At some point before 35-year-old Jesse Ryan Loskarn hanged himself in his parents’ home outside Baltimore, he wrote a painful letter soaked in shame and self-loathing in which he attempted to explain the unexplainable.

The former chief of staff for Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) had lived a secret life, hiding memories of child abuse and his addiction to child pornography. Even as U.S. Postal Inspection Service agents used a battering ram to enter his house, it appeared that he was trying to hide an external hard drive – containing hundreds of videos – on a ledge outside a window.

“Everyone wants to know why,” he wrote, in a Jan. 23 letter posted online by Gay Loskarn, his mother.

Read it all.

You might think that we humans are special: no other species has, for example, landed on the moon, or invented the iPad. But then, I personally haven’t done those things either. So if such achievements are what makes us human then I must be relegated to the beasts, except in so far as I can catch a little reflected glory from true humans such as Neil Armstrong or Steve Jobs.

Fortunately, there are other, more inclusive, ideas around about what makes us human. Not long ago, most people (in the west) were happy with the account found in the Bible: we are made in the image of God ”“ end of argument. But the theory of evolution tells a different story, one in which humans slowly emerged as a twig on the tree of life. The problem with this explanation is that it is much more difficult to say exactly what makes us so different from all the other twigs.

Indeed, in the light of new research into animal intelligence, some scientists have concluded that there simply is no profound difference between us and other species. This is the stance taken in new books by Henry Gee, palaeontology editor of the leading scientific journal Nature, and by animal behaviour expert Marc Bekoff. But other scientists of equal eminence argue the opposite: that new research is finally making the profound difference between humans and animals clear ”“ and two of them, the psychologists Michael Tomasello and Thomas Suddendorf, have written new books purporting to tell us exactly what it is.

Read it all (if necessary, another link may be found there).

Claiming that the mere thought is an “absolute nightmare,” WR 67c, a terrestrial planet from the distant Gamma Velorum star system, expressed its profound terror Wednesday at the possibility of one day gaining the capacity to sustain human life.

The 5.2-billion-year-old celestial body, which is located roughly 1,100 light years from Earth, said that for both its own sake and that of its entire solar system, it can only hope to never possess the necessary planetary characteristics and chemical elements needed to support either a deep-space human outpost or, more gravely, an entire human colony.

Read it all.

A gentler way to conduct one of the most uncomfortable medical examinations may soon be available after a pill containing a camera that transmits images of internal organs was cleared for use.

The technology could avoid the need for hundreds of thousands of patients to have colonoscopies.

The device, created by the Israeli company Given Images, contains a tiny, battery-powered camera to help doctors to check for early signs of colon cancer.

Read it all (subscription required).

Skilled computer hackers, combined with weak law enforcement and a strong criminal underworld, creates a big problem in Russia.

Watch two reports from Richard Engel here and there.

Harvard professor Laura Nasrallah’s edX online course “Early Christianity: The Letters of Paul,” has been called the largest and most concentrated scholarly discussion of Biblical studies in history, according to edX.

Nasrallah told The Huffington Post via email, “The day the course launched was astonishing””like drinking from a fire hose. The edX discussion threads couldn’t handle the amount of people who were commenting, and crashed and slowed down. More people participated on Poetry Genius that day than ever before””the apostle Paul beat out Beyonce!”

edX is a massive online open course (MOOC) platform founded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. It’s a non-profit that delivers university-level course material to a global audience for free.

Read it all.

Genetic testing of embryos has been around for more than a decade, but its use has soared in recent years as methods have improved and more disease-causing genes have been discovered. The in vitro fertilization and testing are expensive ”” typically about $20,000 ”” but they make it possible for couples to ensure that their children will not inherit a faulty gene and to avoid the difficult choice of whether to abort a pregnancy if testing of a fetus detects a genetic problem.

