Scrolling around...August 6th, 2012

Thousands of fish die as Midwest streams heat up
Thousands of fish are dying in the Midwest as the hot, dry summer dries up rivers and causes water temperatures to climb in some spots to nearly 100 degrees.
About 40,000 shovelnose sturgeon were killed in Iowa last week as water temperatures reached 97 degrees. Nebraska fishery officials said they've seen thousands of dead sturgeon, catfish, carp, and other species in the Lower Platte River, including the endangered pallid sturgeon. And biologists in Illinois said the hot weather has killed tens of thousands of large- and smallmouth bass and channel catfish and is threatening the population of the greater redhorse fish, a state-endangered species...

How many parents would your child like?
The new Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) have allowed the creation of brave new families. Whereas earlier it took a man and a woman to produce a child, now there are all sorts of combinations available. A child can be manufactured with any number of players involved...

Albert Mohler: Gore Vidal and the Sky God
...Most of the media coverage after his death dealt extensively with his homosexuality and radical politics. He claimed, for example, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt knew in advance of Pearl Harbor and that President George W. Bush knew in advance of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Many also mentioned his antipathy to Christianity.
But the true nature of Gore Vidal’s theological protest was largely, if not totally, missing from the national coverage. In his 1992 Lowell Lecture at Harvard University, Vidal attacked not just Christianity, but the very notion of monotheism...

British Court Convicts Pakistani-Born Parents for 'Honor' Killing
...The Ahmeds tortured their westernized daughter for years. And then one day in 2003, when she refused to give in to their demand to get married, the couple stuffed a plastic bag into her mouth in front of their four other children at her home in Warrington, Cheshire. Her dismembered body was found on a riverbank in February 2004...

Mensa accepts 3-year-old Houston boy
...Christopher, an only child, was born in Houston on Jan. 22, 2009. The family is in the process of moving to Connecticut, where Christopher is taking online classes through Stanford University's Education Program for Gifted Youth, which he started Aug. 1.

Kate said because he is her first child, she thought nothing of it when he spoke perfectly at age 1. People who overheard him rattling away in the grocery store would be shocked.
She said when he was about 18 months, he started reading full books.

Study finds that avoiding lies can improve your health
...Over the study period, the link between less lying and improved health was significantly stronger for participants in the no-lie group, the study found. When participants in the no-lie group told three fewer minor lies than they did in other weeks, for example, they experienced, on average, four fewer mental-health complaints and three fewer physical complaints. Mental health complaints included feeling tense or melancholy; physical complaints included sore throats and headaches...

Is sugar toxic?
...The chances are good that sugar is a bigger part of your daily diet than you may realize which is why our story is so important. As we first reported last spring, new research coming out of some of America's most respected institutions is starting to find that sugar, the way many people are eating it today, is a toxin and could be a driving force behind some of this country's leading killers, including heart disease...

Tunisia: Muslim leader hospitalized after being attacked at "Tolerance In Islam" conference
...The assailant struck Mourou in the head with what appeared to be a water glass following a dispute. Mourou passed out and was taken to the hospital, where he was given five stitches in the forehead...

Muslim rebels armed with chainsaws attack Philippine towns
A breakaway group of Muslim rebels armed with chainsaws and guns launched simultaneous attacks across 11 towns in the southern Philippines on Monday, leading to clashes with troops...

Growing Up With Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View
...Quite simply, growing up with gay parents was very difficult, and not because of prejudice from neighbors. People in our community didn’t really know what was going on in the house. To most outside observers, I was a well-raised, high-achieving child, finishing high school with straight A’s.
Inside, however, I was confused. When your home life is so drastically different from everyone around you, in a fundamental way striking at basic physical relations, you grow up weird. I have no mental health disorders or biological conditions. I just grew up in a house so unusual that I was destined to exist as a social outcast...

NASA's Curiosity rover and its parachute were spotted by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as Curiosity descended to the surface on Aug. 5 PDT (Aug. 6 EDT). The High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Curiosity while the orbiter was listening to transmissions from the rover...More images at NASA