Saturday Night TOON Roundup- SOPA and the rest

SOPA








HCR



Deen




Gitmo




Etta

Saturday Night TOON Roundup- Newt and Mitt

Toon- Potential SOPA-PIPA revisions

"The Committee to Re-elect the President 2012"

Damning toon from Jeff Danziger- "All I said was food stamps"

Fire at prof's NJ home yields cache of child porn

EAGLESWOOD TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) — Authorities say firefighters in southern New Jersey uncovered a cache of child pornography while battling flames in the home of an architecture professor.

State Police arrested and charged 76-year-old Gamal El-Zoghby with child endangerment. He's listed as a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y.

State Police spokesman Brian Polite tells The Press of Atlantic City (http://bit.ly/x3kqjj ) firefighters were pulling sheet rock from the walls of El-Zoghby's Eagleswood Township home when child pornography images began falling from the ceiling.

The cause of Tuesday's fire is unknown.


Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Fire-at-prof-s-NJ-home-yields-cache-of-child-porn-2626423.php

Science's "most beautiful theories"

By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK, Jan. 15, 2012 (Reuters) — From Darwinian evolution to the idea that personality is largely shaped by chance, the favorite theories of the world's most eminent thinkers are as eclectic as science itself.

Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question.

In previous years, they have included "how is the Internet changing the way you think?" and "what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?"

This year, he posed the open-ended question "what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?"

more

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre80e04y-us-feature-sciences-most-beautiful-theories/

Ancient Popcorn Discovered in Peru

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2012) — People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 1,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored by Dolores Piperno, curator of New World archaeology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and emeritus staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Some of the oldest known corncobs, husks, stalks and tassels, dating from 6,700 to 3,000 years ago were found at Paredones and Huaca Prieta, two mound sites on Peru's arid northern coast. The research group, led by Tom Dillehay from Vanderbilt University and Duccio Bonavia from Peru's Academia Nacional de la Historia, also found corn microfossils: starch grains and phytoliths. Characteristics of the cobs -- the earliest ever discovered in South America -- indicate that the sites' ancient inhabitants ate corn several ways, including popcorn and flour corn. However, corn was still not an important part of their diet.

"Corn was first domesticated in Mexico nearly 9,000 years ago from a wild grass called teosinte," Piperno says. "Our results show that only a few thousand years later corn arrived in South America where its evolution into different varieties that are now common in the Andean region began. This evidence further indicates that in many areas corn arrived before pots did and that early experimentation with corn as a food was not dependent on the presence of pottery."

Understanding the subtle transformations in the characteristics of cobs and kernels that led to the hundreds of maize races known today, as well as where and when each of them developed, is a challenge. Corncobs and kernels were not well preserved in the humid tropical forests between Central and South America, including Panama -- the primary dispersal routes for the crop after it first left Mexico about 8,000 years ago.

more

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120118143624.htm

Most Distant Dwarf Galaxy Detected

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2012) — Scientists have long struggled to detect the dim dwarf galaxies that orbit our own galaxy. So it came as a surprise on Jan. 18 when a team of astronomers using Keck II telescope's adaptive optics has announced the discovery of a dwarf galaxy halfway across the universe.

The new dwarf galaxy found by MIT's Dr. Simona Vegetti and colleagues is a satellite of an elliptical galaxy almost 10 billion light-years away from Earth. The team detected it by studying how the massive elliptical galaxy, called JVAS B1938 + 666, serves as a gravitational lens for light from an even more distant galaxy directly behind it. Their discovery was published in the Jan. 18 online edition of the journal Nature.

Like all supermassive elliptical galaxies, JVAS B1938 + 666's gravity can deflect light passing by it. Often the light from a background galaxy gets deformed into an arc around the lens galaxy, and sometimes what's called an Einstein ring. In this case, the ring is formed mainly by two lensed images of the background galaxy. The size, shape and brightness of the Einstein ring depends on the distribution of mass throughout the foreground lensing galaxy.

Vegetti and her team obtained extra sharp near-infrared image of JVAS B1938 + 666 by using the 10-meter Keck II telescope and its adaptive optics system, which corrects for the blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere, and provides stunningly sharp images. With these data, they neatly determined the mass distribution of JVAS B1938 + 666 as well as the shape and brightness of the background galaxy.

more
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120118165143.htm

Inventory Lists 19,232 Newly Discovered Species During Latest Count

ScienceDaily (Jan. 18, 2012) — More than half of the 19,232 species newly known to science in 2009, the most recent calendar year of compilation, were insects -- 9,738 or 50.6 percent -- according to the 2011 State of Observed Species (SOS) report released Jan. 18 by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University.

The second largest group in the 2009 numbers was vascular plants, totaling 2,184 or 11.3 percent. Of the 19,232 in the total count, seven were birds, 41 were mammals and 1,487 were arachnids -- spiders and mites.
And, according to this latest report, there was a 5.6 percent increase in new living species discovered in 2009, compared to 2008.

The annual SOS report card on the status of human knowledge of Earth's species summarizes what is known about global flora and fauna. The 19,232 species described as "new" or newly discovered during calendar year 2009 represent about twice as many species as were known in the lifetime of Carolus Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who initiated the modern system of plant and animal names and classifications more than 250 years ago, said the report's author, Quentin Wheeler, an ASU entomologist and founding director of the species institute.

"The cumulative knowledge of species since 1758 when Linnaeus was alive is nearly 2 million, but much remains to be done," Wheeler said. "A reasonable guess is that 10 million additional plant and animal species await discovery by scientists and amateur species explorers."

more
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120118173248.htm