But the procedure also raises unsettling ethical questions that trouble advocates for the disabled and have left some doctors struggling with what they should tell their patients. When are prospective parents justified in discarding embryos? Is it acceptable, for example, for diseases like GSS, that develop in adulthood? What if a gene only increases the risk of a disease? And should people be able to use it to pick whether they have a boy or girl? A recent international survey found that 2 percent of more than 27,000 uses of preimplantation diagnosis were made to choose a child’s sex.

In the United States, there are no regulations that limit the method’s use. The Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, whose members provide preimplantation diagnosis, says it is “ethically justified” to prevent serious adult diseases for which “no safe, effective interventions are available.” The method is “ethically allowed” for conditions “of lesser severity” or for which the gene increases risk but does not guarantee a disease.

Read it all.

Thank heaven for iTunes. And Bose audio. Without these technological tools the 11 congregations in the far-flung parish of southeast Labrador would have no organ, and some even no choral music at Sunday services.

“There are no longer any organs in the entire parish, although until recently we had a few pump organs,” says the Rev. Jeffrey Petten, one of the parish’s two priests serving such picturesquely named communities as Black Tickle (pop. 168). “A few churches have a capella choirs only, and some use guitarists as accompanists.”

An organist himself, Petten now uses a digital keyboard and hits the organ-mode button as needed. “But I really don’t like to preside and play at the same service because it becomes more work, hopping between the altar and the keys. You can’t properly prepare the altar for the eucharist with a hymn book in your hand,” he says.

Read it all.

The online superstore Amazon got its start selling books ”” and it’s been getting into the publishing business as well, with imprints for genres like science fiction, romance and mystery.

Until now, though, it hasn’t had its fingers in one of the biggest slices of the publishing pie: Christian books. That changed this past week, with the introduction of the Waterfall Press imprint.

Win Bassett is a writer and a seminarian at the Yale Divinity School. He tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that Christian publishing is a $1.4 billion market, and many major publishers have Christian imprints. “So I guess Amazon thought that it’s about time they get in the game, too.”

Read or listen to it all.

The e-reader may be old hat in some countries but South Africa’s Anglican leader plans to use them in training seminarians.

The Anglican archbishop of Southern Africa launched his project to “promote electronic learning in dioceses” in South Africa’s Western Cape province at the local residential college for ordinands involving e-readers on January 28.

Archbishop Thabo Makgoba launched the new initiative when he opened and blessed a new Centre for Reflection and Development at his official residence and offices in Cape Town.

Read it all.

The alleged cheating may be the result of a great deal of pressure on nuclear missileers, which “is not a healthy environment,” James said.

“What I mean by that is although the standard on our test ”“ a passing grade on these tests is 90 percent ”“ the missileers are still driven to score 100 percent, all of the time.”

That’s because commanders there are using the test scores “to be a top differentiator, if not the sole differentiator, on who gets promoted,” she added. “So I believe that a very terrible irony in this whole situation is that these missileers didn’t cheat to pass. They cheated because they felt driven to get 100 percent. Getting 90 percent or 95 percent was considered a failure in their eyes.”

Read it all.

“There’s hardly a more pressing issue at the dawn of the 21st century than science and faith,” the Rev. Jeff Miller, chairman of Mere Anglicanism, said in a statement.

About 650 people attended the three-day event that this year explored “the evidences of God’s handiwork in the cosmos,” said the Rev. Dr. Peter Moore, associate rector at St. Michael’s in Charleston.

Oxford University mathematician John Lennox, who has debated prominent atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, opened the conference tackling naturalism and “scientific fundamentalism.”

Science, he argued, needs God to account for the origins of things.

“Science may explain the how, but it cannot explain the why,” Lennox said.

Read it all.

The Conference reached “sold out” capacity weeks before it began ”” even though it had moved to a larger venue this year in order to accommodate a crowd of up to 650 in the two-story high Charleston Music Hall. The organizers attribute the dramatic increase to the timeliness and topicality of this year’s theme: “Science, Faith and Apologetics: an Answer for the Hope That Is Within Us.” In my humble opinion, however, the draw of the event was equally due to the stellar lineup of speakers.

