Elizabeth Graham, Director of Texas Right to Life

Over the past couple months, we've brought you periodic updates on Texas Right to Life's quest to help pass a bill banning all abortions after 20 weeks. They've finally found a sponsor to carry that bill: State Representative Jodie Laubenberg filed the "Preborn Pain Act" this time last week. Texas Right to Life and the bill's other supporters -- including Governor Rick Perry -- make the assertion that fetuses are able to feel pain at 20 weeks.

The thing about that claim is that it's not true (we'll get into the voluminous evidence for that again in a moment). The second thing about that claim is that "fetal pain" legislation --- much like "personhood" legislation that tries to claim that life begins at fertilization -- is part of an ongoing attempt to ban abortion by inches. Which, as Perry keeps saying publicly, is exactly the point: to make abortion "a thing of the past."

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Melba Ketchum has by now established herself as a voice in the scientific wilderness, proclaiming, loudly and often, that Bigfoot is real.

That role was cemented in November when Dr. Ketchum -- she's a Nacodoches veterinarian-turned DNA researcher -- announced that her "Sasquatch genome study" had found conclusive evidence that the holy grail of cryptozoology not only exists but is actually part human.

The evidence, she claimed, came from a sample of purported Sasquatch hair samples her team put through "extensive" DNA sequencing. The results suggested the creature "is a human relative that arose approximately 15,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an unknown primate species."

She immediately called for public officials and law enforcement to acknowledge the "unambiguously modern human maternal ancestry" of the Sasquatch and begin treating it as such. "Government at all levels must recognize them as an indigenous people and immediately protect their human and Constitutional rights against those who would see in their physical and cultural differences a 'license' to hunt, trap, or kill them."

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UTA

A smooth human muscle cell, being rotated by a fiber optic wrench.

Samarendra Mohanty has spent the past decade looking for ways to better hold and rotate microscopic objects. It seems the existing techniques are just too big a pain, requiring objects to be visible under a microscope in order to hold or rotate them. That was fine, but was little help to, say, a surgeon or researcher trying to work with a cancer cell inside the human body.

Using a single strand optical fiber, Mohanty was able to develop tweezers that use light to hold a cell in place. It was a useful step, but one that had its limits, since it could only move a microscopic object along a single axis, so Mohanty began brainstorming how it could be improved.

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Midlothian is not likely to make a list of places you want to move, even one of those made-up Forbes lists. If the hulking smokestacks and the fact that there is a Cement Valley there don't scare you off, then the reports of abnormally high rates of cancer, stillbirths, respiratory problems, and birth defects will. Residents have been complaining about those things for years.

In response, an arm of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry set out to see whether the reported health problems might have some connection to the emissions bellowing from the smokestacks.

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George Hall's 10-year-old, high-powered telescope was trained on Jupiter at 6:35 a.m. on Monday when it caught a brief flash of something lighting up Jupiter's surface. Hall didn't actually see the flash -- possibly a meteor impact -- but another amateur astronomer named Don Peterson did, and when Hall checked his telescope, there it was: the first video confirmation of the event. The clip has been making the rounds ever since, even getting a plug from Brian Williams on NBC.

Like a good neighbor, State Farm wants to insure Johnson County homeowners against fracking-related earthquake damage. Cleburne, aka Lil' San Andreas, has experienced a string of quakes this summer. Which is weird because, before 2008, the area had absolutely zero history of seismic activity.

State Farm reps have reportedly been firing off mailers to residents, urging them to buy earthquake coverage. A local rep passed me onto corporate. Gary Stephenson, the spokesman for the DFW area was coy, but conceded, "Is there major research going on at State Farm? I can say we're aware of this, we're watching this issue. It's more in the news, and we are watching this with interest."

None of the quakes has been huge -- most beneath 3 on the Richter scale, according to U.S. Geological Survey data compiled by StateImpact -- but their persistence in a historically seismically silent area is curious. Research into the activity shows a strong link between tremors and waste-water injection wells. During the fracking process, many millions of gallons of water, sand, and chemicals are injected a mile or more underground. As the gas is produced, much of it surges to the surface, often accompanied by subsurface brine. The "water" is almost impossible to treat. So the best idea the industry has at the moment is to inject into deep water-bearing formations like the Ellenburger.

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Photo by Brandon Thibodeaux

Our record-busting summer 2011 continues to be an object of fascination to climate scientists all over the world. Alongside floods in Thailand, drought in Eastern Africa and the European heat wave, the driest, hottest year in recorded Texas history has provided a case study for gauging the influence of climate change on weather extremes.

Researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Oxford and Exeter scrutinized last summer and -- with data from 2008 (the most complete set we have) and comparable La Niña years in the 1960s -- ran them through a set of computer models. When they threw the results on a scatter plot, the spread was dramatic: Texas was 20 times more likely to see heat extremes in 2008 than in years with similar oceanic conditions in the '60s. They found much the same for drought.

"This suggests that conditions leading to droughts such as the one that occurred in Texas in 2011 are, at least in the case of temperature, distinctly more probable than they were 40-50 years ago," says the study in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

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CERN

In the early morning hours Wednesday, physicists in Switzerland may announce that they've discovered the elusive "God Particle," aka the Higgs boson.

For more than half a century, the Higgs has been the theoretical mechanism that imbued matter with mass after the Big Bang, so that the swirling chaos of the universe could coalesce into planets and, eventually, life. Since 1994, Southern Methodist University physics professor Ryszard Stroynowski has been involved in the construction of a device that could detect the presence of the Higgs in the Large Hadron Collider. Back in December, the Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced they'd narrowed their search down to a small range of masses. Reached Tuesday, he was tight-lipped about Wednesday's announcement.

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The dunes sagebrush lizard is out to rob your children of a decent public education, Texas officials say.

Texas is no stranger to beefs with the federal government. Look no further than its perennial pissing match with the EPA. Last week, Texas officials declared victory in another front of their skirmish with the feds, this one involving an obscure reptile, the dunes sagebrush lizard, found only in four western Texas counties and southeastern New Mexico.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been considering classifying the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species for years. According to its Wikipedia page, the lizard has been losing habitat as the networks of shinnery oak it prefers have been cleared to make way for cattle, but that's not what the current debate's about. No, the current debate centers on the lizard's chutzpah to inhabit an area coveted by the oil and gas industry. So when USFWS began considering protecting the lizard under the Endangered Species Act, Texas officials did what Texas officials do: They bitched about federal overreach.

"A small, sandy-colored lizard you've probably never seen before could cost the schoolchildren of Texas hundreds of millions of dollars if the Federal government pushes forward with its plan to list it as endangered," reads the website of Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. Senator John Cornyn said the feds' proposal was "ill-conceived," based on "incomplete science," and would have had "dire consequences ... for Texans and our nation's energy production."

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Wait. You knew that man and dinosaur walked the earth hand-in-talon, right? Happened about 6,000 years ago? "And on the fifth day God created dinosaurs and on the sixth He made man to rideth upon them."? Well how exactly do you explain these fossil things that keep turning up? I recommend you watch this series of educational films. And get your ass to the Creation Museum.

Sure, the five-year-old Mecca cathedral of evangelical revisionism Truth is in Kentucky, but once your impressionable young one catches sight of the billboard above, or whichever of the 20 variations will go up along Interstate 30 at Ferguson Road, you'll have no choice, because kids go batshit for dinosaurs.

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