Planet

Maybe you've seen the signs of the apocalypse. One was spotted in New York. Literally. The kind with lettering. Next to a sidewalk squatter, not far from the Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. This wasn't a vague the-end-is-nigh warning. This guy knew when: May 21, 2011. Billboards scattered around the country, from Vineland, N.J., to Nashville, also proclaim that's the date of Judgment Day, when Jesus Christ returns. The message comes from California-based radio evangelist Harold Camping, who did the math and calculated the time left to "turn away from your sins and humbly beg, beseech, and implore God for forgiveness," he writes at his familyradio.com.

"Planet of the Apes" by Faye Flam does not appear this week.

One of the nice things about the Internet and Hollywood is that they make the holidays last so much longer. It's March, and we're still getting gifts ordered through dot-com companies about four months ago. We're also still getting Christmas movies, like "Reindeer Games," set during the holidays but released, rather suspiciously, as the daffodils bud. When a "Christmas" movie is released in March, it can can mean three things: There...

Both parties have selected leaders with little experience to run a nation, let alone deal with foreign affairs. One candidate stands at the top of the ticket, the other is at the bottom. So why the fuss? Let?s face it, the most important issues in the minds of the American people are oil and the war. If the Republicans win, there?s a chance that we?ll dig for oil and salvage what remains of a cancerous economy. If it?s the Democrats, we can expect troop withdrawals that will leave the Iraqi people fending for themselves.

Be kind to the environment. Clean up polluted air and water. Protect Earth's ozone layer. Nurture its ecological systems. Preserve its natural resources. And, acknowledge the beauty and diversity of humanity worldwide by respecting various cultures and traditions. That was the gist of the message Friday for the students at Wyncote's Ancillae-Assumpta Academy, which celebrated Catholic Schools Week by participating in a special program called "Our Planet In Every Classroom.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group Hey, did you hear the one about the woman who aborted her kid so she could save the planet? That's no joke, but Darwin must be chuckling somewhere. Toni Vernelli was one of two women recently featured in a London Daily Mail story about environmentalists who take their carbon footprint very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Vernelli aborted a pregnancy and, by age 27, had herself sterilized.

THE TAGLINE for Tim Burton's upcoming ape movie is "Rule the Planet," but given the flood of products pegged to its release - action figures, baseball caps, binders, board games, comic books, fanny packs, key chains, lunchboxes, scooters, skateboards, stickers, trick-or-treat bags, temporary tattoos - "Rule the Playground" might be more appropriate. Judging from the previews, Fox ended up with a shadowy space-opera whose flash libretto was drawn up in crayon. It's a neat reversal of the pattern established by five previous Ape flicks: There, the production values were comically shoddy but the story lines strikingly mature.

Moorestown, which Money magazine named the top town in the United States last year, again lived up to its reputation for being on the cutting edge by hosting South Jersey's first Pachamama Symposium. The first what? Pachamama Symposium. Pachamama is a word from the Quechua language of South America often translated as "Mother Earth" or, more fully, "the sacred presence of the Earth, the universe and all time. " The symposium brought together about 30 caring citizens at Moorestown High School on March 25 for a daylong program based on the best information available regarding the question: What shape is our Earth in?

Our solar system may have a new, strange and very distant member, two teams of astronomers think. It may be a big 10th planet hidden far beyond Pluto, a hitchhiker that joined the solar system later than the rest of the planets. Or it could be a burned-out mini-star, called a brown dwarf, that is a long-lost twin to our sun. Whatever it is, it's really, really far away: 3 trillion miles, give or take a few billion, the scientists figure. But it's still part of our solar system and big enough - probably three times the size of Jupiter - that it is warping the orbits of some far-traveling comets.

AUDACIOUS, VIOLENT and disquieting, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is a summer sequel that's better than it has any right to be. This movie about how apes rise up against the humans who would trap them, cage them and use them in medical experiments is a stunning job of back-engineering the familiar "Planet of the Apes" story and another leap forward in performance-capture animation. As alarming and sometimes bloody as it is, "Rise" doesn't require a "No apes were harmed in the making of this movie" credit.

