In protest of the utterly vile outpouring of treasonous hatred on WorldNutDaily towards the elected President and his family, I’m pointing to Skemono’s article demonstrating that even great men of the past could not escape the common attitudes of their times.

Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, showed his ignorance of church etiquette by attending mass, putting his hand out for a wafer, then slipping it into his pocket and leaving the church with it. This is behavior that has been condemned by Catholics as being “Worse than kidnapping,” since they believe that the  magic cracker is now literally Jesus–at least that’s what they fulminated last year when a student taking a wafer back to his pew to show it to his seatmate was assaulted by other churchgoers in an attempt to make him drop the cracker.

The U.S. space shuttle Endeavor launched Wednesday night when thunderstorms stayed away. Unfortunately, it released a cloud of foam insulation on launching that might have damaged the shuttle’s ceramic insulation tiles.  The New York Times describes it thus:

Astronauts in space and engineers on the ground will spend the next few days examining and analyzing the damage to see if it might pose a danger to the shuttle on re-entry.

The shuttle Columbia disintegrated in 2003, killing the seven astronauts on board, because of damage to its wing caused by falling foam during liftoff.

Of course, that last statement is not strictly true. The Columbia was destroyed because nothing was done to assess and correct the damage before re-entry. It was just another episode of NASA’s de facto policy of “Bolt it all together and pray.” So it gave me a little chill to hear that NASA didn’t think that the lightweight foam did any damage. Did that mean they weren’t going to check it? Hadn’t they heard of velocity? Fortunately, they will still inspect the shuttle for damage.

The  U.S. space shuttle Endeavor is about to launch after several days of delays and six holds or re-schedules.

Elephants, even now, love water. And they come by it honestly. In the Eocene period, 37 million years ago, the ancestors of elephants spent time in the water probing with their proto-trunks for aquatic plants to eat. It’s possible that the elephant’s trunk developed initially for reaching deep into the water for forage.

Moeritherium (Luci Betti-Nash/Stony Brook University)

Two early proboscideans, Moeritherium andBarytherium, have left fragmentary remains. To tell what they ate, researchers looked at the distribution of isotopes in their teeth. The isotopes reflect a watery environment.

While carbon isotopes can give clues as to an animal’s diet, oxygen isotopes found in teeth come from local water sources – and variations in the ratios of these isotopes can indicate the type of environment the animal lived in. They compared the ratios of these isotopes to definitely terrestrial animals from the same period and these results – when combined with results from studies of embryology, molecular data, and sedimentology – lead them to believe that Moeritherium was semi-aquatic.

We already know that their closest relatives are the sirenians, or manatees and dugongs, which are fully aquatic. Researchers hope to look at other ancestors of elephants to find when they split off from sirenians and when they started feeding on land.