In the past few years, the video game industry has grown from a niche market into a major part of mainstream media. This increase in popularity and use of technology has allowed video game developers to insert more detail and nuance into the storylines of their games. Many video games have begun incorporating religion as a key aspect to plot points and story lines. Greg Perreault, a doctoral student in the University of Missouri School of Journalism, found that the many newer-generation video games equate religion with violence in the game narratives.

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There is no doubt that reproduction is an industry, and a very lucrative one, at that. The costs of IVF run in the tens of thousands of American dollars for a single attempt, and the woman must receive regular hormone injections and undergo invasive procedures to both retrieve eggs and transfer embryos into her uterus. Given the physical and financial toll exerted by IVF, prospective parents and medical professionals place a great deal of emphasis on achieving a successful birth with as few attempts as possible. Therefore, it is common to transfer more than one embryo at a time, in the hopes that at least one will survive. In the event of the survival of multiple embryos, or if the embryos further divide in a case of identical twinning, the parents are offered the option of a “selective reduction,” in which one or more of the fetuses is aborted.

The argument used to support this practice is that the fewer the number of babies, the better the projected outcome for the survivor(s). In other words, even if a mother would be happy to accept twins or triplets, she may be counseled to “reduce” the number of her children for fear that she might be more likely to miscarry and lose the entire pregnancy. Sadly, this barbaric practice is being increasingly recommended not only for higher-order multiples, but also for twins, including those which occur naturally

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Google says the changes will make it easier for consumers to understand how it collects personal information, and allow the company to create more helpful and compelling services. Critics, including most of the country’s state attorneys general and a top regulator in Europe, argue that Google is trampling on people’s privacy rights in its relentless drive to sell more ads….

Google is combining more than 60 different privacy policies so it will be able to throw all the data it gathers about each of its logged-in users into personal dossiers. The information Google learns about you while you enter requests into its search engine can be culled to suggest videos to watch when you visit the company’s YouTube site.

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I should like to focus on nothing””that is, on the various senses of nothing about which scientists, philosophers, and theologians speak””and the danger which follows from a failure to keep distinct these different senses. It may seem strange, but my task here is to make crucial distinctions about nothing….

Lawrence Kraus, however, simply rejects any appeal to notions of “nothing” which are beyond the explanatory domain of the natural sciences. As he said in an interview on National Public Radio in January: “the question of why there is something rather than nothing is really a scientific question, not a religious or philosophical question, because both nothing and something are scientific concepts, and our discoveries over the past 30 years have completely changed what we mean by nothing.” Krauss goes well beyond what most physicists would claim when he says: “the distinction between something and nothing has begun to disappear, where transitions between the two in different contexts are not only common, but required” (183). Indeed, he has a whole chapter on why nothing is unstable. In a way, of course, he is right. The “nothing” he attributes to various cosmological theories is really something. The distinguished French physicist, Étienne Klein, author of Discours sur l’origine de l’univers (2010), observes that, contrary to Krauss’ speculations, we do not have the conceptual tools to try to explain how something can come from nothing; indeed, “that which pre-exists our universe is never nothing,” since all change starts from a prior something….

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Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang, they say, adding that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people tend to realize.

“A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute,” said Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University. “But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.”

The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island University published a paper about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample ”” recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 ”” the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.”

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We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

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During the debate, it seemed that at the heart of Dawkins’ difficulty with faith is his impoverished view of God and is failure to grasp more than the most simplistic understanding.
Towards the end he asked the archbishop: “Why don’t you see the extraordinary beauty of the idea that we can explain the world, life, how it started, from nothing? … Why clutter it up with something so messy as a god?”

Dr Williams replied that he doesn’t see clutter: “I’m not thinking of God as being shoehorned in.”

Dawkins then said: “That is exactly how I see God.”

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Why is this important, and how does it affect even those who do not live in Maryland? Isn’t it best just to let people do what they want with their lives and leave well enough alone, as long as we are left in peace to do what we want with our lives? That’s a pipedream. This law is a misnomer, and its passage signals the destruction of, not greater protection for, marriage. Let me explain why.

First, let’s step back from the rhetoric and define our terms. Fundamentally, what defines a marriage? What makes it unique and distinct from all other human relationships? It is the only relationship that naturally leads to the procreation of a child, and, through its stability and mutual commitment, provides the optimal conditions to nurture and educate that child. Same-sex unions cannot achieve this biologically. Two women cannot conceive a child, nor can two men. Therefore, they simply cannot, naturally speaking, be “married,” for their relationship lacks the essential component of fertility. Sexual difference is an essential component of marriage.

Some will claim that homosexual partners raise children just as heterosexual ones do. But again, let’s step aside from the rhetoric and look at facts. Two lesbians who bring a child into the world through artificial insemination still require the male gamete necessary for fertilization to take place. Whether aware of him or not, the child of that lesbian couple actually does have a father.

