I’m too lazy to write out something original, so I can at least just supply some interesting news.
The most impressive story is the detection of water in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet. The planet is slightly more massive than Jupiter, and has a greater orbital radius, but its orbital period is only 2.2 days. Insanely fast compared to Jupiter’s 11.9 years. Distance to the star from the sun is ~300 light-years. Overall, we knew there must be water on some extrasolar planets, but to have that confirmed is amazing. Especially since the first spectrum from an extrasolar planet was just obtained in February 2007.
There’s a report of Spontanious altruism in chimps and young children in PLoS Biology. The chimps handed a unfamiliar human a stick that was just out of reach of the person, even when the chimps had to climb 2.5m to retrieve the stick. A similar experiment was conducted with small children, and found nearly the same results. No bible was involved in the experiments, no stone tablets were handed down to the chimps, and no sermons were given. This is just more evidence that humans don’t acquire their morality from a magic man or a special book.
—cts