As the presidential campaign heats up, we should look closely at a faraway object for a lesson about polls. Billions of miles away from us, Pluto spins happily around the sun, ignoring all polls and surveys. We would be wise to adopt its attitude. In 2006, a poll of pocket-protector-wearing, hungover, disco-bobulated astronomers determined that Pluto wasn't a planet after all. (Officially, we now have only eight planets in the solar system; Pluto was sent to the kiddies' table.)

For half a century, David Attenborough has taken viewers on extraordinary, well-informed, thought-provoking, and moving tours of the rich flora and fauna of virtually every corner of our planet. The 85-year-old British naturalist provides energetic and stimulating narration on the BBC's Frozen Planet , a stunning, six-hour exploration that takes us, quite literally, to the ends of the Earth: the Arctic and Antarctic. Produced by Alastair Fothergill and Vanessa Berlowitz, the team responsible for the equally glorious The Blue Planet and Planet Earth series, Frozen Planet opens with a general introduction to the topography and the history of the two polar regions, with stunning views of giant glaciers and the creatures that live in their shadows, including polar bears, Adélie and emperor penguins, albatross, narwhals, even wolves.

Sometimes evolution gives and sometimes it takes away. Cats have lost their ability to taste sweets, and dolphins lost the sensors needed to pick up bitter or sweet flavors. From studying their DNA, scientists conclude that the common ancestor we share with these fellow mammals could taste all five of the major flavor types - sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the more recently discovered savory flavor known as umami. But after we diverged, many lost some of their tasting ability.

You didn't need to be a solar physicist to be riveted by the "solar storm" that sent a blast of charged particles our way this month. That particular flare-up fizzled, but in the long term, the sun's temper is worthy of our attention. Our sun changes, and living things adapt or die. Our planet circled a very different star when life first emerged on Earth some four billion years ago. The sun was dimmer and cooler, but more violent, sending deadly blasts of X-rays as well as particles that would have lit up the skies with spectacular auroras.

It was the time of P.T. Barnum, when people would line up to see a whitewashed elephant or a carefully faked petrified giant. But in 1868, a display in Philadelphia proved that reality could be far stranger than fiction. That year, the Academy of Natural Sciences showed the world its first glimpse of a real dinosaur skeleton - a 15-foot-tall Godzilla pulled from a pit in Haddonfield. The creature threatened to obliterate the traditional picture of the universe. Along with Darwin's theory and a revolution in geology, dinosaur fossils were opening the human imagination to lost worlds on our own planet, separated by vast epochs of time.

Election seasons can serve as a reminder of just how deeply mysterious the human mind remains. Particularly puzzling is the fact that people are heavily influenced by political advertising on television. Our rational sides tell us that these ads are unlikely to serve as unbiased sources of information. And yet, in states where the bulk of negative ads focused on Mitt Romney's rivals, Romney won. In states where Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich ran the most negative ads, they surged.

Among the more alarming rumors prompted by genetics research was the impending extinction of the Y chromosome. The classic male marker seemed to be shriveling. Would the human race become an all-female species? The Y is, after all, just a tiny nub of a chromosome, having undergone serious shrinkage in the past. Luckily for those who like men, the latest results say the Y has more macho mileage left. And even if it did shrink itself out of existence, scientists say men could persevere without the Y. A few other animals have already lost their Y chromosomes and those males have adapted, fathering offspring as if nothing had happened.

"Planet of the Apes" by Faye Flam does not appear this week.

On Star Trek , the aliens often look so human that crew members fall in love with them. But in real life, scientists in the field known as astrobiology can't be sure alien life would even be carbon-based like us, or use DNA to carry a genetic code. Some insight now is coming from earthly labs, where scientists are building alternative kinds of genetic codes, and showing how they can evolve. Whether life could be built with an alien biochemistry was among the more interesting questions that came up during a public event with famed biologist Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of the book The Physics of Star Trek.

Timing is everything, and if there was ever a scientist whose legacy was tarnished by bad timing, it was Jean Baptiste Lamarck. The French naturalist lived from 1744 to 1829 - and published his own evolutionary theory decades before Darwin's theory went public in 1859. In the popular imagination, those who've heard of Lamarck tend to associate him with a wrongheaded version of evolution in which giraffes can grant their offspring longer necks by reaching for high leaves. Historians say this unfair portrayal was engineered by Lamarck's enemies.