Jon Gitchoff / RFT Slideshow

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey in St. Louis.

St. Louis residents Marcia and Tim Dorsey would like to get "verified" on Twitter through the website's official badge of authenticity (that little blue check next to a user's name).

Twitter generally reserves those verifications for well-known movie stars, politicians, athletes, etc. -- but these two are arguably quite deserving.

After all, they're the grandparents of Twitter.

That's right: Marcia and Tim, the parents of Twitter cofounder and St. Louis native Jack Dorsey, would like the site to verify their accounts.

And they're tweeting up a storm to promote the cause!

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via cbsnews.com

Jack Dorsey, future mayor of...

We can thank the St. Louis emergency dispatch center for Twitter.

The national spotlight was on St. Louis last night with a 60 Minutes interview, full video on view below, of Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter who grew up here and who apparently got his inspiration for Twitter by listening to the local police scanner when he was young.

"They're always talking about where they're going, what they're doing and where they currently are and that is where the idea for Twitter came," he told CBS' Lara Logan. "Now, we all have these cell phones. We had text messaging, and suddenly we can update where I was, what I'm doing, where I'm going, how I feel. And then it would go out to the entire world."

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Curtis Cooper, a math professor at the University of Central Missouri, has discovered the world's largest prime number.

Wait a minute, you say. Aren't numbers eternal and always sort of...there?

Well, yes, but primes are special. As you may recall from basic math, they're numbers that have no factors besides themselves and one. One is a prime. And two. And three. And seven. And eleven. And thirteen. But as numbers get higher, primes are fewer and farther between.

This prime, for instance, is 17,425,170 digits long. Specifically, it's

It begins 58188726623224644217 and ends 46141988071724285951 with several million numbers in between.

No, we're not exactly sure how you would say that.

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via Facebook

Representative Rick Brattin wants proof of evolution.

Missouri Representative Rick Brattin, a Republican, has introduced a bill that would mandate schools across the state give "equal treatment" to the theory of evolution and so-called "intelligent design," which is similar to creationism.

Why?

"I'm a science enthusiast," he tells Daily RFT. "I'm a huge science buff."

He's not, however, much of a Darwin fan.

See Also:
- Akin: Evolution is "Not Even A Matter of Science"
- Evolution T-Shirts on Trial in Missouri Town

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Even though it comes from NASA, this balloon flight trophy looks suspiciously repurposed.

Update January 22: Super-TIGER has broken the official NASA balloon record. And yes, there's a trophy for that. Which has already reached the team in Antarctica. (Yet it takes a week for UPS to deliver a simple package within the continental United States. What is up with that? But we digress.)

Currently Super-TIGER has been circling Antarctica for 45 days, handily shattering the old record of 42 days, set back in the winter of 2004-2005. And it's not done yet: The Super-TIGER research team, based at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, believes the balloon has another eight to ten days to go before it circles back to McMurdo, whereupon the scientists will bring the sucker down and retrieve the two tons of scientific equipment aboard.

Original post from January 15 after the jump.

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Is it curtains for our planet tomorrow? Or just Friday?

Do you fear that tomorrow is the last day ever?

It's certainly the end of the long-count calendar used by the ancient Mayans (whose descendants don't actually believe that we all die tomorrow).

But does that mean it's curtains for our planet?

No, says NASA. With a giant, exhausted, empirical sigh.

Plenty of people apparently do believe in this end-times notion, which is why NASA has felt compelled to set it straight with a frequently-asked-questions page. And it's hard not to detect in their answers a little bit of exasperation -- almost outrage -- at having to perform this task at all.  It is hilarious.

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The elixer of life!

Red wine has been firmly established as the wonder drug of our time. It prevents blindness, skin cancer, diabetes, heart disease and tooth decay! It fights radiation and food poisoning! It makes you thin and young and lovely and French! Whoops, not French, sorry, we got a little carried away there. But it does cure impotence.

For years scientists have been trying to figure out red wine's secret wonder ingredient. (That's part of being a scientist. You can't ever just appreciate a good thing. You have to figure out what makes it work.) A few years ago, scientists thought they'd found it: a compound called resveratrol.

But now a team of researchers at Wash. U. has put the kibosh on that. And thank goodness, because the National Institute of Health actually had this crazy idea that people could stop drinking wine and just take resveratrol tablets instead.

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The other day a colleague forwarded along a link citing a study in which St. Louis was ranked no. 4 in the nation for our Creative Class* contributions to the nation's greater good.

Or so it first appeared.

In a short paper titled "Is your Region ... Creative, Innovative, Productive, ... or Just Populated?" the University of Toronto's Martin Prosperity Institute reveals what it found when it "decided to analyze...four measures (GDP, population, Creative Class and patents) across the individual U.S. metros in relation to the metro totals. We sorted every metro according to their individual shares and determined where each metro makes its greatest contribution to the overall totals."

The paper displays a li'l chart for each measure. Here's the one for "Creative Class":

Martin Prosperity Institute

*The paper doesn't supply a definition of "Creative Class," but it's fair to presume the authors are on the same page as Richard Florida, who coined the phrase. Florida, you see, is director of the Martin Prosperity Institute.

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Cilia viewed under an electron microscope.

You probably haven't heard of primary ciliary dyskinesia. It's a genetic disorder that affects only one in 20,000 babies, mostly by causing chronic respiratory problems. What makes it even trickier is that, because it's so rare, and because respiratory problems are caused by a wide range of things, it's difficult to pinpoint, let alone cure.

But now a team of researchers at Washington University Medical School believe they've found one of the genetic errors that causes ciliary dyskenesia.

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Ever see Inherit the Wind, Todd? If you haven't, here's a spoiler: The politician who denies evolution gets so flustered trying to defend his position that he dies at the end.

Todd Akin, Missouri's Republican Senate candidate, trained engineer, member of the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Science, Space and Technology and self-appointed expert on female reproductive issues has taken upon himself another role: Challenger of the dubious theory of evolution!

At a Tea Party meeting yesterday in Jefferson City, Akin assured his audience that evolution is more or less bunk.

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