Science Update

Clearing Some Tabs

Hilarious News
A Creationist museum is going under financially, due in part to some legal dispute over acquiring a perfectly good dinosaur skeleton so they could claim it was on the Ark or some nonsense. Now they're being forced to auction off their stuff to avoid complete insolvency, and the prize of their collection, a gorgeous Mastodon skull, is on the block.

Huzzah.

Source: CNN.com

Seems Like Someone Should Organize These Archives
So the Library of Congress recently found 3 new photos of Lincoln's second Inaugural, which previously had something in the neighborhood of one photograph on record. I guess from the CNN labeling, the photographic glass plates were mislabeled and so lost to history until now.

They're not particularly interesting visually, but still, more history being discovered in the back room of a museum. First a giant rat, now some glass negatives. Will wonders never cease?

Source: CNN.com

Another Nidoking Story
So some researchers at Rice University have made the blackest substance yet, a material that absorbs 99.9 something percent of visible light. This beats the old record used as the 'official' black by the National Standards people by three times, apparently.

It is composed of carbon nano-tubes, tiny tubes of tightly rolled carbon that are 400 hundred times smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair. The carbon helps absorb some of the light.

These tubes are standing on end, much like a patch of grass. This arrangement traps light in the tiny gaps between the "blades."

The researchers have also made the surface of this carbon nano-tube carpet irregular and rough to cut down on reflectivity.

"Such a nano-tube array not only reflects light weakly, but also absorbs light strongly," said Shawn-Yu Lin, a professor of physics at Rensselaer, who helped make the substance.

Source: Reuters
H/T to Nidoking

Nobel Prize Means Nothing to High School
So one of the climate scientists from the UN panel that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore last year was scheduled to speak at a Montana high school, when the idiot school board pressured the principal to bring in an opposing view, because they thought that Global Warming as a theory is 'anti-agriculture'.

Ahem. Fuck you, you fucking nitwit farmer fucks.

So the principal canceled the event of a nobel laureate rather than find some moron to debate him. Which is better than giving the flat earth crowd another dog and pony show I suppose.

Americans just want to be ignorant, that's the only conclusion I can reach.

Source: Raw Story

Sums It Up Nicely
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