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A former medical director of the country’s largest abortion provider said it was “well known” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the gender of the child and that he had been asked by women to arrange the procedure for this reason.

Dr Vincent Argent, who previously worked for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and is now a GP and consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said he had “no doubt” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the sex of the baby and that he believed the practice was “fairly widespread”. This week The Daily Telegraph disclosed that women were being offered illegal abortions by doctors on the basis of the gender of the foetus.

Dr Argent said there were “an awful lot of covert abortions for sex selection going on” where women would have a scan or blood test to find out the sex, then ask for a termination without telling the doctor the real reason.

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Women are being granted illegal abortions by doctors based on the sex of their unborn baby, an undercover investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals.

Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such “sex-selection” procedures.

Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. Sex selection is illegal and is morally wrong. I’ve asked my officials to investigate this as a matter of urgency.”

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Even as the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said in a new report Friday that Iran had accelerated its uranium enrichment program, American intelligence analysts continue to believe that there is no hard evidence that Iran has decided to build a nuclear bomb.

Recent assessments by American spy agencies are broadly consistent with a 2007 intelligence finding that concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program years earlier, according to current and former American officials. The officials said that assessment was largely reaffirmed in a 2010 National Intelligence Estimate, and that it remains the consensus view of America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

At the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran….

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Iran dramatically boosted its production of a purer form of nuclear fuel in recent months, with much of the increased output coming from a newly opened plant built inside a mountain bunker, U.N. officials said Friday, further exacerbating worries about Iran’s march toward nuclear-weapons capability.

The finding, in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, showed a nearly 50 percent jump since the fall in Iran’s stockpile of a kind of highly enriched uranium that is closer to weapons-grade than the type normally used in nuclear power plants.

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…. the world should [not] just let Iran get the bomb. The government will soon be starved of revenues, because of an oil embargo. Sanctions are biting, the financial system is increasingly isolated and the currency has plunged in value. Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders. Meanwhile, political change is sweeping across the Middle East. The regime in Tehran is divided and it has lost the faith of its people. Eventually, popular resistance will spring up as it did in 2009. A new regime brought about by the Iranians themselves is more likely to renounce the bomb than one that has just witnessed an American assault.

Is there a danger that Iran will get a nuclear weapon before that happens? Yes, but bombing might only increase the risk. Can you stop Iran from getting a bomb if it is determined to have one? Not indefinitely, and bombing it might make it all the more desperate. Short of occupation, the world cannot eliminate Iran’s capacity to gain the bomb. It can only change its will to possess one. Just now that is more likely to come about through sanctions and diplomacy than war.

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Women reign supreme on social networks, but men are more likely to tote tablet computers.

Those are just a pair of the findings in a new analysis of research from Nielsen and NM Incite that was released Thursday. Women make up 54% of visitors to social networks and blogs and outnumber men, 53% to 47%, among online video viewers, the report finds.

Men account for 53% of tablet owners. However, the sexes are in a 50-50 dead heat when it comes to smartphone ownership.

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With Passover just a month away a new app aims to help consumers keep kosher throughout the eight-day Jewish festival and to stay up to date on kosher products throughout the rest of the year.

Released by the Orthodox Union (OU), which promotes the values of the Orthodox Jewish community, the app called OU Kosher provides consumers with updates on products that have been certified by the OU, which is the world’s largest kosher certification agency.

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As a woman, I have found that fertility and childbearing highlight my addiction to control more than almost anything else in my life thus far. Women are, after all, trained to control our bodies. Managing one’s appearance and conducting one’s body in a way that honors God are common female virtues in the church. Added to that is the resource of birth control, with which we can control our biological cycles.

This control has extended beyond pregnancy prevention into the realm of pregnancy facilitation. Women are now waiting longer to have children, some because they must, others because they can.

In truth, the control we have over our bodies is an illusion of power that inevitably comes crashing down. For me, the illusion crumbled when I began to think seriously about having children, and recent media stories reveal that I am not alone.

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Not directly related to ”“ but probably not completely independent from ”“ the raging debate over birth control coverage in Roman Catholic college health plans, the availability of the emergency contraceptive Plan B One Step, or the morning-after pill, has been making news on a number of campuses across the country, and not all of them are religious.

Some colleges have been criticized for not making Plan B easily available; others, for expanding access or accommodating it in unusual ways. But, playing out against the backdrop of the latest culture war, each case reinforces the considerable impact colleges can have in this area of student health.

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The economy might be experiencing one of its worst times, but Catholic colleges seem to be experiencing their best times, all things considered, because of their commitment to Catholic identity.

The Augustine Institute in Denver, which offers graduate degrees on campus and through distance education, saw record enrollment this past year. “One big draw for us is our program,” said Edward Sri, provost and professor of Scripture and theology. “Particularly, our distance-education program is booming.”

