Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics here and here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."

What’s wrong with us is that the kind of mind we have wasn’t evolved to cope with the kind of world that we live in. Our kind of mind was selected to solve the sorts of problems that confronted our hunter-gatherer forebears thirty thousand years or so ago; problems that arise for small populations trying to make a living and to reproduce in an ecology of scarce resources. But, arguably, that kind of mind doesn’t work very well in third millennium Lower Manhattan, where there’s population to spare and a Starbucks on every block, but survival depends on dodging the traffic, finding a reliable investment broker and not having more children than you can afford to send to university. It’s not that our problems are harder than our ancestors’ were; by what measure, after all? It’s rather that the mental equipment we’ve inherited from them isn’t appropriate to what we’re trying to do with it. No wonder it’s driving us nuts.

On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance. Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes.

"Sequestration is difficult, but if we don't have sequestration then I see very little hope for the world."

"No one can be comfortable at the prospect of continuing to pump out the amounts of carbon dioxide that we are pumping out at present ... with consequences that we really can't predict but are probably not good."

"You probably have to put it under the sea but there are other possibilities. You may be able to trap it in solids or something like that."

"The timescale might be impossible, in which case I'm really very worried for the planet because I don't see any other approach."

I believe the Earth has a public domain dedication. More or less.

Internationally, the public domain is the body of creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest (typically a government-granted monopoly such as a copyright or patent). Such works and inventions are considered part of the public's cultural heritage, and anyone can use and build upon them without restriction (not taking into account laws concerning safety, export, etc).

While copyright was created to protect the financial incentive of those doing creative work as a means to encourage more creative work, works in the public domain just exist as such, and the public have the right to use and reuse the creative work of others without financial or social burden.

"My plant read my mind!" On February 2nd, 1966 this realization forever changed the life of the FBI and CIA's then foremost polygraph researcher, and reintroduced modern science to the sentient nature of our universe. On that date the brilliant and disciplined mind of Cleve Backster conceived an irrefutable paradigm-busting scientific protocol. With straightforward electronics that a student or garage-level scientist can replicate, he proved to humans that their thoughts and emotions affect the behavior of their own and other living cells.

For millennia traditional peoples have known that all life forms-plants, animals and even single cells-are not only sentient and intelligent, but that they communicate with one another. This fact got lost a few centuries ago between the mechanistic focus of industrial science and the modern human view of reality that ascribed consciousness only to the human brain. A few 20th century scientific pioneers, like Chandra Bose in India and the Kirlians in the former Soviet Union, had earlier developed technology to demonstrate energy fields and basic emotional responses in plants and animals. Backster's experimental work took the next step and documented a heretofore unrecognized cellular level of interspecies biocommunication.

The rate of carbon fixation through photosynthesis is a basic property of life on planet Earth. It is the basis for capturing and storing the energy that fuels our world’s living systems and forms the foundation of the food webs. The oxygen we breathe is a byproduct of this photosynthesis. According to its creators, these new net primary productivity maps provide a fascinating new insight into the intimate connection between the living world and the physical world.

"We are literally watching the global garden grow,” says Steve Running, MODIS Science Team member and director of the Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group at the University of Montana. “We now have a regular, consistent, calibrated and near-real-time measure of a major component of the global carbon cycle for the first time. This measure can also be the basis for monitoring the expansion of deserts, the effects of droughts, and any impacts climate change may have on vegetation growth, health, and seasonality."

About 94 percent of life on Earth resides in the oceans. We've seen only about 2 percent of this vast ecosystem - the uppermost layer (home to fish, whales, scuba divers, and most known marine life). Beneath this warm lens lies a cold, dark, and life-rich realm of grand proportions. It's home to creatures as far removed from the sun and human biology as any alien imagined by science fiction.

We've seen some of these organisms clustering around midocean thermal vents - small undersea volcanoes that spew 400-degree water spiked with toxic chemicals. Thriving in total darkness, under 8,000 psi of ambient pressure, these organisms possess metabolic processes fundamentally different from ours. The ones we know about rely on chemosynthesis, using sulphides and other chemicals from Earth's core to convert seawater into food. That's about as alien as it gets.

Currently, the entire US scientific community shares a single, 12-year-old submersible named Alvin. With just one Alvin, long-range exploration is nearly impossible. Alvin doesn't even know where to go because we don't have a decent map. The latest ocean charts rely on satellites to detect the sea-level changes wrought by the gravitational pull of underlying topography. This gives us a crude sketch that's essentially useless without hands-on exploration. We can't begin to mine the sea's minerals or harvest DNA unless we go deep, with a fleet of sea exploration vessels. We need a national agency with the stated goal of exploring, mapping, and studying the oceans.

Japan is already there, having created the Japan Marine Science and Technology Center, which secures rights to deep-sea minerals, territories, and potential food sources. Its Deep Star program has even taken an early lead in DNA recovery: It's already working with the biotech industry to develop pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, we're still combing the rain forests and wishing upon a star.

Although biological stromatolites and non-biological stromatolite-look-alike structures appear similar to the human eye, the biological origin of stromatolites makes them more ordered, more highly patterned. And it is this patterning that, while hard for the human eye to discern, is readily detected by the compression algorithm. Non-biological stromatolite-like structures are more random, less patterned and therefore less compressible.

A couple of years ago Stamets partnered with Battelle, a major player in the bioremediation industry, on an experiment conducted on a site owned by the Washington State Department of Transportation in Bellingham. Diesel oil had contaminated the site, which the mycoremediation team inoculated with strains of oyster mycelia that Stamets had collected from old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. Two other bioremediation teams, one using bacteria, the other using engineered bacteria, were also given sections of the contaminated soil to test.

Lo and behold. After four weeks, oyster mushrooms up to 12 inches in diameter had formed on the mycoremediated soil. After eight weeks, 95 percent of the hydrocarbons had broken down, and the soil was deemed nontoxic and suitable for use in WSDOT highway landscaping. By contrast, neither of the bioremediated sites showed significant changes.

On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria.

Biologists Raœl Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil. This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago. Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life.

"Inside, the sunlight was terrific, the entire space fairly cozy, but very hobbit-like. And with, let's be clear, fairly low resale value to anyone except a total granola-crunching lunatic like yourself, unless there's a nuclear war and living off the grid becomes handy, at which point you won't want to move anyway, but will want to insert steel bars over all the windows to avoid mutant tribes of 16-eyed irradiated flesh-eating Objectivists."