Myths about Spiders.

I have been pondering recently on why we find small rodents cute when as a species they're a threat to our food supply, spread disease and so on, apparently its a consequence of the evolutionary need to find babies cute. Regardless that lead me on to wondering about why human beings generally don't like and are often afraid of spiders who are supremely beneficial to humans in their consumption of numerous pests. I don't know that but I did google to see if I was mistaken in thinking spiders so useful, I wasn't but I did find this great website that dispels various myths about spiders.

While I'm not very good at science I like to read any kind of academic subject and find out things I'd just assumed to be fact aren't correct at all and this list has several myths I'd completely bought into so it was fun to have my perception of the world shifted a bit. Also even if you're an arachnophobe its worth a look because the list explains how spiders are often less dangerous than they're thought to be.

Charles Darwin: Building Better Worlds.

Terraforming, a concept familiar in sci-fi for decades now is rapidly coming into the mainstream. In fiction it has generally been shorthand for the alteration of planets for colonisation, forming planets to be more like Terra, Earth. In reality while it is brought up from time to time in relation to Mars the reason it is starting to move into public knowledge is that it is (and will increasingly prominently continue to be) Industry's favoured solution to climate change. Instead of cutting emissions or adapting to less polluting ways they instead want to continue as usual and hope that future science will magically fix things. The fact that the impact of climate change and dwindling resources will almost certainly lead to larger and larger wars and thus less chance for innovation in peaceful areas is irrelevant in their world. After all the quarterly financial report is all that really matters anyway.

However it seems terraforming has been around a lot longer than most people had assumed, back in the middle of the C19th Darwin, the Royal Navy and Kew Gardens botched together their own forest eco-system that turned a barren volcanic island into a lush expanse of greenery. But hey, creationists could've achieved something even better if they cared to pray hard enough.