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• Stem cells used to rebuild breasts after lumpectomies — chicagotribune.com Adult stem cells FTW again.

• Salon.com Books | We are meant to be here People are not the result of a cosmic accident, but of laws of the universe that grant our lives meaning and purpose, says physicist Paul Davies.

Filipino and Danish researchers “have found a way to generate helico-conical, or spiral-shaped light beams.” Hmmm, will this lead to Lasik surgery being an even quicker procedure? Maybe Lucas should delay the release of Star Wars Episode III and insert a scene featuring spiral laser whips. Oh wait, the Balrog got there first, didn’t he?

(via geekpress)

Stumbled upon a couple of Filipino-American blogs worth checking out. There’s Robert Garcia Tagorda’s Boomshock, a blog about politics and baseball. Then there’s The Dubious Biologist, a Salon-hosted blog by BJ De La Cruz, who happens to be, you guessed it, a biologist. He’s also a Macintosh fanatic.

I discovered BJ’s blog quite by accident. Around June and July of this year, I saw a spike in hits from searches on “Filipino Biologist/Physicist.” I never blogged about any such person but my June 2003 archive page does contain the words “Filipino”, “Biologist” and “Physicist.” Out of curiosity, I checked the search engine results and I find a link to one of BJ’s entries where he urges the “person who is still doing the “filipino biologist” search on Google and Yahoo” to stop already. Heh-heh, I could just imagine how much traffic this guy was getting.

Since all search queries originated from the Philippines, and June was the beginning of the schoolyear, I suspect some college professor was giving out assignments to research Filipino biologists or physicists. Or maybe there was some sort of breakthrough in the Philippine scientific field like this discovery of a new parasitic fungus by a Pinay biologist. Who knows?

Update: BJ de la Cruz moved his site here.

This past weekend I found a few good bargain bin items. I got the Excalibur and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior DVDs for $7.50 each at Wal-Mart. At Half-Price Books in Fremont, I picked up two video documentaries at $3.98 each: Icons of Evolution: Dismantling the Myths and Unlocking the Mystery of Life: The Case for Intelligent Design. These two videos cover the growing dissatisfaction among many in the scientific community about Darwinism’s insufficiency to answer questions about the origins of life. These documentaries are quite balanced, interviewing proponents of both intelligent design and (macro)evolution.

On a related note, here are the opening paragraphs of a December 2002 Wired article entitled “The New Convergence” by Gregg Easterbrook touching on the emergence of a “reconciliation between science and religion”:

“The ancient covenant is in pieces: Man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance.” So pronounced the Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Jacques Monod in his 1970 treatise Chance and Necessity, which maintained that God had been utterly refuted by science. The divine is fiction, faith is hokum, existence is a matter of heartless probability - and this wasn’t just speculation, Monod maintained, but proven. The essay, which had tremendous influence on the intellectual world, seemed to conclude a millennia-old debate. Theology was in retreat, unable to explain away Darwin’s observations; intellectual approval was flowing to thinkers such as the Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who in 1977 pronounced, “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” In 1981, the National Academy of Sciences declared, “religion and science are separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought.” Case closed.

And now reopened. In recent years, Allan Sandage, one of the word’s leading astronomers, has declared that the big bang can be understood only as a “miracle.” Charles Townes, a Nobel-winning physicist and coinventor of the laser, has said that discoveries of physics “seem to reflect intelligence at work in natural law.” Biologist Christian de Duve, also a Nobel winner, points out that science argues neither for nor against the existence of a deity: “There is no sense in which atheism is enforced or established by science.” And biologist Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, insists that “a lot of scientists really don’t know what they are missing by not exploring their spiritual feelings.”

Read the rest here. Interesting stuff.