BREAKING: Osama Bin Laden Confirmed Dead

  Osama bin Laden, hunted as the mastermind behind the worst-ever terrorist attack on U.S. soil, has been killed, sources told ABC News. Specific details of how and where the al Qaeda mastermind was killed were not immediately available, but sources said U.S.

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Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born

A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.

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A flowchart to help you determine if you're having a rational discussion - 22 Words

As one of the commenters said, I don't think any discussion has ever successfully made it through this flowchart, but man wouldn't it be nice if they did?

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What is Grammar Anyway?

Grammar is a strange and wonderful thing. It is also fuzzy. At least the word "grammar" is. So fuzzy, in fact, that linguists rarely invoke it, other than in the broad meaning of "language".

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Map of Potential Radiation Spread from Japan to United States

L'institut d'Aéronomie spatiale de Belgique made this model of the spread of radiation. Essentially concluding that though some radiation will make it to the United States, most will disperse.

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Recent Japan Quake Could Increase Risk of a "Big One" in Tokyo

Scary thought, there are more than 30 million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area. An earthquake in such a densely populated area would be devastating.

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Failing Nuclear Reactors and Their Radiation Could Remain a Problem for Months

WASHINGTON — As the scale of Japan's nuclear crisis begins to come to light, experts in Japan and the United States say the country is now facing a cascade of accumulating problems that suggest that radioactive releases of steam from the crippled plants could go on for weeks  …

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Death Toll Will Pass 10,000 in One Japanese Prefecture Alone

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Japanese Power Grid Under Stress May Fail- Rolling Blackouts Expected Through April

Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced Sunday that he has approved temporary power outages to prevent a massive blackout in the wake of Friday's deadly earthquake that struck northern Japan. Tokyo Electric Power Co.

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Satellite Photos Reveal Devastation in Japan

Interactive feature, before and after shots of earthquake/tsunami.

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Conservative Delusions on Islam

This past April, I was at a conference at Miami University in Ohio where Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the fantastically brave, inspiring, and completely maddening feminist opponent of Islam, was the keynote speaker.

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Nuclear Crisis Spreads to 4th Plant

TOKYO — Japanese officials struggled on Sunday to contain a quickly escalating nuclear crisis in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake and tsunami, saying they presumed that partial meltdowns had occurred at two crippled reactors, and that they were bracing for a second exp …

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Japan Moves 8 Feet From Quake

Japan's recent massive earthquake, one of the largest ever recorded, appears to have moved the island by about eight feet (2.4 meters), the US Geological Survey said.

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Scientists Study Japanese Quake

Friday's 8.9-magnitude temblor off the east coast of Japan ranks as one of the 10-largest earthquakes ever recorded. Though scientists have just begun to pore over the data, they have already made some surprising discoveries about one of the most quake-prone regions on Earth.

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Koch Industries Use Tax-Payer Funded Bio-fuel Subsidy to Fund Republicans

Why are American taxpayers forced to subsidize the billionaire Koch brothers' massive campaign contributions to Republican Party politicians, the Tea Party movement, and policies that ensure greater subsidies to the Kochs, while cutting more public services to the taxpayers who …

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Japanese Government Assuming Meltdown Has Occured- 200,000 Evacuated

About 180,000 people are being evacuated from within 10 to 20 kilometers (6 to 12 miles) of the Daiichi plant -- which is in addition to the thousands that have already been taken away who live closer by.

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Fears over Nuclear Power Plants Spread

As nuclear power plants in Japan are experiencing a crisis, critics of nuclear power speak up across the world.

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5 Ridiculous Things Americans Believe About Islam

A conservative commentator recently made headlines by claiming 10 percent of all of the world's Muslims are terrorists.

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How the Consumer will be Manipulated in a Post-Scarcity World

Picture your ideal future. OK, not your ideal future, where you're the last man on earth fighting the zombie horde, but society's ideal future: Energy is clean and limitless, goods are plentiful and machines take care of all the dirty work. So everybody's happy, right?

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6 Things the World is Running Out of

When we talk about a shortage of "resources," most people immediately think "oil." But the only reason oil is the most famous of the dwindling resources is because we feel the spike in prices, since we have to go buy the stuff ourselves on a weekly basis.

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Big Government Governs Best

The authors write, "At every level, we think the progressive imperative should be to shift responsibility for executing what are now government services to private competitive organizations." This might have seemed plausible two decades ago, when Al Gore and Bill Clinton laun …

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Japanese Evacuate Six Mile Radius Around Damaged Nuclear Power Plant

Japanese officials early Saturday expanded the area around a crippled nuclear power plant subject to emergency evacuation, as radiation levels inside the facility were reported to have surged and operators struggled to keep the plant's cooling system operating on battery power.

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Japan Death Toll Could Surpass 1,000 on Top of Concerns of Radiation Leaking from Nuclear Power Plants

TOKYO — An 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of Japan on Friday, the strongest ever recorded in the country and one of the largest anywhere in the last century.

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Another Stalemate in Congress

"WASHINGTON – The Senate on Wednesday resoundingly dismissed competing plans to impose new spending cuts and fund the government through Sept. 30, forcing top lawmakers and the Obama administration back into negotiations to resolve a budget stalemate."

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The Current Dangers of Conservative Governance

This article explores the issue of what the author calls "Conservative Nihilism." He proposes several ideological implications for "Party-of-No's" rhetoric we have been seeing from conservatives since Obama took office. Will they govern?

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