Monday Science Links

This holiday week's sciency goodness:

• Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy describes leap seconds:I hope you liked 2008. Because you’re going to get an extra 0.0000031689% of it today. That is, on top of the leap day we had on February 29, there’s a leap second getting added tonight. 2008 is the year that keeps on giving. We have leap days because the length of the Earth’s day isn’t an even fraction of the year, and we add a day in every fours years to help even it out (though in reality it’s a LOT more complicated than that). But why do we add a single second?


• Carolyn Porco at Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) gives us Cassini's 2008 in review: In its four years of flying sentry at Saturn, Cassini has borne witness to the changes of season and the transformations they have brought to the face of the planet, the appearance of its rings, and the onset of eclipses of its many moons ... all documented in the set of heavenly sights being released today to celebrate the close of 2008.


• Darren at Tetrapod Zoology covers the curious case of the purple squirrel: Late last year (on December 22nd) the British newspapers told the story of Pete, a purple-coated Grey squirrel Sciurus carolinensis photographed in the grounds of Meoncross School, Stubbington (Hampshire, UK). Why a Grey squirrel should have a purple coat is, of course, the big mystery.


• Over at the Loom, guest poster Ken Miller takes on a defense of ID at Dover. You won't be surprised to hear he thinks ID did indeed get fair representation: One of the enduring fantasies of the intelligent design (ID) movement is the notion that it might have won the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial if it hadn’t been consistently “misrepresented” in testimony by witnesses from the scientific establishment. Even worse, they point out, when their own heroes like Scott Minnich and Michael Behe attempted to correct those Darwinist distortions, Judge Jones, that liberal, ACLU-friendly activist, paid no attention. More than three years after Kitzmiller v. Dover, Discovery Institute spokesman Casey Luskin is still trying to win the case. During the trial itself, from which Discovery stalwarts William Dembski and Steven Meyer conspicuously withdrew, Luskin stood just outside the courtroom, spinning the day’s testimony for any reporter willing to listen. Casey’s still spinning, and now he’s doing his manful best to resurrect one of Behe’s favorite arguments for “irreducible complexity” (IC), the vertebrate blood clotting cascade. The culprit in its demise at the Dover trial, of course, was me. But according to Casey, my testimony was nothing more than “Smoke-and-Mirrors.".


• Phil at Bad Astronomy posts about perihelion: If you’ve been staring at the Sun lately, then you may have noticed it looks a wee bit bigger today than it did a few days ago. That’s not because the UV light from the Sun is frying your retina; it’s actually true. Today is perihelion, the time when the Earth is closest to the Sun in its orbit.

Enjoy! And a Happy New Year of Science to all!