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Hate the captcha that Science 2.0 uses when you want to leave a comment?  So do we.

But spammers make money spamming and there is no money at all in preventing it, so many media companies are a lot more annoying than us.  They make you create a proprietary account just to leave a comment, some allow third party general tools, like Disqus or Facebook. We don't want anonymous people here so we are stuck with captcha.

Maybe not for long. The minteye startup has created a “no-type solution” which utilizes a slider that tasks users to straighten out a contorted image.

Geneticist A.J. Bateman did an experiment in 1948 which showed that, in mating fruitflies, the male insects' strategy was to mate with many females, whereas the females' strategy was to be discriminating in their choice of partners. Male reproductive success, in other words, correlated positively with number of mates, but female reproductive success did not.
I'm pretty confident the world is not going to end because a bunch of people who couldn't even keep Spaniards - SPANIARDS - from taking over their country were too lazy to make a new calendar.

NASA is confident also. So confident they created a video to explain why the world did not end December 21st, 2012 in order to appease a wacko Mayan conspiracy theory - and they even released it 10 days early.

Man, are they going to have egg on their faces if we actually are acting out scenes from Fallout 3 a week from now.


A NASA photo error showed just how many sheep in science media are blindly regurgitating anything about space they read.  

NASA got a snapshot from Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko on the International Space Station, 230 miles above Earth, wrong, saying a summit in India was Mount Everest rather than what it really was, Saser Muztagh in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India. It could have been worse, they could have put Mt. McKinley in Europe or something.
At midnight tonight, new Federal Communications Commission rules will bar television networks from blasting viewers with excessively loud, screamy commercial breaks. 

Adopted a year ago Thursday, the rules "will require commercials to have the same average volume as the programs they accompany," the FCC says. The commission was prompted to action last year when Congress passed the "Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act"—the CALM Act. 

So enjoy your sanity and not having that feeling of dread for 2 minutes and 2 seconds four times during "Modern Family".

Loud-Ass TV Ads Are About to Be Outlawed — By Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones
You have to love this story by Dr. Vicky Forster of the Northern Institute for Cancer Research in honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness month.

"On Christmas day in 1994, whilst the rest of my family were playing games in the lounge, I was asleep in bed upstairs feeling absolutely exhausted, despite the fact that I had only woken up a few hours previously. I had been ill for a few weeks with what the doctor thought was a chest infection. Later that week, when I still wasn’t better, my mum took me to the doctor again who sent me for a blood test.

"On New Year’s Eve 1994, I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and admitted to St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London for a two and a half year program of treatment..."

Read the uplifting details at:
The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. Their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.

In the heat of that competition Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus  in 1877. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he used the head of another dinosaur, thought to be a Camarasaurus, to complete the skeleton.
Owen Paterson, Environment Secretary, says genetically modified food should be grown and sold widely in Britain and opponents of the technology are talking "humbug". Paterson made the remarks amid speculation that ministers are ready to relax controls on the cultivation of GM crops.

What?  Use science to grow food?  Can we get more Brits to re-colonize America, this time in batty anti-science states like California?  Or maybe put a few in the federal government?
How do you know 'citizen science' has gotten to be a popular term?  Two 'citizen-science projects' are charging people to analyze their poop and claiming it will make the world a better place.

The American Gut Project wants to 'enroll' 10,000 people to pay money to find out what's living in their intestines. uBiome will settle for 2,000.
Sales of specialty, craft, and small-market beers have improved dramatically in sales, many of the traditional, full-calorie beers that were once the staples of most breweries have fallen behind. In the five years ending in 2011, sales of Budweiser, which was once the top-selling beer in the country for years, have fallen by 7 million barrels.

Sales of Michelob are down more than 70%. Based on data provided by Beer Marketer’s INSIGHTS, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the nine large — or once-large — beer brands with a five-year decline in sales of 30% or more.

What are people drinking instead? Light beer and microbrews.
The McRib, that cult-favorite pork parts delight, is back in prestigious McDonald's restaurants December 17th - unfortunately the Mayan calendar runs out on the 21st and it has been the big disaster scenario since the American presidential election Nibiru Elenin Harold Camping
North Korean archaeologists are claiming discovery of a unicorn lair. I want this to be true but the source, North Korea's news organization, is even less credible and more partisan than the Huffington Post, where I saw it.
Social authoritarians love big government and lots of regulations - they also tend to love organic food.

Now they have met.  The FDA, acting under broad new authority granted by President Obama in 2011, has closed the Sunland, Inc. peanut butter plant in eastern New Mexico - and left it closed.
Bodybuilder Moustafa Ismail, 24, insists that his 31-inch arms are solely the result of training and a diet that consists of 7 pounds of protein, 9 pounds of carbohydrates and 3 gallons of water per day.

Guinness World Records is a little bit skeptical and is conducting research to decide whether he will be recognized as a world record holder.

Ismail had better hope he gets the guy who had to transport Ryan Braun's doping test results. Otherwise, I think he is going to lose.
EFSA, the food safety agency for the European Union, definitively rejected the bombshell French report headed by Gilles-Eric Séralini linking genetically modified corn to cancer, saying it failed to meet "acceptable scientific standards."

"Serious defects in the design and methodology of a paper by Seralini et al. mean it does not meet acceptable scientific standards," the European Food Safety Authority said in its statement.

The EU agency said its final assessment took into consideration evaluations carried out in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. "EFSA noted the emergence of a broad European consensus," it said, stating that the six countries too found Seralini's conclusions "were not supported by the data presented in the study."
While a subset of scientists, and certainly atheists, think any evidence of religion is grounds for dismissal from the ranks of science, most scientists disagree.
If you believe that female porn stars have low self-esteem and are less psychologically healthy than other women, it may be just sour grapes rationalization because they get a lot more sex than you.
Are you a morning or night person? It may help determine when you will shuck off your mortal coil.

No one can determine with any accuracy specifically when we will die, but a new study has found that a particular gene variation, the same one that seems to determine if you are a morning person or not, also predicts what time of the day you will die.

The adenine-adenine (A-A), adenine-guanine (A-G) and guanine-guanine (G-G) variants of a single nucleotide near a gene called "Period 1" varied between two groups that differed in their wake-sleep behavior. 
 In ban-happy modern America, it's fashionable to find someone or something - anything - to blame for why you choose to ingest more calories than you burn on a persistent basis.

But during the holiday season, the circus that is health reporting in this country grows even more ridiculous as stories about the worst holiday foods and how to eat healthy on Thanksgiving begin to pop up in the news.  Complaining about what other people eat is irritating, but what's most bothersome about the warnings not to overeat on Thanksgiving is that they're entirely pointless. Obesity isn't caused, not even in part, by our holiday fare. 
If you don't believe in miracles, like that organic produce is nutritionally superior or that you can taste GMOs in food, the National Organic Coalition thinks you are on the take from slightly bigger Big Ag.

Even if you are the Obama administration's USDA, the $29 billion organic food industry thinks you are For Sale.