. When cost was removed as a barrier to contraceptive access, many women ‘flocked

No Comments

A compassion-based meditation program can significantly improve a person’s ability to read the facial expressions of others, finds a study published by Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This boost in empathic accuracy was detected through both behavioral testing of the study participants and through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brain activity.

‘It’s an intriguing result, suggesting that a behavioral intervention could enhance a key aspect of empathy,’ says lead author Jennifer Mascaro, a post-doctoral fellow in anthropology at Emory University. ‘Previous research has shown that both children and adults who are better at reading the emotional expressions of others have better relationships.’

The meditation protocol, known as Cognitively-Based Compassion Training, or CBCT, was developed at Emory by study co-author Lobsang Tenzin Negi, director of the Emory-Tibet Partnership. Although derived from ancient Tibetan Buddhist practices, the CBCT program is secular in content and presentation.

The research team also included senior author Charles Raison, formerly a psychiatrist at Emory’s School of Medicine and currently at the University of Arizona, and Emory anthropologist James Rilling.

When most people think of meditation, they think of a style known as ‘mindfulness,’ in which practitioners seek to improve their ability to concentrate and to be non-judgmentally aware […]

No Comments

Offshore winds off the U.S. Atlantic coast could yield enough clean, renewable electrical power for at least one-third of the entire U.S., or the entire East Coast, from Maine to Florida, according to a Stanford University study released Sept. 14. That includes some of the country’s largest urban centers, as well as the nation’s capital.

The Stanford research team employed a state-of-the-art offshore wind power model to simulate the installation of 144,000 5-megawatt wind turbines of the type typically found in European offshore wind farms at various ocean depths and distances from shore from Florida to Maine, concentrating them in the typically hurricane-free stretch of the Atlantic between Maine and Virginia, according to a Stanford University News report.

Now’s the time for U.S. offshore wind power development

They found that offshore winds off the U.S. East Coast produce between 965-1,372-terawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to meet 1/3 of U.S. electricity demand, or all the power needs of the entire East Coast, from Maine to Florida. The study, ‘U.S. East Coast Offshore Wind Energy Resources and Their Relationship to Peak-Time Electricity Demand,

No Comments