The distance program was launched in 2008, and by fall 2011, it had more than 200 students. Students like how the DVD format makes them feel part of a live class, plus the flexibility of the program means they can “maintain their work and revenue and responsibilities on the home front with their families and still work on their master’s degree,” Sri said.

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Should Israel decide to launch a strike on Iran, its pilots would have to fly more than 1,000 miles across unfriendly airspace, refuel in the air en route, fight off Iran’s air defenses, attack multiple underground sites simultaneously ”” and use at least 100 planes.

That is the assessment of American defense officials and military analysts close to the Pentagon, who say that an Israeli attack meant to set back Iran’s nuclear program would be a huge and highly complex operation. They describe it as far different from Israel’s “surgical” strikes on a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007 and Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981.

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A two-year-old boy with “three parents” – his lesbian mother, her partner and a gay father – is at the centre of an Appeal Court test case on the status of “alternative” families.

The mother says she made a pact with the father during a restaurant meeting before the boy was conceived that she and her lover would fill the role of “primary parents” within a “nuclear family” and that he would not stand on his paternal rights.

But now she and her partner say they feel “bitter and betrayed” after the father – a former close friend who attended the birth and held the new-born baby in his arms – demanded overnight and holiday contact with his biological son.

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Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world’s endangered languages, scientists believe.

Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century’s end.

Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the “modern world”, especially digital technology, are pushing back against the tide.

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Hollywood veteran Brian Robbins has a new production studio under construction and 35 shows in development. There’s a sitcom set in a high-school bathroom, a talk show modeled on “The View” but hosted by young Twitter celebrities and a series about an outlandish teen wrestling league.

Mr. Robbins, a producer and director known for Eddie Murphy movies and TV shows including “Smallville,” plans to produce 120 hours of teen programming this year, all of it destined exclusively for the Web. “We consider ourselves a network,” he says.

Mr. Robbins is part of a teeming new ecosystem, as some of Hollywood’s biggest names””with support from Silicon Valley’s deepest pockets””are racing to create new shows, and in some cases, dozens of them, for the Web.

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It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation may soon be forced to shut down a number of key Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which would cut Internet access for millions of Web users around the world, reports BetaBeat. The DNS servers were installed by the FBI last year, in an effort to stop the spread of a piece of malware known as DNSCharger Trojan. But the court order that allowed the set up of the replacement servers expires on March 8.

In November of last year, authorities arrested six men in Estonia for the creation and spread of DNSCharger, which reconfigures infected computers’ Internet settings, and re-routes users to websites that contain malware, or other illegal sites. DNSCharger also blocks access to websites that might offer solutions for how to rid the computer of its worm, and often comes bundled with other types of malicious software.

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Nevada is envisioning a day when taxicabs might shuttle fares without a driver, or people with medical conditions that make them ineligible for a license could get around with a virtual chauffeur.

The concept took a big step when Nevada became the first state to approve regulations that spell out requirements for companies to test driverless cars on state roads.

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Attorneys general from a dozen states say they intend to sue over the Obama administration’s contraception mandate that requires many religious employers to violate the teachings of their faith.

In a Feb. 10 letter, the attorneys general voiced their “strong opposition” to the mandate, which they called “an impermissible violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment virtually unparalleled in American history.”

They said that if the mandate is implemented, they are prepared to “vigorously oppose it in court.”

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U.S. legislators on Wednesday sought more information from Apple Inc….regarding its privacy policies, pulling the iPhone manufacturer into a swelling controversy over how developers on its popular iOS mobile platform have been able to access users’ private address book data.

In a letter addressed to Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook, Representatives Henry Waxman of California and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, both Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asked Apple to clarify its developer guidelines and the measures taken by the company to screen apps that are sold on its App Store.

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The HHS regulations announced on January 20 are one domestic expression of defining-religious-freedom-down. The administration does not propose to, say, restore the 1970 ICEL translations of the prayer-texts of the Mass; that, even HHS might concede, is a violation of religious freedom. But the administration did not think it a violation of religious freedom for its Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to try and overturn the longstanding legal understanding which held that religious institutions have a secure First Amendment right to choose their ministers by their own criteria””until it was told that it had gone way over the line in January’s Hosanna-Tabor Supreme Court decision (a judicial smackdown in which the administration’s own Court nominees joined).

Now, with the HHS “contraceptive mandate” (which, as noted above, is also a sterilization and abortifacent “mandate”), the administration claims that it is not violating the First Amendment by requiring Catholic institutions to provide “services” that the Catholic Church believes are objectively evil. That bizarre claim may well be another constitutional bridge too far. But the very fact that the administration issued these regulations, and that the White House press secretary blithely dismissed any First Amendment concerns when asked whether there were religious freedom issues involved here, tell us something very important, and very disturbing, about the cast of mind in the Executive Branch.

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