TIME, however, observed the day by posting a Q&A with British author Dennis Sewell, who is selling a book on “how often — and how easily — Darwin’s big idea has been harnessed for sinister political ends.” Sewell isn’t an evolution denier, but rather among the crowd crowing that Darwin was a racist and responsible for inspiring eugenics.

Sigh. While it’s probably true that Darwin was influenced by the racial attitudes of his time and place—Victorian England–DISCOVER has covered the other side of that coin: that the scientist was an abolitionist and rather progressive for his day. Even Ray Comfort, in his rambling, Darwin-bashing introduction to a “new edition” of Origin that creationists passed around college campuses recently, concedes: “However, after much research, I do concede that you won’t find anything in Darwin’s writings that would indicate that he in any way felt blacks were to be treated as inferior or that his views of them were due to their skin color.” Even if the opposite were true, and Darwin the man was actually a howling racist, Darwin’s theory of evolution would still smash the fallacy that different races belong to different species.

Still, Sewell claims that eugenics is Darwin’s fault because he supposedly believed that the poor were “genetically second-rate.” School shootings, he asserts, are Darwin’s fault because his theory means that human life has no more value than animal life and killers like the Columbine High School shooters latched onto this idea. But blaming Darwin for the fact that dictators twisted his ideas and teenage murderers used those twisted ideas to shoot their classmates a century and a half later is ridiculous at best.

Sewell, asked about Darwin’s status as a scientific luminary, concludes with this gem:

What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It’s helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise.

Never mind that Sewell gives himself away as a conspiracy theorist with that last bit. Darwin wasn’t perfect—DISCOVER noted one of his great scientific blunders in the November issue. But, as writer Bruno Maddox says, in focusing on the man “we have detracted from the sheer, forehead-slapping obviousness of Darwinism the idea.” TIME’s Q&A is a good example of just that: While Sewell doesn’t deny the truth of natural selection, his focus on Darwin the man allows him to make misleading statements about Darwin’s ideas.

And, as DISCOVER blogger Carl Zimmer wrote for TIME back in February, isn’t not like the science of natural selection stopped in its tracks when Darwin published his most famous book. Researchers have spent the last 150 years refining Darwin’s big idea and fixing its errors, unraveling the history of life itself in the process. Thanks to their work we know, for example, that the penicillin Sewell touts as the pinnacle of practicality is less effective that it used to be because microorganisms evolve through natural selection.

Anyway, if learning the true history of our species isn’t “practical” enough for Sewell, well, tough. Buy an iPhone.

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Image: Wiki Commons

…you can see you will need to make a series of compromises to cook a “perfect” turkey. The outside needs to be heated to between 140 and 200°C to make sure the Maillard reactions provide plenty of the “Turkey” flavour for the gravy. The tender breast meat wants to be heated to no more than 55 to 58°C to keep the muscle proteins from contracting and becoming tough. The tougher, collagen rich, legs and wings need to be heated to a higher temperature (say around 65 to 70°C) to denature some of the collagen.

Did you get all that? Good. The problem is that the different parts of the turkey require different treatments, yet it absolutely must be cooked whole so the elder males can battle over who gets to carve the bird in front of the family. This rules out the obvious solution of cooking the parts separately. Luckily, Physorg.com suggests an elegant solution: covering the turkey breast with aluminum foil for most of the cooking process.

But if this kitchen chemistry doesn’t have a big enough wow factor, and you don’t trust yourself with a deep fryer full of hot oil, DISCOVER’s list of hi-tech ways to cook your bird will give you plenty of reasons to be thankful on turkey day.

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Image: flickr / stevevoght

Nathalie Blanchard, a Granby resident, says she’s suffering from severe depression that has made it impossible for her to work full-time for the past 18-months.

She says her sick leave payments were cut after insurance giant Manulife obtained profile pictures on Facebook showing her at bars, whooping it up during her birthday and on a beach holiday.

Blanchard, who lives in Quebec province, said her doctor told her to go have some fun, but apparently her insurer thought she was having too much to be depressed. According to another CBC article, the moments of revelry didn’t cure her condition:

“In the moment I’m happy, but before and after I have the same problems” as before, she said.

She’s taking them to court, in what should be an interesting case to test social media’s reach into the real world. The case suggests a host of other difficult questions: Can insurance companies raise your premiums if they see a picture of you smoking a cigarette on the internet? Will the court decide you can make a medical diagnosis from a Facebook picture? What about a weekend’s worth of happy tweets?

Another take home lesson, kids, is that should you make headlines, for whatever dubious reason, your Facebook pics will also be on the news. However in this case, Blanchard offered up her photos to get her story to the media. ABC News has a short video interview with Blanchard on their site.

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Image: Facebook

We here at Discoblog love the yuck factor of science. Can’t get enough of it. But for some parents in Sandwich, Massachusetts, a presentation in their kids’ 5th grade class went too far. From MyFoxBoston:

Parents of some fifth-graders at a Sandwich school were horrified when their teacher decided to invite a presenter to class who showed them cell development at different stages of growth.

It happened during a class last Thursday at the Forestdale School. The teacher allegedly had the presenter come into her class with embryos, hearts and lungs at different stages of development.

Besides concerns that their kids were exposed to—gasp!—biology during a science glass, some Sandwich parents also complained that the fifth-graders were allowed to handle jars containing formaldehyde. Fair enough. Formaldehyde is dangerous stuff that shouldn’t be handled without supervisors… like a science teacher and the pathologist assistant who gave the presentation.

Between embryos and chemicals, perhaps a protective parent freak-out was inevitable. But hopefully fear of reprisal won’t scare this teacher or others away from teaching tactics that actually might work. As one parent told a local TV station, “It was a great class, my son actually commented on what a great class it was.”

