The Smithsonian  wants some help in making their citizen science efforts a little more relevant to the public. 

So if you are not a zoologist and can take their eMammal Survey it will help them get some 'baseline' values of what people know about critters.

James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, wrote in a paper "We now have no general of influence, much less power ... leading our country's War on Cancer."

On the $100 million U.S. project to determine the DNA changes that drive nine forms of cancer: It is "not likely to produce the truly breakthrough drugs that we now so desperately need," he said. And on the idea that antioxidants such as those in colorful berries fight cancer: "The time has come to seriously ask whether antioxidant use much more likely causes than prevents cancer."

What does he mean? 

It’s official:  There's treasure in them South Staffordshire fields.

Some of the 90 pieces of gold and silver found in central England last year - after an unemployed man searching a farmer’s field with a metal detector discovered loot in 2009 - have formally been declared to be treasure.

That means it is at least 300 years old and at least 10% precious metal.  It also means you can't have any of it if you find it, is is property of The State. Anyone who finds an object believed to be treasure must report it.

Sorry, treasure hunters.

Do you like cooking but wish the stirring of food didn't force you to pause the DVR and leave the comfort of your living room chair every five minutes?

Japanese dentist Hideki Watanabe did also, so he created the Kuru-Kuru Nabe, which literally means round-round pot but in Japan real means a pot that stirs itself. Watanabe created the prototype using dental plaster from his practice to line the inside surface of a metal pot in a spiral design he created using good, old-fashioned trial and error.

On New Year's Day of 1888 in eastern Kentucky, the Hatfield clan set Randolph McCoy's cabin ablaze and gunned down two members of the rival family.

That property, which deeds have traced back to Randolph McCoy, is now owned by Bob Scott, a Hatfield descendant who suspected for years the land was the site of the attack and now excavators have found bullets believed to have been fired by the McCoys in self-defense, along with fragments of windows and ceramic from a cabin.

Americans, Italians and Brits can rejoice - health science has finally caught up to their waistlines. 

An analysis of 100 studies including three million people found that those whose B.M.I. ranked them as overweight had less risk of dying than people of normal weight. And while obese people had a greater mortality risk over all, those at the lowest obesity level (B.M.I. of 30 to 34.9) were not more likely to die than normal-weight people. 

 People not selling diet books or otherwise engaged in feel-good fallacies and scare journalism (like us) have said all along that weight and BMI are fake metrics - there are a lot of knobs to turn in good health and being a certain weight is vital if you have other risk factors.

The Indiana Jones movies are good when they have some basis in real stuff - like Nazis and the Ark of the Covenant in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and Templars and...well, Nazis again...in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".

When Steven Spielberg ventured into fake temples and 1950s alien hokum, we got movies better left to AFI members to have to endure.  So for Indiana Jones 5, he should throw out whatever bad idea he is working on and read about Qin Shi Huang's tomb. The first emperor of China created a  courtyard-style palace tomb inside a 22-square-mile mortuary compound guarded by more than 6,000 full-size statues of warriors, musicians and acrobats.

It's not biology versus physics but in many ways it is science versus culture: Peter Higgs, he of the Higgs Boson, colloquially called 'the God particle', doesn't think much of Richard Dawkins, the biologist not famous for biology but rather for hating religion.

Why does Dawkins, and by extension a number of biologists, hate religion so much and why don't more physicists give a crap?  Don't physicists see that religion is solely responsible for all of the evils of the world, as Dawkins and his acolytes do? 

If we were to tell Jimmy Wales that the Science 2.0 entry is an unmitigated pile of garbage written by someone who either knows nothing about Science 2.0 that he didn't Google in 5 seconds (I say 'he' because the place is legendarily hostile to women so it unlikely to be a 'she') he would simply respond that we should fix it.  

Well, his own site does not work that way. The person who knows nothing about Science 2.0 other than to declare it a subset of the meaninginless 'open science' generic term and deny its actual history simply reverts any edits and then gets together and tries to ban people who do fix it.