Punctuated equilibrium is a model of how evolutionary change happens.  Like how raising taxes can help poor people in economic theory, it is an often-misinterpreted model but means that evolutionary change can take place in short periods of time - huge jumps associated with speciation events.

It basically was created by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould to account for why there are sometimes no transitional fossils for drastic changes in a species, and the reasons are the small population size, the rapid pace of change, and their isolated location - plus, fossilization is tricky business and requires a lot of things to go right.

It was many years ago we pointed out some real flaws in the 'skeptic' movement - first is that it is mostly about ridiculing religion and Bigfoot and if those are the only things you can be skeptical about, you aren't really skeptics, you're just a front for militant atheists who want to cover their cultural agenda with a veneer of science.  The second issue is that, for being  progressives who coo about tolerance and diversity, women sure are not in it.

Finally, someone outside science has caught on to this 'organic food is better' nonsense.   It isn't nutritionally any different, it isn't structurally any different, it is just marketing - they pay a fee and fill out paperwork.  Small farmers that actually are completely 'organic' in their methods, with no pesticides (including organic ones that will kill you just the same, like strychnine and ricin) can't actually afford the fee to be labeled organic.

We can only confuse science and environmentalism when science happens to match their cultural agenda - ethanol, for example, was lousy science and the anti-science positions embraced by environmentalists to combat pollution were firmly in the anti-science camp; biology and the energy sector have terrific solutions available right now but if 'stop CO2' is instead a cult-like mantra, they can't be part of the policy discourse.

Nothing says celebrating athletic perfection like a McDonald's hamburger.

Actually, elite athletes likely can eat all the hamburgers they want but you get the idea - a McDonald's, nay the world's largest McDonald's, at the site dedicated to athletic excellence is pretty funny.

But Brits are nothing if not funny.  And so they get a 3,000-square-meter McDonald's restaurant,  on two floors and equivalent to half the length of an American football field. 

Olympic chiefs have moved quickly to reject claims that the new McDonald's will deter from aims to promote a healthy and active lifestyle, which London chiefs have been pushing since winning the Olympic bid.

Partisans on each side will claim some vast conspiracy in the debt ceiling debate - Republicans are bought by corporations and hate poor people because they want to lower their taxes, Democrats are bought by unions and hate poor people because they want to give them stuff for free - but it may be simpler than that.    Cooperation is in our nature but morality can undercut the tendency, writes Jason Castro in Scientific American, and game theory can tell us some things about why - at least academically.

It's impossible to imagine a science audience is not excited about "The Avengers".  Marvel, who throughout the 1980s and 1990s could do nothing right, has now taken great pains to do nothing wrong.   "Thor" should have been the hardest but it was darn good and only the twin Hulk efforts could be regarded as something of a misfire.

I wouldn't have picked Scarlett Johansson to be Black Widow (Hilary Swank, obviously) and yet another Hulk can be annoying, but you can tell by the audience reaction that this is going to be pretty sweet.

From digital archives, to religious studies, to national libraries, these university libraries from around the world have plenty of information for you. 

Here are a few samples and go to the link below for the comprehensive list:

An electromagnetic pulse (EMP) as a secondary effect of a nuclear blast has been known for decades, but recently groups have started to talk about EMP concern in a primary attack.   With so many of today's communications systems based on electromagnetics and the semiconductor world that lives there, a terrorist attacked designed not to kill people but simply to explode and kill communications has gotten some press.

But how much of our communications system or the electrical grid would be impacted?   No one is sure, there are too many variables, but people still create some worst-case domino effect where all electricity is knocked out, food is gone and Sean Penn is patrolling the streets with a shotgun and contend we have to plan for it.