think you understand evolution? you might be surprised.

is alternative medicine nonsense on its way out in Europe?

here are some issues and tactics to keep in mind when debating.

The Guardian has this graphic showing just how big the recently discovered star, R136a1, the biggest star yet discovered, compares to our sun and our solar system. check the links on that page to read more about the star or see here.

seeing gene expression in a human cell in real time.

why does god reveal himself to some people and not others?

on the reliability of perception, researchers plant false symptoms in subjects.

there's always periodic talk about why women are so much less represented among scientists compared to men. do women shun those careers because they view them as an obstacle to their goal of helping others?

recently, Greta Christina posted this piece about what would cause her to believe in god. she based that piece off of blogger EbonMuse's (of Daylight Atheism) piece "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists: What would convince an atheist that a religion is true?" EbonMuse has now responded to the two genuine responses Christina got to her piece, pointing out how the responses fail to show that religious faith isn't unfalsifiable for the faithful as he had alleged.

Luke at CommonSenseAtheism summarizes Michael Spencer's series of articles on why Evangelical Christianity is approaching its collapse.

quantum mechanics passes another test.

god and the problem of suffering.

the editors of the journal Nature Immunology to Franscis Collins, NIH director: you're not helping and, worse, you may be doing real harm to science education in the US.

to find alien signals in the huge expanse of space with the understanding that aliens will likely face the same kind of budgetary concerns as we do, you have to look the right way.

the government in the UK may be making changes to the laws that would have allowed the pope to be arrested while he's in the UK for an upcoming visit.

baleen whales, a transitional form.

John Loftus of Debunking Christianity has been busy defending against snipers trying to shoot down his Outsider Test for Faith. check out his responses to the critics here, here, and here.

Bayes' Theorem has figured prominently in recent probability based arguments for the existence of god and for the resurrection of Jesus. as such, it's important to understand how it works so as to spot its misuse. TA's Gregory Scott helps us out by linking to this video introduction to Bayes' Theorem.

disease as a byproduct of adaptation.

Ken Pulliam wonders if he's a fundamentalist atheist and concludes that according to a certain definition he is, and so should we all be.

quantum time machine allows for travel to the past without fear of the grandfather paradox.

Phil Plait recently gave a talk at the Amazing Meeting8 where he urged atheists not to be dicks. some commentators have taken issue either with the idea that we shouldn't be dicks in some sense or that we have been dicks in the past according to any reasonable definition of what it means to be a dick.

new research into the relationship between intelligence and religiosity shows that the correlation between higher intelligence and lower rates of religiosity is largely an outlier but has some other findings that are perhaps more important when it comes to the atheism/theism debate.

scientific denialism is political suicide.

on biology and free will.

astrocytes, star shaped brain cells, may help us breathe.

with Christopher Hitchens' announcement that he has esophageal cancer (which may have spread to his lymph system) people have begun posting their thoughts on what Hitch has meant to them and about their experiences of him as a person.

the olm: the blind cave salamander that lives to 100 years old.

on the evolution of skin color.

hopefully now what happened to Constance McMillen never happens to anyone else at her school.

have an asteroid fetish? i gotcha covered. check out this infographic comparing the recently visited asteroid Lucretia with other asteroids we've photographed.

on using geoengineering to fix or minimize the effects of global warming; it might not be political feasible.

once more, on the reliability of our perception- the invisible gorilla.

reprogrammed stem cells carry a memory of their past identity.

Mel Gibson's misogynistic racist tirades aren't just because he's a drunk with anger management issues.

the bible is misogynistic, we should stop being surprised when biblical literalists are themselves misogynistic.