Cute fun: Valentine Doll Dress-up offers lots of pink, red and purple outfits to drag, mix and match. Or, you could dress up a penguin.

Just in time for Valentine's chocolate: Low-Fat Diet Does Not Cut Health Risks, Study Finds: NYT.

The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet reduces the risk of getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet has no effect.

The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks and strokes as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today.

"These studies are revolutionary," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University in New York City, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. "They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."...

The study made no distinction between butter and olive oil, and most women weren't able to get as little fat as the study recommended, and newer thinking, such as carbs and insulin reponse, wasn't represented. It means disease happens anyway and everybody dies of something. Okay.

Smoky honeyeater.

Photo Gallery: Five photos go with "Lost World" of New Species Found in Indonesia at National Geographic.

Busted by a blog: A Young Bush Appointee Resigns His Post at NASA: NYT.

George C. Deutsch, the young presidential appointee at NASA who told public affairs workers to limit reporters' access to a top climate scientist and told a Web designer to add the word "theory" at every mention of the Big Bang, resigned yesterday, agency officials said.

Mr. Deutsch's resignation came on the same day that officials at Texas A&M University confirmed that he did not graduate from there, as his résumé on file at the agency asserted....

Mr. Deutsch, 24, was offered a job as a writer and editor in NASA's public affairs office in Washington last year after working on President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee, according to his résumé....

Mr. Deutsch's educational record was first challenged on Monday by Nick Anthis, who graduated from Texas A&M last year with a biochemistry degree and has been writing a Web log on science policy, scientificactivist.blogspot.com.

After Mr. Anthis read about the problems at NASA, he said in an interview: "It seemed like political figures had really overstepped the line. I was just going to write some commentary on this when somebody tipped me off that George Deutsch might not have graduated."

A guy who lied about his own education wants scientists to lie about the dangers of global warming. Figures -- he got far by 24, after all.

Anthis, the blogger, to his credit points to the last graf of the Times story, a quote from Dr. James Hansen, the climate scientist Deutsch tried to muzzle (pictured at right), as the point of it all:

"On climate, the public has been misinformed and not informed," he said. "The foundation of a democracy is an informed public, which obviously means an honestly informed public. That's the big issue here."

Related: Here's a WaPo profile of Hansen from last year. And, from Sunday's Boston Globe, Too hot to handle: Recent efforts to censor Jim Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist, are only the latest. As his message grows more urgent, we ignore him at our peril.

More hubris? Europe's Biotech-Seed Rules Ruled Illegal by WTO, U.S. Says. Bloomberg.

...European governments such as Germany and France, as well as activists such as Greenpeace International, have sought to curb the use of seeds genetically altered to resist pests, disease and drought, claiming that the modified crops threaten human health and the environment. The U.S. insists that biotech seeds are safe and shouldn't be distinguished from conventional seeds.

The WTO ruling sets a precedent for other nations ranging from India to Japan to Russia that have regulations stipulating the labeling and tracing of goods containing biotech ingredients.

'One of the main reasons to bring the case was to prevent the loss of other important markets'' for U.S. agriculture exports, said Michelle Gorman, director of regulatory relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation in Washington. ...

Upsetting the balance of nature pales next to the needs of "markets."

Mass resignation: NY Press kills cartoons; staff walks out, reports the N.Y. Observer.

The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.

Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:

New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the
minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions...

DIY discrimination: Craigslist sued over housing ad bias: Medill News Service.

Massive online bulletin board Craigslist.org has been accused in a federal lawsuit of publishing discriminatory housing advertisements.

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc. filed suit in Chicago on Monday saying Craigslist published more than 200 housing advertisements on its Chicago Web site since last July that excluded prospective buyers and tenants on the basis of race, gender, family status, marital status, national origin and religion.

According to the suit, one rental ad stated, "African-Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out." Another read "no minorities" in all capital letters, the suit said.

I've wondered about that -- I've seen jobs ads there specifying gender, for instance, for no obvious reason.

Design your own plaid: Interactive Tartan Weaver You may just wish to play and produce your own Tartan images. Perhaps for inclusion on your own web site.

Delicious spook debunked: Alas, you can't boil an egg with two cell phones. Fun while it lasted.