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The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing Friday on a resolution to censure President Bush for his domestic warrantless wiretapping program1. The censure would be only a slap on the wrist, but would serve notice that the Senate is watching and disapproves. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), the lone senator to vote against the original Patriot […]

Last week astronomers published the discovery of something never seen before – a double helix nebula, which they found near the center of the Milky Way1. Astronomers took a picture of the nebula (shown below) using the Spitzer infrared space telescope, one of NASA’s four “great observatories”, each of which detects a different radiation band2. […]

In 1783 Rev. John Mitchell put forth the idea of a dark star, one with such gravity that light could not escape it1. But after Thomas Young showed that light acts as a wave, rather than particles, the idea lay dormant for more than a century. In 1916, on the heels of Albert Einstein’s general […]

During the Cold War the operations division (DO) of the CIA overthrew elected governments and supported brutal dictators, but the analytic division (DI) maintained a reputation for producing objective reports, such as those debunking President Kennedy’s “missile gap” rhetoric and President Lyndon Johnson’s assumption that bombing in Viet Nam would be effective1. Under President Ford, […]

A fever took Helen Keller’s sight and hearing at the age of one-and-a-half. On March 3, 1887, when Keller was six, a teacher, Anne Sullivan, came to stay at her house. Sullivan taught Keller language by spelling into her hand. Keller wrote about the first word that she understood1: I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant […]