It's a nightmare for Whole Foods shoppers; what if genetically modified crops produced by evil scientists who only care about profits for their employers (i.e., the same as every employee of Whole Foods and its organic Mega-Farm suppliers) are actually good for the ecosystem?

We already know that genetically modified foods are as good for people as organic foods - or better if you'd prefer not to get E. coli from your food. We also know that, despite the silly claims, organic food is incapable of feeding poor people while genetically modified foods have brought prosperity and nutrition to a billion people worldwide in the last decade, and they have done it without using more land and with less harmful pesticides.

Bank of America was recently so crushed by its risky derivatives investments it needed $45 billion in bailout money from taxpayers - and then proceeded to engage in questionable practices to cover its losses, much like it engaged in questionable practices to acquire the losses.  

Things are so much better now they can afford to fix global warming and are devoting $50 billion to the cause. 

If we want to start cutting budgets, Republicans are not wrong for noting that the Education Department and the Department of Energy could disappear without any consequence at all to America beyond the government union employees working there.

But one darling of the right, the military, could do some cutting as well.  America has 16 different intelligence agencies and one of them you likely never heard of, the National Reconnaissance Office, has donated not one but two Hubble-sized military telescopes to NASA because, darn it, they just don't need them after all.

Count on economics, the dismal science, to claim that the one economy not crippled in 2012, is in peril.

Change it must, argues political scientist Victor Shih of Northwestern University in Financial Times, because its net exports to GDP is falling rapidly. Since its trade surplus, the cheap engine of its financial machine, has shrunk, they must consider

Conservatives and more taxes are kind of an oxymoron in the same sentence but pretend for a minute that more taxes are going to happen.   Because they are.  Do you want a bad one or a really terrible one?

America has been trying to get a really terrible one but even President Obama couldn't pull that one off - he gave us terrible health care law instead.  But he had limits even on what he could do with a bulletproof majority.  When it came to higher taxes in the form of cap and trade for emissions, his own party's Senators were airing commercials shooting the bill with an assault rifle.

Sorry economists, you don't do science, no matter how much envy you have.  Nor you, mathematicians, and social psychologists surveying undergraduates are disqualified too. 

In order to be a science you have to be scientifically rigorous - that doesn't mean just using some statistics. Obviously, even getting funding from the National Science Foundation doesn't qualify as science, though it should.

Take that, Sir Isaac Newton.  16-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories, which will help scientists calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and predict how it will strike and bounce off a wall, a tough problem for hundreds of years.

Ray attributes his success to  "Schuele generic naivety" - schoolboy naiveté - but good math should not be discounted.  His engineer father started teaching him calculus at age 6.  Newton basically had to invent fluxions at age 24 so Ray had a bit of an advantage there.

What do you do when the project you did is complete but your entry badge still works for the AOL Palo Alto campus and you have no place to live?

You sleep on couches there.

Eric Simons, age 19, managed to pull it off for two months before being caught by a security guard - he ate the free food, drank the free drink, worked out in the gym when he wasn't working, and took showers there.

And built his company.

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL by Daniel Terdiman, CNET

Some cultural wars that throw science out the window - anti-DDT, anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-evolution  - are baffling. Others at least have some science basis - smoking, for example - but sometimes bandwagon charlatans use the obvious to make all kinds of exaggerated, silly claims.  Where smoking harm was once clearly denied by Big Tobacco companies, exaggerated claims of all the ills smoking may cause are now so commonplace people assume that everyone with lung cancer got it from smoking.  And when that isn't true, they get even crazier ideas.  Donna Summer, the disco singer, never smoked but got lung cancer.  She believed the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001 'caused' it.