Discovery in science means something different than discovery in common terms. Local people may have seen a snake for 500 years but if it turns out to be a new species, that is a discovery.

There also many Civil War-era battle and camp sites that local people know about but that archaeologists have not cataloged yet - they are not in history books and so the sites have not been officially analyzed. In Civil War CSI: Did Stonewall Jackson Die From Pneumonia? I posted a picture of a bullet I found wandering around one of those overgrown sites in South Carolina that haven't been analyzed yet:

There were a whole bunch of protests against Monsanto last weekend - going after a company in name while really going after the science is smart politics, because it allows science media to rationalize that hard-core anti-science progressives are not anti-science at all, they just dislike corporations.

And Monsanto is not easy to like.  But politics, as with likability, is subjective.  And when politics and science mix - as they often do in the modern period where government wants to control basic research - things can get messy for political reporters who are used to equivalent sides that are engaged in spin.

If you are tired of Democrats getting all of the media attention for spouting anti-science nonsense about food, energy and medicine, there is good news; someone on the right-wing can make weird anecdotal proclamations about health as well.

Talk show host Bill O'Reilly recently announced that giving up wheat made his cholesterol drop and "and I feel stronger, more manly."

Well, that's nice. When I was 19 years old I fasted for 4 days every two weeks, nothing but water. It also gave me a lot of energy. Despite the existence of 'hunger pangs' your stomach is a muscle that adapts rather quickly. After 24 hours without food you no longer get them, even though you are more 'hungry' than ever, and the energy increase is tremendous.

Last weekend,  May 18th, 2013 an aurora appeared over Marquette, Michigan in the northern USA, after coronal mass ejections from the sun made contact with Earth’s magnetic fields, funneling energy and particles into near-Earth space.

The outer solar atmosphere, the corona, is structured by strong magnetic fields and where those fields are closed, often above sunspot groups, the confined solar atmosphere can suddenly and violently release bubbles of gas and magnetic fields. We call those coronal mass ejections and they erupt from the sun with billions of tons of solar material that can impact satellites. 

If spending is the metric, Canadian research is in trouble.

Of course, if spending is the metric, American Democrats hate science a lot more than American Republicans do, but you'd have a hard time getting science media to acknowledge that. Still, spending is at least one metric.

While the new DSM-5 has attracted plenty of criticism - and the National Institute of Mental Health has given up on it, saying "patients with mental disorders deserve better" - not everyone is critical.

The people who brought a certain cultural demographic (*cough*) sand-free peanut butter have now come out with a new product that is going to appeal to the anti-science crackpots that shop in places like Whole Foods and/or have a giant majority in California - non-GMO rock salt.

Space Oddity by Chris Hadfield - David Bowie Approves

Nearly 5,000,000 views so far.

Chris Hadfield left orbit in style yesterday after five months aboard the International Space Station. Hours before his planned return to Earth aboard a Soyuz capsule, he cast himself as Bowie’s Major Tom in a remake of the singer’s 1969 classic, “Space Oddity”.
The Independent

vidi audienti dilexi
I looked, I listened, I loved it !

see also - http://youtu.be/rLRunqi1mDM

While psychology as science is a little overcome by surveys and correlating behavior to images to take seriously, there is one area where it shines - applied marketing.

We know psychology as marketing engineering is successful - it is a giant industry, we even have advertising here on Science 2.0. And it's being used in restaurants right now to get you to spend more money.