If this were true, it would make it more difficult to promote a quality website of terrific scientists, right?

Maybe - maybe not. Perhaps it is instead the case that information democracy is replacing sources that are hampered by niche fields or ideology or politics.

You sometimes hear that blind people have disadvantages. Don't say it to Geerat Vermeij. He got into graduate school at Yale after proving to the faculty he could identify shells through their shape and feel - using samples at random from their collection.

Vermeij, now 60, contracted a rare childhood form of glaucoma and has been blind since age 3. He discovered his love of shells attending school in New Jersey at age 9, where his family had moved because they liked that state's policies on educating the blind more than their native Holland.

"I thought of them as beautiful works of art," he said.

Now Vermeij is best known for his work highlighting the impact of competition among species in evolution.

I saw a press release about a global warming 'virtual march'( we'll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the "Stop Global Warming College Tour" beginning April 9th in Dallas.

I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore's movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the

We don't normally like to highlight people funnier than we are but we have to make an exception here - we mean Lee Silver, of course, not Stephen Colbert, though he might be pretty funny also.

Taped last summer, now you can get the six-minute lesson on stem cell research, how science is threatened by the left and the right, and why sometimes "mother nature is a real nasty bitch."

Computing that would normally take five million years to complete now takes five minutes, thanks to research at the University of Toronto.

A paper in the February edition of Science describes how U of T researchers created a new way of computing called "affinity propagation," which can be used to organize information in areas such as medical imaging, drug discovery, genetics, telecommunications, automobile traffic planning, school access planning and astrophysics.

SEATTLE -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Feb. 13, 2007 -- Newsvine, the popular Social News website, announced today that they would be adding a Front Page section dedicated solely to Presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

Calvin Tang, Newsvine co-founder: "Over the past week, 80% of all articles and seeds at Newsvine have been about Mr. Obama, he deserves his own section."

The Obama section will replace the little used Science section on the front page. "Not many people use the science section, especially now that Global Warming has been confirmed.