Circus of the Spineless #14 is online, so head on over and get your fill of the latest invertebrate science.

What if there’s no more seafood by 2050?  Guess what?  “There may be no more commercial fish stocks left in the sea by 2050, according to a new study cataloguing the global collapse of marine ecosystems. It blames not just over-fishing, but also mankind’s wider attack on the health of ocean ecosystems, for instance from pollution. ‘Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working eco-systems, then this century is the last century of wild food,’ says Steve Palumbi at Stanford University in California, US, who carried out the four-year investigation with colleagues. The study is the biggest and most all-embracing effort yet to understand the productivity of the oceans and predict their future. Uniquely, it combines historical data on fish catches, some of it going back a thousand years, with analysis of marine ecosystems and experiments to bring marine life back to protected areas.”  I don’t know about you, but I strongly suspect this is the century that will see the downfall of human civilization if we don’t do something RIGHT NOW to address the problems we’re creating in the environment.

Along the same lines comes this bit of news.  “29% of all fish stocks have collapsed. 32% of all amphibians globally are threatened with extinction, and 43% of all amphibian species are in decline. 14% of all bird species are predicted to be extinct by 2100 (as opposed to 1.3% for the 500 years previous), and total number of birds globally estimated to have dropped by 20-25%.”  We’re doing a bang-up job, are we not?

Don’t forget to visit Friday Ark #111 throughout the weekend.

Bravo!  Um, not really.  It’s an example of how ludicrous our government really is.  “Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein. But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.”  That’s right, poppets, our government has been freely handing out the information necessary to build a nuclear weapon.  Does that mean we’ve violated the nuclear proliferation treaties we forced on the rest of the world?

You can’t make this stuff up.  The most powerful evangelical leader in America has resigned and admitted to “indescretions” with a male escort who claims the rabid anti-gay Christian also did drugs and talked about wanting an orgy with six 18-22 year olds.  The Talebangelist has already quit his job and those who were supporting him have already stopped doing so after he admitted some of the accusations were true.  Now we find out analysis of the voicemails the escort claims are from the Pharisee do in fact appear to be from him after all (electronic and professional analysis show there’s a very high probability they are from him, and at least 9 out of 12 words and at least one full phrase are 100% matches).  This man has long been the proclaimer that gays are evil and going to hell, a powerful advocate of anti-gay legislation, and also a strong opponent of anyone who did drugs, and now we find out, like so many other Christians, that he’s nothing more than a charlatan, a false prophet using God to subjugate others while he dreams of orgies with young men, snorts drugs left and right and even places phone orders for his fixes, and has been sleeping with a male prostitute for three years.  Like the Republicans, this level of hypocrisy from the religionists goes beyond offensive and abhorrent.  Oh, and guess what?  This man was president of the national evangelical group and had weekly conference calls with the White House for quite some time.  Birds of a feather…

Japan’s Hinode spacecraft, using its onboard Solar Optic Telescope (SOT), has sent back the first group of photos of the sun.  These are very cool photos because SOT “provides crystal-clear images of features on the sun’s surface.”

A fascinating bit of news from a yacht race: “Meanwhile Mike Golding, the leading Brit in the race, was also in a good mood this morning despite an incident with a giant squid, which has covered his hull and the lower part of his sails in ink. Mike Golding commented: ‘The decks and even the foot of the head sail were covered in what looks like squid ink and there’s an awful lot of it. It looks like it was shot from ahead. Whatever it was, it was pretty big, but I’m not worried – I’m bigger!'”  Well, I’m not sure about that statement, but it’s still a very neat experience.  [via Craig at Deep-Sea News]