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Terminated: Voters Say No to Arnold's Initiatives

Poor Arnold. Should have stuck to being a barbarian.

"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Arnold Schwarzenegger picked the fight and emerged badly bloodied.

The special election he called cost 20 percent of the California governor's popularity and $300 million in campaign spending, including $7 million of his personal fortune.

At the end of Tuesday's exercise in direct democracy, the Republican emerged battered a year before he would be up for reelection in the generally Democratic state, with all eight initiatives on his ballot soundly defeated.

"This is the most significant 'no' vote in modern political California history, and it ought to cause serious reflection by the governor," Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said.

"The election results should send a strong message that the voters are tired of having issues that should be solved by their elected representatives placed before them on the ballot," she said.

The Austrian-born actor-turned-politician called the special election to show the Democrat-dominated state legislature that he could turn to the people and win if Sacramento did not bend to his will. He lost that bet.

Schwarzenegger's battle revolved around the budget, union dues, teacher tenure and legislative districting. Even some supporters wondered aloud whether those issues represented the most pressing problems facing the most populous U.S. state.

"This was about a bunch of garbage that nobody cared about," said Tony Quinn, co-editor of the California Target Book, which tracks state campaigns. "His problem was that he put all his prestige on the line for these measures that were arcane and in many cases poorly drafted."

- Adam Tanner, Reuters.

Penguins Explained: Flightless Brids Product of Microevolution

"The breakup of giant icebergs may have forced minor evolutionary changes in penguins over the past 6,000 years, a new study suggests.

The Antarctic iceberg chunks, which break off the continent now and then, are thought to have blocked the swim paths of Adelie penguins returning home to their colonies. Some of the penguins were forced to become immigrants in other colonies, where they established new homes and interbred with the locals.

As a result, genetic changes that might otherwise have remained isolated became widespread among the different colonies. The result is what scientist call microevolution.

Microevolution involves small-scale genetic changes in a species over time. The classic example is a color change undergone by British pepper moths in response to changing levels of air pollution. The acquisition of antibiotic resistance by bacteria and the trend towards tusk-less elephants in Africa are also examples of microevolution at work.

Because it is so well documented, even people who don't believe that evolution can lead to the creation of new species accept that microevolution occurs.

Most microevolution studies involve change over very short time periods, on the order of decades or a few hundred years. The detection of microevolutionary changes over longer time periods has been difficult because it requires that ancient DNA deposits be found together with samples from modern populations of the same species.

Adelie penguins may be the ideal candidates for such research. The penguins often live, breed and die in the same colonies where they were born and where their ancestors before them lived. And the remains of ancestor birds are well preserved in distinct layers of the frigid terrain, making fossil dating relatively easy."

- From Ker Than, LiveScience.com

They Call It Science: We Better Go Warn the Whales...

"Japan's whaling fleet has set sail for Antarctic waters where it will make its biggest catch in 20 years. The boats will aim to catch nearly 1,000 whales over the coming months. A global moratorium on commercial whaling has been in place since the 1980s, but Japan describes its programme as "scientific."

The hunting is condemned by most conservation groups on the grounds that it is inhumane, unnecessary and may harm fragile wildlife populations. The fleet sailed on Tuesday from Shimonoseki port for the first year of a "research" programme called JARPA-2. It envisages catching up to 935 minke whales and 10 fin whales during the southern hemisphere summer to "...monitor the Antarctic ecosystem, model competition among whale species... elucidate temporal and spatial changes in stock structure and improve the management procedure for the Antarctic minke whale stocks."

JARPA-2 replaces the JARPA-1 programme which took 440 Antarctic minkes each season. In two years' time JARPA-2 will expand to include humpbacks, the favoured species for whale watchers. Critics say this is commercial whaling in disguise, with meat obtained from the hunts sold for food in restaurants and schools. Scientific objectives can be met through non-lethal methods, they say.

"Japan's announcement that it intends to kill more than twice as many minke whales and hunt two new species over the coming years provoked international outrage earlier this year," commented Philippa Brakes, a scientist with the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.

"The Japanese whalers know that the eyes of the world are upon them with an intensity that they have not experienced since the moratorium," she told the BBC News website."

- Richard Black, BBC News.

Science Says Peyote Safe! Let's Eat Cactus!

I don't known anyone who has tried this. It may be safe, but I am still afraid. It is after all a spirit cactus.

"In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that peyote -- for now, the only legal hallucinogenic drug in the United States -- doesn't rob regular users of brain power over time. While the findings don't directly indicate anything about the safety of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mushrooms, they do suggest that at least one hallucinogen is OK to use for months or even years.

"We really weren't able to find any (mental) deficits," said Dr. John Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and co-author of the study, released today in the Nov. 4 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry. Hallucinogenic drugs have long fascinated researchers, who are now studying whether they hold the potential to treat mental illnesses like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But little is known about the long-term effects of hallucinogenic use. Part of the problem is that many users -- such as LSD aficionados -- take a variety of other drugs, so it's hard to tease out the specific effects of psychedelic drugs.

Enter peyote, currently the only hallucinogenic drug legally allowed for use outside research labs (although that may change). Compared with LSD and mushrooms, peyote is a bit obscure, with its use -- at least legally -- limited to the sacramental rites of the Native American Church, which has as many as 300,000 members. Many peyote users don't take other drugs, making them ideal subjects for hallucinogenic research.

Peyote comes from the crowns of a cactus that grows in northern Mexico and parts of Texas. Harvesters cut off the crown, dry it and sell it in "buttons," Halpern said. Generally, users eat the buttons whole or grind them up into a powder that can be mixed into food or brewed into a tea.

When enough peyote is eaten, users enter a hallucinogenic state thanks to its active ingredient, the chemical mescaline. Halpern and colleagues recruited three groups of Navajos -- 61 members of the Native American Church who regularly ate peyote, 36 alcoholics who have been dry for at least two months and 79 people who reported little or no use of alcohol or drugs. The researchers then gave mental-health and cognitive tests to the subjects."

- Randy Dotinga, Wired.

Scotter Libby's Erotic Novel: Kinky and Depraved

Is it just me or do all these family values people eventually end up being exposed as perverts?

"NEW YORK (Reuters) - A steamy novel by Lewis "Scooter" Libby has become a hot item now that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff is under indictment.

An inscribed copy of "The Apprentice: A Novel," which Libby wrote in 1996 when he was a relative unknown outside Washington, was on sale on online bookseller Amazon.com on Monday for $2,400. Unsigned hardcover copies were going for $700.

Now out of print, the novel tells the story of an innkeeper apprentice in a bizarre coming-of-age story set in Japan in 1903. It is littered with edgy sexual material and strong language.

"Wow, who would have thought that clean living, family values man Scooter Libby was capable of writing such filth," said one reviewer on Amazon. Another Amazon reviewer noted its "lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, pedophilia and corpse robbery."

Libby was charged last month with perjury in a special prosecutor's probe into how a CIA operative's identity was leaked to journalists. Libby's writing skills also happened to be displayed in a widely published letter to reporter Judith Miller of The New York Times that showed a flair for literary allusion and ambiguity.

"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them," he wrote to Miller as she sat in jail earlier this year for refusing to reveal Libby's identity as a source."

-From Reuters, Yahoo! News.