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Image: flickr / lunar caustic

CNET tries to help readers imagine this bulk:

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Internet is very heavy indeed. To give you some idea of just how heavy the internet is, imagine an absolutely enormous tower of computers and servers and cables reaching up into the sky like the evil fingers of some apocalyptic demon. Now imagine sparks, thunder, electrical storms. And, on top of it all, an otter screaming pointlessly. That is the closest you are likely to come to visualising the Internet.

The author claims that “for the first time in the world, we have precisely and scientifically calculated the weight of the Internet.”

Well that’s interesting, considering that Stephen Cass, writing for DISCOVER, calculated the weight of the Internet back in 2007 and came to a very different answer. Cass ignored the hardware, and instead calculated the weight of  online information by taking the total estimated Web traffic of 40 petabytes (40 x 10¹⁵ bytes: a 4 followed by 16 zeros) and figuring out the weight of the electrons required to store that information. His total?

The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

However, a year before that, in 2006, Russell Seitz, calculated the weight of the internet to be 2 ounces. You can read more about his calculations on his blog.

So which is it, readers? Weigh in on whose calculation is closest to the truth.

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Image: flickr / sugree

• In Soviet Russia, blog writes you! Maksim Suraev, a Russian cosmonaut, joins the blogosphere with a healthy dose of cold war humor about life on the International Space Station.

• In a case of Project Mayhem gone terribly bad, Peru police say a gang drained the fat from their murder victims and sold it on the black market for use in cosmetics.

• Wisconsin looks to become the first state to recognize an official state microbe. Of course the bacterium, Lactococcus lactis, ferments the state’s $18 billion per year cheese industry.

• An Italian art collector found a mummified tooth, thumb, and finger of Galileo Galilei that have been missing since 1905, according to Florence’s History of Science museum.

Oh, definitely yes, says research psychologist Jesse Bering, writing for Scientific American. Bering goes on at great length in his analysis of testicular location. Sure, he argues, the temperature part makes sense. But why would natural selection, which so rewards passing on your genes, put a man’s means of passing on those genes in such a terribly exposed place on his body?

Bering’s lengthy account of gonad geography, and the studies trying to explain it, includes some real gems:

One of the more fanciful accounts–and one ultimately discarded by the authors–is that scrotal testicles evolved in the same spirit as peacock feathers. That is to say, given the enormous disadvantage of having your entire genetic potential contained in a thin satchel of unprotected, delicate flesh and swinging several millimeters away from the rest of your body, perhaps scrotal testicles evolved as a sort of ornamental display communicating the genetic quality of the male.

Oh, and this, on how a man’s cremasteric muscle works to keep his sperm at an optimal temperature by contracting and drawing the testicles up on a cold day and relaxing when it’s hot:

[That's] why it’s generally inadvisable for men to wear tight-fitting jeans or especially snug “tighty whities”–under these restrictive conditions the testicles are shoved up against the body and artificially warmed so that the cremasteric muscle cannot do its job properly. Another reason not to wear these things is that it’s no longer 1988.

In all seriousness, there’s nothing Discoblog values more than analysis of the silly… other than over-analysis of the silly.  If you haven’t had your fill of scrotal hypotheses,  check out the rest of Bering’s post.

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Image: iStockphoto

Recently, as part of an ongoing effort to playfully engage the public in science, he chatted with DISCOVER contributor Darlene Cavalier (who moonlights as the Science Cheerleader) and shared his thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider, spiral galaxies, ROS suppression, and more.

First up, for the cat lovers out there who tragically don’t have any cats, comes CatPaint, a $0.99 app that lets you add images of cats to pics that you’ve snapped with your iPhone.

via MacWorld:

Davander Mobile has launched CatPaint, an app that lets you add cuteness—in feline form—to any photo on your iPhone or iPod touch. You grab a photo, choose a kitten, and then tap to place it anywhere within the image.

But the makers of the add-a-cat app must have realized that it’s possible to get carried away by your enthusiasm in such a situation. CatPaint uses the iPhone’s accelerometer as a delete function: Shake gently to remove the most recently added cat, or shake violently to purge all felines from the image.

From one internet meme to an app that incorporates them all—teh internets. Brace yourself for a lolpocalypse, according to their description on YouTube:

THE MOST EXCITING IPHONE GAME EVER! Coming soon (already submitted to the App Store) to the iPhone or iPod Touch. A (cyber)space shooter of epic proportions. Collect lolcats, dodge popups, feed trolls, avoid viruses, break through firewalls. It’s EPIC.

Peep the trailer below:

k thx bai!

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Image: CatPaint
Video: YouTube / insurgentgames

Via the Los Angeles Times:

A medium-sized popcorn and medium soda at the nation’s largest movie chain pack the nutritional equivalent of three Quarter Pounders topped with 12 pats of butter, according to a report released today by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Popcorn from Regal Entertainment Group, AMC and Cinemark, were analyzed in lab. Regal was the worst offender, packing 1,200 calories, 60 grams of saturated fat, and 980 milligrams of sodium into a medium popcorn–before adding butter! The gooey buttery sauce adds 200 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat per 1.5 tablespoons.

Both Regal and AMC pop their popcorn in coconut oil, which is about 90 percent saturated fat, noted the study’s authors. Cinemark uses canola oil, which is healthier, but a medium popcorn from Cinemark will still add around 760 calories and 3 grams of saturated fat to your diet, according to the analysis, which is published in the December issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action HealthLetter.

On a positive note, no trans-fats were detected in any of the samples.

Apparently, there aren’t any plans to include a low calorie popcorn at any of the movie chains’ snack bars, so if you want healthier options, just do like everyone else and sneak in your own food.

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Image: flickr / jennie-o