Final frontier

Take one salmonella bacteria, dress it in blue body suit, red briefs, and paste a big S on it's chest, don't forget the cape! Look! Up in the atmosphere! It's a chicken, no it's an egg, no it's SuperBug!

Scientists tested what happens when you take bacteria, salmonella to be exact, up into space, give it something to chew on, then bring it home and test it's virulence on lab mice. The result: the mice infected with space raider salmonella got sicker, faster, and deadlier than mice infected with earthborne bugs. Ay caramba, Mickey Mouse and Minney got sick!

So now what? Whither man goeth, so doth the bugth. If we dream of eventually colonizing Pluto, or whatever took it's place in the line of planets, we're sure to bring along our dregs. And I'm not talking certain politicos, but basic one or two cell organisms that love to break us down to our mortal coils. Just like Captain Cook brought forth the destruction of the dodo bird, when we head up and outward, we're likely to expand the nature and power of our wonderfully symbiotic bugs and viruses.

"Dinosaurs were on the ark"

A couple of nights ago, I caught the Simpsons episode dealing the issue of teaching evolution vs creationism/intelligent design in schools (Season 17, Episode 21: The MONKEY SUIT. A Springfield law ordered that creationism must be taught instead of evolutionary science, and Lisa springs to the defense of science. She is caught illegally promoting The Origin of the Species, and during a trial reminiscent of the John Scopes "Monkey Trial", the battle is waged for the benefit of the souls and minds of the townsfolk.

Today, rummaging through the online news, I learned that creationists are not going to simply stand by and let evolutionary beliefs take over the landscape. They've opened a Creation Museum in Kentucky, with dioramas of Eden, Noah's ark, man's descent into a world full of evil (a young teenager in front of a computer is labeled "looking at pornography"), and conceptualizing the 6000 years of life since God first cobbled the Earth. What it has also done is to incorporate some of the more typical "natural history" elements into the picture: dinosaurs. They have our reptilian brethren trotting around 6000 years ago, and supposedly all fossils are remnants of dinosaurs that perished in the great flood. However, there were a few that survived, hence the belief that they managed to get on that ark.

The dinosaurs must be rolling in their graves.