Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness

Dr Stephen Hawking, Astrophysicist, Cosmologist, Genius, Horndog

I squeezed this over the last two days out of lemons from my garden.
I’ll be turning it into Meyer lemon marmalade in a few days.

I bought this t-shirt in the Chapultapec Castle gift shop.
It shows the Mexican flag known as ‘el Doliente Hidalgo’ (the Suffering of Hidalgo).
Father Hidalgo was a priest who spoke out against the French treatment of Mexican peons.
He was arrested by the French and tortured for several weeks and finally executed by strangulation.
This flag, carried into battle on 5 Mayo 1862, carried the message that the French would suffer as they made Father Hidalgo suffer.
That is: no mercy and no prisoners.
I bought it and then looked up its history when I got back to my hotel and like it even more now that I know the history.

“The most exciting part was when all the pieces of the puzzle fell together,” said the study’s corresponding author Scott Soderling, an associate professor of cell biology and neurobiology in the Duke University School of Medicine.

Overactive neurons in the front of the mouse brain, shown in green, trigger excessive release of the brain chemical dopamine, which causes motor abnormalities.
Credit: Soderling lab, Duke University

“Schizophrenia is complex at every level, from genes to brain to behavior,” said Soderling, who is also a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.  “When Dr. Kim and I finally realized that these three outwardly unrelated phenotypes (spine pruning, hyperactive neurons and excessive dopamine) were actually functionally interrelated with each other, that was really surprising and also very exciting for us.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150504120805.htm

Wells Fargo is as evil a bank as any other (their racially-based predatory lending practices contributed greatly to the 2008 economic melt-down and created a great number of homeless families)

Okay, not a real dragon. It likely didn’t breathe fire. But a new member of the short list of flying vertebrates that includes just birds, bats, and pterosaurs.
A failed evolutionary experiment in animal flight, the pigeon-sized Yi Qi “Strange Wing,” (pronounced Yee Chi) was feathered but also had membraneous wings between its fingers:

Yi qi was not a direct ancestor of birds, but a close relative from an extinct line.  Bearing the shortest name ever given to a dinosaur, Yi qi belonged to a family of tiny creatures called Scansoriopterygids, which had feathers and exceptionally long finger-like digits that may have been used for climbing trees or catching insects.                                                                                                                            Known only from fossils found in China, Scansoriopterygids were closely related to primitive bird types like Archaeopteryx, considered a transitional species between non-avian dinosaurs and birds.

Yi qi, the newest addition to the group, weighed about 380 grammes (13.4 ounces) as an adult, and had tiny teeth set in a four cm long (1.6-inch) skull.                                                                                                                                        It had feathers considered too flimsy to be useful in flight. But what really sets Yi qi apart is a bony rod, about 13 cm (five inches) long, jutting from each wrist.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-weird-winged-dino-science-world-aflutter.html#jCp