Oxford University Professor of Mathematics John Lennox both led off and summed up the Conference. He began Thursday evening’s session with a bravura survey of all that is faulty with the arguments and logic of the so-called “New Atheists”, that is to say, Steven Hawking, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (now deceased), Sam Harris and the like. Essentially they want to exclude religion from the public and academic sphere, and replace it with methodological naturalism ”” which they call “science”, but which as they spell it out is really just a religion in its own right: it excludes all discussion or concepts of the supernatural on grounds which are just as dogmatic and doctrinal as is their straw-man chimera of religion based on faith. Quoting passages from his recent book, Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target, Dr. Lennox had the audience laughing over the self-induced isolationism of the intellectual atheists.

Read it all.

Check it out.

Scientists and biotechnology companies are developing what could become the next powerful weapon in the war on pests ”” one that harnesses a Nobel Prize-winning discovery to kill insects and pathogens by disabling their genes.

By zeroing in on a genetic sequence unique to one species, the technique has the potential to kill a pest without harming beneficial insects. That would be a big advance over chemical pesticides.

“If you use a neuro-poison, it kills everything,” said Subba Reddy Palli, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky who is researching the technology, which is called RNA interference. “But this one is very target-specific.”

Read it all.

The Church of England has joined with a coalition of co-operatives, charities and community groups – providing a collective membership of 17 million – to welcome the UK’s first ever Community Energy Strategy, published this week, providing the opportunity for a scaling up of community energy.

The Community Energy Coalition (CEC) includes the Church of England, Co-operative Group, National Trust, Campaign to Protect Rural England, Energy Saving Trust, NUS, Co-operatives UK and more than 20 other civil society and sustainable energy organisations.

David Shreeve, Environmental Adviser for the Church of England said: “As a member of the Community Energy Coalition, the Church of England through its individual churches can play a pivotal role in helping develop community interest and action Its many buildings can provide excellent sites for renewable facilities. In addition, it supports the opportunity that community schemes could provide by enabling tariffs to be adjusted to benefit the fuel poor.”

Read it all.

You can find the link to listen to it all here; note you can listen by clicking the link or download by clicking the blue “download” word underneath the black line. Our thanks to Saint Helena’s, Beaufort, S.C., for making this available.

[Google’s] DeepMind acquisition closely follows…[the company’s] $3.2 billion purchase of smart thermostat and smoke alarm maker Nest, a slew of cutting-edge robotics companies, and another AI startup known as DNNresearch.

Google is looking to spread smart computer hardware into so many parts of our everyday lives ”” from our homes and our cars to our bodies ”” but perhaps more importantly, it’s developing a new type of artificial intelligence that can help operate these devices, as well as its many existing web and smartphone services.

Though Google is out in front of this AI arms race, others are moving in the same direction. Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are doubling down on artificial intelligence too, and are snapping up fresh AI talent. According to The Information, Mark Zuckerberg and company were also trying to acquire DeepMind.

Read it all.

U.S. technology companies may give the public and their customers more detail about the court orders they receive related to surveillance under an agreement they reached on Monday with the Obama administration.

Companies such as Google Inc and Microsoft Corp have been prohibited from disclosing even an approximate number of orders they received from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. They could give only an aggregate number of U.S. demands that combined surveillance court orders, letters from the FBI, subpoenas in run-of-the-mill criminal cases and other requests.

The deal frees the companies to say, for example, approximately how many orders they received in a six-month period from the surveillance court.

Read it all.

Listen to it all should you wish to and also note that there is an option to download it there.

Check them out there. Note also that a slideshow option is available by clicking there.

Check them out.

