Blog Heap of Links for the day 15 November 2008

McKinney police inspected McKinney High School students after school officials detected the smell of marijuana on a school bus. ... police officers responded to the stopped bus and conducted a search of the bus and the students. Alex Green, a McKinney High School student, said everyone on the bus could smell it. "We were just driving down the road and started smelling pot," ... Another student who asked not to be identified said he was sitting in front of the two students who brought the marijuana on the bus. He said they weren't smoking it, just burning it. "The bus driver's assistant smelled it and they were just burning it,"

Eight people have been arrested in the slaying of an Oklahoma woman who was killed Sunday in southeastern Louisiana during a Ku Klux Klan initiation

Nicolaus Copernicus's idea that Earth was just one of many planets orbiting the sun - and so occupied no exceptional position in the cosmos - has endured and become a foundation stone of our understanding of the universe. Could it actually be wrong, though? ... According to Ellis and others, our uncertainty about galaxy distances allows an interesting possibility. The distribution of matter could look the same in all directions, but vary with distance from us. In particular, we might be sitting in the middle of a "void" - a vast spherical bubble in an otherwise homogeneous universe. This bubble is not devoid of matter. In fact, most of the stars and galaxies we can see from Earth would be contained within it. It's just that everywhere beyond it, which is too far away to see, the density of stars and galaxies is much higher.

A Bartlesville man is being held on $25,000 bond after his arrest Friday for the alleged molestation of an 11-year-old girl.

The Los Angeles Fire Department reported at least 500 mobile homes were destroyed at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park.

The Cambodian Buddhist community in Rochester is abuzz over what they believe is a miracle: a wasp nest in the shape of a seated Buddha built in the eaves of their temple.

Seventy-seven million years later, scientific detective work conducted by University of Calgary and Royal Tyrrell Museum researchers used this unique fossil nest and eggs to learn more about how nest building, brooding and eggs evolved. But there is a big unresolved question: Who was the egg-layer?