Darwin letter should settle all doubts about his lack of religious faith

Charles Darwin came from a family of skeptics and freethinkers and although at one point he studied for the clergy, it was clear that he was never that religious and his research into the origins of species frayed even that weak link and he moved away from the biblical theories of special creation that were dominant at the time and became an unbeliever as a young adult.
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The glowworm caves of Waitomo

Many years ago, I visited the glowworm caves in Waitomo, New Zealand, a wondrous place where these tiny creatures festoon the roofs of the caves and give out tiny points of light that make them look like the night sky. It is remarkably beautiful. A young Canadian couple moved to New Zealand and have gone to extraordinary lengths to take time-lapse photographs of it.
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Religious implications of finding life on other planets

There have been an increasing number of discoveries of planets orbiting other stars that are in the habitable or ‘Goldilocks’ zone, not too close or too far from the star and thus having the kinds of temperature and size that might be able to support life. The possibility of intelligent life existing on other planets is tantalizing no doubt and opinion is split as to whether it exists or not. I for one think that it does. From our own existence, we know that the probability of intelligent life emerging is non-zero. Given the huge number of stars and planets out there in the universe, it seems possible, if not likely, that it could have emerged elsewhere too. But at the same time this same vastness of space makes it highly unlikely that we will ever find out about other life so it will likely remain a theoretical speculation.
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Unnecessary vitamins

America is prone to all manner of food fads. New diets come and go with eye-popping rapidity and this or that food becomes the new magic food that everyone latches on to, before it is replaced by something else. Kale is now the latest miracle food to be dethroned. The problem is that people go overboard with the big new fad and overdo it, rather than taking everything in moderation
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Africa becomes polio free?

Maryn McKenna shares the excellent news that midnight August 11 marked one full year with no cases of polio reported in the whole of Africa. It takes three consecutive years of absence for a region to be designated as polio-free but this step is significant nonetheless, given the opposition by Muslim imams in a few countries that nullified the World Health Organization’s goals of making the entire globe polio-free by the year 2000,
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