Let’s not mince words: This looks an awful lot like the beginning of a second Great Depression. Will we “act swiftly and boldly” enough to stop that from happening?

Social browsing is a loosely defined phrase that means many things to different people. Because of the confusion about what social browsing is, people have strongly differing opinions about its relevance. Some think that social browsing is nothing new, others believe it will be the next big thing, while still others believe that social browsing is a market doomed to fail.

To make predictions about the success of the social browsing market, you must first be able to accurately define it. To be considered social browsing, a product must contain at minimum the following prerequisites:

1) Portable
The product must ...

My guess is this has nothing to do with the phishing attacks that started on Twitter a couple of days ago. But a few minutes ago the official Fox News Twitter account posted "Breaking: Bill O Riley is gay" (referring to the host of the popular Fox show O'Reilly Factor), right after a legitimate message about making turkey lettuce wraps. My guess is they're just finding out about it now, and realizing their password, which was probably "password," has been changed. Twitter will promptly restore the account to its rightful owners, I'm sure. But here's my ...

One of the quirks of the unresolved senate race in Minnesota and Illinois is that it really does the Democrats no good to have just one of Al Franken and Roland Burris seated -- they only gain ground if and when both get sworn in.

This is why. Presently the Democrats have a 57-member caucus, counting neither Burris nor Franken. However, because there are currently only 98 senators, this reduces the number of votes required to break a filibuster from 60 to 59. (Vacancies are not counted when calculating the number of votes needed to break a filibuster; three-fifths of 98 ...

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, tapped in December by President-elect Barack Obama to serve as secretary of Commerce, has withdrawn his name for the position, citing a pending investigation into a company that has done business with his state.

Minnesota took until 5 PM today to begin actually counting rejected absentee ballots, as the Canvassing Board sorted through various legal objections, underwent the arduous task of physically opening more than 900 ballots, and then gave the campaigns a chance to review the back of the ballots for identifying marks. Once they finally got underway, however, with election officials calling out the names of the candidates one ballot at a time, Franken went on a long winning streak and essentially never looked back.

All told, Franken gained a net of 176 ballots from the 952 under review according to The ...

The Supreme Court has yet to rule on Coleman's request to consider more wrongly rejected ballots.

Political pictures for your blog - GRANDMOTHERS: So soft spoken

UPDATE (10:30 AM): Apparently, when officials in Hennepin County asked the Coleman campaign why they wanted "new" absentee ballots included in the recount, they were not able to detail why the county had rejected those ballots in error. A lot of the actions the Coleman campaign is taking right now are engineered with an eye toward raising doubt about the process to create more public sympathy in the (inevitable) event of an election contest. It may be that the extra absentee ballots they identified are something of a distraction ploy.

UPDATE (9:48 AM): The state will now begin ...

This week, Nature magazine published a short list of recent important developments in evolutionary biology that support the theory of evolution, as a tool to help explain that evolution is definitely a dynamic and useful theory in our field and to demonstrate that the evidence is still growing. Here's a short summary of the 15 stories the editors picked out, but you should also read the freely available article, 15 Evolutionary Gems. Teachers, put this in your classroom!

1. The discovery of Indohyus, an ancestor to whales.

2. The discovery of Tiktaalik, an ancestor to tetrapods.

3. The origin of feathers revealed ...