by Damon Martin
During the holiday season, atheists in America and Canada are letting everyone know they are still good without God. The message has been spread across buses and billboards throughout North America to send an alternative message during this normally oversaturated time of religious rejoice.
Groups like Secular Samaritan, American Humanist Association, and the Centre for Inquiry are responsible for the Christmas time ad buys. The gospel they’re trying to spread with these billboards is that goodness and morality are not in the exclusive domain of those that believe in a higher power.
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by Damon Martin
Remember the name GFAJ-1 because it may be the organism that changes how we perceive and define life on Earth and eventually in space.
Today, NASA held a press conference announcing the findings of a team led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon, an astrobiologist at the U.S. Geological Survey. The researchers discovered a bacteria originally found at Mono Lake, CA that is able to sustain, grow and reproduce using the element arsenic.
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by Blogbot
So you’ve recovered from your turkey/Tofurky coma, and you’ve just finished pimpin’ your pad out with Christmas lights. You’ve got a little creative, you’re feeling smug – then don’t watch the video below, which seriously ups the ante on domestic decorations and will likely make the baubles you were so proud of 5 minutes ago look, quite frankly, slightly shite by comparison.
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by Matt Dunbar
The cultural destruction wrought by the internet has reached truly apocalyptic proportions. The death of unbiased, objective news delivered exclusively by white males; the reduction of teenage attention spans to the length of half a Tosh.O punchline; and, perhaps most insidious, the very existence of iJustine threatens to unspool the moral fabric upon which our modern social order is built.
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by Brandon Perkins
In the last installment of our futuristic fiction series, Please Use Rear Exit, Mikhail, who’d just X’ed is GF Katya, had ridden the #720 to the Low bar. Having been absent from his “regular” libation center, and therefore a stranger to his “friends” Jayson and Chevy, when he’s confronted by the later (who’s a rapper, who rhymes, all the tymes) he considers his next move carefully. Of the four approaches that run through Mikhail’s mind, option D – awkwardly asking Chevy “What’s up” – could prove optimal.
***Please Use Rear Exit: Chapter 3 – A Fleeting Glimpse of CGI
D). Mikhail absent-mindedly chose (d).
But he told himself that such stumbling wasn’t all his fault. Katya called him the second that Chevy started to trail off. Mikhail instinctually paused to silence a phone that no one could hear vibrating, simultaneously losing his beat in the conversation and train of thought. Fortunately, all awkwardness was forgotten and forgiven en route to finding Jayson – who had posted up at one of the last empty standing tables – and simple small talk was okay enough.
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by AJ Focht
The music industry has won the day as file sharing program Limewire has been forced to stop its “searching, downloading, uploading, file trading and/or file distribution functionality.” Limewire was ordered by US courts to shut down its services after being found in violation of mass copyright infringement.
This major file sharing service may have closed down but it is only a temporary block until its users find another site. The music industry has been fighting internet pirating sites since Napster, and for each victory they win another hundred sites pop up in their place. The Internet Industry Association says, “the music industry needs to focus on new business models.”
With that in mind, could MySpace be the answer the music industry is waiting for? With the launch of the new Myspace reboot, the site has taken a step away from the social networking world and is going in a new direction.
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by Damon Martin
Alone in the Universe? Still Not Sure
A few weeks ago, scientists discovered what was thought to be a habitable planet called Gliese 581-g, which had all the characteristics of a world that could create and contain life as we know it on Earth anyways. The “Goldilocks” planet was found to be in a zone not too close to its sun (ie. not too hot) and not too far away (ie. too cold), in the sweet spot in between where an atmosphere could form and life could grow.
Not so fast.
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