These Mere Anglicanism 2014 speakers have agreed to speak or preach at the following churches on Sunday:

Dr. Denis Alexander
Christ St. Paul’s/Yonges Island

Professor Peter John Kreeft
St. John’s Parish/Johns Island

Professor John C. Lennox
Parish Church of St. Helena/Beaufort

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali
St. Michael’s Church/Charleston

@KendallHarmon6 is tweeting
@drewcollins is also doing so
@GoebelGreg is present as well
#MereAnglicanism is the hashtag

Just past midnight Indian time on 22 January, an astronomer at University College London and his students were taking a routine peek through their telescope when they noticed something odd: there was a new, bright ‘star’ at the edge of the Cigar Galaxy or M, some 11.4 million light years away. Before the London fog closed in and the view was lost, the group had taken photographs and contacted US astronomer friends. After a flurry of intercontinental activity, excited astronomers announced the discovery of a new supernova. The discovery has been announced in the scientific journal Nature.

A supernova is a star explosion. It throws out an enormous amount of energy, outshining a whole galaxy for a few days. It is estimated that mass is ejected from the exploding star at 30,000 kilometers per second. This one is of the type 1a, which happens when a white dwarf star which is old and dim, is loaded with excessive gas and dust causing a thermonuclear explosion. Two white dwarves colliding would also lead to a similar result.

Read it all.

Tallulah, an aspiring dancer from West Hampstead in London, threw herself under a train at St Pancras Station on October 14, 2012. Her mother said she had been unable to prevent the troubled teenager from becoming increasingly withdrawn at home and at school, as she developed a fantasy cocaine-taking persona online.

Ms Wilson said: “Like any parent I sought to protect my daughter, seeking help from professionals at her school, the NHS and the Tavistock Clinic. Her sisters and I did everything we could to keep her safe, but she had fallen into a world of nightmares. She was in the c lutches of a toxic digital world where in the final few weeks we could no longer reach her.

“I was shocked by the ease with which Tallulah and other children can access online self-harm and suicide blogs. Tallulah entered a world where the lines between fantasy and reality became blurred. It is every parent’s worst nightmare.”

Read it all (subscription required).

Scientists returned to the Amazon rainforest in December to collect data on one of their biggest finds of 2012: a spider that uses insect corpses and jungle trash to build big, spider-shaped decoys in its web.

But these Peruvian spiders, presumed to be a new species of Cyclosa, are not the sole sculptors of false arachnids. A second decoy spider lives in the Philippines, on the island of Negros. Finding two spiders that make such similar designs, 11,000 miles apart, has left scientists wondering how the behavior evolved and if the decoys serve as lures for prey or as an anti-predator defense system. The discoveries also suggest there may be even more sculpting arachnids.

You just have to know what to look for.

Read it all.

Obviously no one against abortion likes Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that made abortion on demand the law of the land, and has led to fifty-five million legal abortions in the forty-one years since.

But listen to a few lines from those who call themselves “pro-choice.” Harry Blackmun, the Supreme Court justice who actually wrote it, called the court’s decision to even hear Roe a “serious mistake.” And before joining the court, current Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Roe was not “measured” because it “invited no dialogue with legislators.”

In his new book, “Abuse of Discretion,” Clark Forsythe digs into the nuts and bolts of the decision like no book I’ve ever encountered. Forsythe, the former president and current senior counsel of Americans United for Life, is well versed in the ugly causes and even uglier consequences of Roe v. Wade, and he joined me to talk about it on the current edition of “BreakPoint This Week.”

Read it all.

If the new wave of supersmart robots and computers is as clever as people say, will they be any more able than humans are to answer the question of whether these automatons will destroy everyone’s jobs?

This issue has been subject to fierce debate in the US, where the economy has never generated so few jobs in an upturn since records began. It has been less debated in Britain, probably because the country has so far experienced a low-productivity recovery in which employers have preferred hiring low-wage workers to investing in technology.

That could be temporary, however: there are signs that productivity may be starting to pick up. The robots issue has global implications.

Read it all.