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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

 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.