3,622 research outputs found

    Politically Correct Science: Why Johnny Can’t Read Scientific Creationism

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    The playing field is far from level in the contest between Evolutionism and Scientific Creationism. Science faculty with ambitions to move up to larger universities are unlikely to assign readings in Creation Science. Scientists who express doubts about Evolutionism are punished for straying from orthodoxy. Scientific publishers are generally unwilling to accept manuscripts from Creationist researchers and theorists. Secular review sources either neglect Creationist works altogether or are so uniformly hostile and dismissive that they are not useful for separating the wheat from the chaff. Unless librarians muster the integrity and professional diligence to collect robustly in Scientific Creationism, a monolithic Evolutionist siege will succeed

    How Should America's Anti-Terrorism Budget Be Allocated? Findings from a National Survey of Attitudes of U.S. Residents about Terrorism

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    U.S. residents are very concerned about future terrorist attacks and they are willing to commit substantial sums to prevent further terrorist acts. Protecting against another 9/11 style incident is important, but U.S. residents are more concerned about protecting the food supply system and preventing release of chemical or biological agents in public areas. On average respondents would allocate 13.3 percent more to protect the food supply chain and 12.0 percent more to protect against release of a toxic chemical or biological agent than they would to protect against another terrorist attack using hijacked aircraft. Approximately 5billioniscurrentlyspenttoprotectcivilaviation.The2006budgetprovided5 billion is currently spent to protect civil aviation. The 2006 budget provided 8.6 billion of fiscal authority for programs protecting against all types of catastrophic terrorist incidents, including protection against radiological or nuclear incidents, as well as protecting the food supply and preventing chemical or biological attacks. No one would argue that decisions on the size and internal allocation of the nation's homeland security budget should be made on the basis of a public opinion survey, but this survey indicates that Americans would likely support additional spending to defend the food system and protect against release of a chemical or biological agent.Political Economy,

    A classical reactive potential for molecular clusters of sulphuric acid and water

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    We present a two-state empirical valence bond (EVB) potential describing interactions between sulphuric acid and water molecules and designed to model proton transfer between them within a classical dynamical framework. The potential has been developed in order to study the properties of molecular clusters of these species, which are thought to be relevant to atmospheric aerosol nucleation. The particle swarm optimisation method has been used to fit the parameters of the EVB model to density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Features of the parametrised model and DFT data are compared and found to be in satisfactory agreement. In particular, it is found that a single sulphuric acid molecule will donate a proton when clustered with four water molecules at 300 K and that this threshold is temperature dependent

    Hierarchical formation of bulgeless galaxies II: Redistribution of angular momentum via galactic fountains

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    Within a fully cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, we form a galaxy which rotates at 140 km/s, and is characterised by two loose spiral arms and a bar, indicative of a Hubble Type SBc/d galaxy. We show that our simulated galaxy has no classical bulge, with a pure disc profile at z=1, well after the major merging activity has ended. A long-lived bar subsequently forms, resulting in the formation of a secularly-formed "pseudo" bulge, with the final bulge-to-total light ratio B/T=0.21. We show that the majority of gas which loses angular momentum and falls to the central region of the galaxy during the merging epoch is blown back into the hot halo, with much of it returning later to form stars in the disc. We propose that this mechanism of redistribution of angular momentum via a galactic fountain, when coupled with the results from our previous study which showed why gas outflows are biased to have low angular momentum, can solve the angular momentum/bulgeless disc problem of the cold dark matter paradigm.Comment: 9 Pages, 10 Figures, accepted MNRAS version. Comments welcom
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