Unless it's a child of Jenny McCarthy or the anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-science demographic that listens to her, kids of today who are reading classic fiction may not understand the world characters of the past lived in. Cholera? Scarlet Fever? Jungle Fever? 

A lot of great books written today simply lack a plot, unless the emotional anchors for The Velveteen Rabbit and Little Women could be transformed into worries about global warming and how much water should be in a toilet flush.

At Discover, Elizabeth Preston outlines a whole bunch of great books that kids read and that revolved around medical facts of the day. Want to know what Tiny Tim had and how he was likely cured? You have to go read the article.

Cosmologically speaking, 'near' does not mean what it means colloquially. After last week's "Cosmos" show, astronomers were chuckling at the representation that space was some sort of asteroid-laced minefield. In reality, you are less likely to get hit by an asteroid in space than you are on Earth - because space is that big.

So when astronomers stated scientifically that Asteroid 2003 QQ47 would pass 'near' us, they were speaking the language of science but the language of doomsday prognosticators is another thing entirely.

12 million miles is 'near' to astronomers but to you and me that is 50 times farther away than the Moon...and therefore nothing to fear. 

Stonyfield Farm wants to be environmentally conscious -and they want to sell expensive organic yogurt but not saddle customers with a lot of liberal guilt about a container.

They may have done it with Stonyfield Frozen Yogurt Pearls, which is being tested in a few Whole Foods stores. The organic vanilla or chocolate frozen yogurt is encased in an edible skin flavored like peach or banana or coconut or strawberry.

Co-founder Gary Hirshberg says the edible, protective skin is bound via molecular interactions between its two key ingredients, organic fruit and natural ions, whatever that means. Grapes figured this out without a lot of gibberish and there has never been anything 'organic' about them, they have been genetically modified for millenia.

There are a lot of conferences out there. If you are in science, or even science media, you have gotten emails soliciting papers. The benefit for them is you pay a big registration fee, the presumed benefit for the contributor is you get to say you did a paper at a conference.

Likely inspired by the Sokal affair, where a hippie physicist got tired of hippie, anti-science nonsense in philosophy and created a paper stuffed full of postmodernist gibberish that was immediately accepted by because it was by a physicist and lauded the weakness of physics compared to philosophy, a group at MIT knew they could get all kinds of papers accepted at science conferences the same way.

At a young age, I gave up on trying to master the latest high-fives, hand signs and generally trying to be cool. 

I couldn't do the math.

But math geeks can, and Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings is apparently the coolest. He can show you how all of the various high fives relate to math.

Just one sample, since I put germaphobes in the title:



The Asymptote. This representation of one of the coolest behaviors a function can have is also good for germaphobes afraid of physical contact.

And he has 13 more!

How would you do homework at night if you don't have electricity? 

As much as one fifth of the world may not have regular access to electricity but 16-year-old Ann Makosinski of Victoria, Canada may have helped solve part of the problem; she created a flashlight that is powered solely from hand heat.

When I was a young guy, there were predictions of doom based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. 

Weirdly, it is still discussed in media reports every single day, even though it doesn't tell us anything at all about peoples' lives.

Do most Americans feel like the economy is doing well, even though the DJIA has gone up a lot? The president certainly claims the economy is better now than when he came into office, even though outside government, unemployment is still really high, and if we factor in the full-time jobs that are now part-time and people no longer on unemployment because they have been on it too long, things look really bad.

Teach For America is a national group that recruits recent college graduates to teach in poorer public schools. Presumably the students would be better served than they would be by regular substitute teachers in those areas.

But it is never going to be an easy process. Evangelism is just that, for a college student it would mean being a true believer, the same way an intern for a politician or Sierra Club would be. 

Recently, it was claimed that all of the big questions in science had been answered and it was now just about filling in the details.

It isn't the first time the concept has taken hold; Lord Kelvin said the same thing about physics and then a few years later a young man named Einstein turned the world upside down: General relativity was special, special relativity was general and we found out that gravity doesn't work the way it should for the very large and the very small, and those concepts are the engine of physics today.

But what about science overall?