Psychologists contend there is a 'health halo' adopted toward foods thought to be 'healthy', whether or not they actually are (granola, low fat yogurt, etc). There is also a health halo around foods that are organic. Some people even think organic foods are nutritionally superior and are even lower in fat and lower in calorie than foods without that organic label - which only required paying a fee and filling out a form.

As with young hipsters who like a band until they become popular, organic food eaters also seem to have adopted a 'moral halo' about their belief system - they think they are better than other people for buying organic pineapples. 

In a fit of Keynesian pique sure to make wackier economists like Paul Krugman proud, Tom Mulcair of the New Democratic Party of Canada has claimed that the robust economy in Canada, during a worldwide recession, is a disease.

Mulcair claims because the economic gains are boosting the value of the Canadian dollar, it is  hurting Canada's manufacturing sector — a phenomenon dubbed the "Dutch disease."  Yes, if poor people can buy more stuff but the boom is coming from energy, it must be killed.

While the word 'consensus' is commonly used in science, it isn't a great one.  Consensus means basically voting and the public does not want to think science is like the United Nations where everyone, no matter how right or wrong, gets to insure nothing ever gets accomplished because some remote dictatorship can cancel out the US.

So a vote on the existence of Dark Matter isn't legally binding but it is still sounds like fun.  

Last year, fiscal hawk Senator Tom Coburn stuck his economic talons into waste at the National Science Foundation. Scientists, alarmed at the prospect of losing funding, circled the wagons while the usual kooky progressive suspects claimed because Coburn had an 'R' in his political party, he must be anti-science.

Jonah Goldberg, writing a guest piece in USA Today, tackles what he calls 'the new conservative phrenology' - basically, pseudosciencing up why Democrats are super-smart just for registering to be Democrats and Republicans are not part of the reality-based science community:

"They were born that way."

Are you a 20-something with a brand new degree and looking for advice?  Well, thanks to warmed-over Keynesian economics America is now a financial demilitarized zone and it isn't going to change any time soon so Forbes has crowd-sourced advice for the graduates of 2012 and condensed them into 30 pearls of wisdom that are a lot more practical than the pithy 'wear sunscreen' stuff we foisted off on the last generation.

 A calico lobster, a mix of orange and yellow spots, is a 1 in 30 million specimen according to researchers, and thus has been spared from being delicious.

It was caught off Winter Harbor, Maine and saved from the cooking pot by Chef Jasper White at Jasper White's Summer Shack restaurant in Cambridge, Mass. after they noticed the coloration. They contacted the New England Aquarium, which then made plans to get the lobster, now named Calvin, and it will eventually take up residence at the Biomes Marine Biology Center in Rhode Island.

While the value of antibiotics in treating illness has always been clear, the impact of overuse on farms has been debated for some time.

The U.S. Food And Drug Administration has issued guidelines (voluntary) for the use of antibiotics in the agricultural industry;"judiciously" - for treating and preventing sickness. The spike in overuse of antibiotics has led to increases of drug-resistant bacteria - 'superbugs' in animals and humans.

The rules are voluntary for now - I know, in an age where goldfish, Happy Meals and trans fats are regulated by government, something is still voluntary - but the FDA will pick up the issue again in three years.

For most of the past 50 years, archaeologists thought they knew how humans arrived in the New World. At the end of the last ice age, sea levels dropped and big-game hunters living in eastern Siberia followed their prey across the Bering land bridge and into Alaska. Then they swept across the unpopulated continent. Archaeologists called these presumed pioneers the Clovis culture, after distinctive stone tools were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Any evidence of humans in the New World before the Clovis time was dismissed, sometimes harshly. That was the case with a Washington-state mastodon kill first described around 30 years ago but then largely ignored.