The massive oil spill creeping across the Gulf Coast dominated the twitterverse this weekend. DrCraigMc has been doing an awesome job keeping us up to date on the progress of the oil and the status of clean-up. Deep Sea News posted a time line of the disaster. At the current rate of 210,000 gallons of oil a day, this spill to reach the magnitude of the Exxon-Valdez in 62 days. In comparison, 67,500 gallons of oil enters the ocean from runoff in the United States every day, for a grand total of 24.6 million gallons a year dumped into the ocean.

Sparked by a comment I made on Thursday, several tweeps have been sharing paternity fails from classic grade school biology lesson:

@WhySharksMatter: You joke, but a girl in my high school found out she was adopted after we did a pedigree lab. She was quite unhappy.

@SFriedScientist: my 8th grade bio class did it with blood types. 2 kids found out that their parents couldn’t be their parents.

@ebamignone: Cold Spring Harbor labs used to have visiting students bring hairs from each parent. They had to stop because too often 1 hair didn’t match with the kids. “Ask your parents” didn’t work…

We’ve also revamped the homepage to make it more readable. It should now be much easier to subscribe to out Feedburner RSS Feed, recieve e-mail updates, or visit our Facebook Fan Page.

The dislike threshold on comments has been increased to 10. Only comments with more than 10 net dislikes will fade.

~Southern Fried Scientist