On August 15th, the closeout memorandum for the Office of Inspector General at the National Science Foundation agreed with two reviews commissioned by Pennsylvania State University which cleared climate researcher Michael Mann of allegations regarding research integrity, including allegations of research misconduct, specifically

(1) falsifying research data
(2) concealing, deleting or otherwise destroying emails, information or data
(3)misusing privileged information and

A US-Albanian underwater expedition believes they have found a 1st century B.C. Roman shipwreck off the southwestern Albanian coast, close to the Sazan Island off the Karaburun Peninsula and the Vlora city, 87 miles southwest of the capital, Tirana.

They speculate  the 'well-preserved' 30-yard tall ship and some 300 Lambolie 2-type amphora were in the wine transport business. 

Unfortunately, the amphora were empty.  If wine gets better with age, it would have to be pretty terrific after 2,000-plus years.  

Northport Middle Schooler Aidan Dwyer has accomplished more in his life than most people three times his age. He sails, he golfs...and he is a patented innovator of solar panel arrangements.

Dwyer applied the Fibonacci sequence to solar panel arrays in a months-long backyard experiment. He found that small solar panels arranged according to the Fibonacci sequence found in tree branches produced 20 percent more energy than flat panel arrays, and prolonged the collection window by up to two and a half hours.

'Young Naturalist' Granted A Patent In Solar Energy - By Leah Bush, Patch.com

more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain.

Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), have created the basic design of an experimental computer chip that emulates the way the brain processes information.

IBM’s so-called cognitive computing chips could one day simulate and emulate the brain’s ability to sense, perceive, interact and recognize — all tasks that humans can currently do much better than computers can.

Kudos to The Mac Observer's John Martellaro for dusting off his geometry and calculating the diameter of the circle that would circumscribe the Pentagon's five 921-foot sides. Answer: 1,566 feet.

But he went astray when he eyeballed the floor plans for Apple's (AAPL) proposed new headquarters -- made public last week by the Cupertino city council -- to estimate the diameter the main office building. He came up with 1,615 feet "plus or minus a few feet." That's the diameter he used to draw the image below that shows the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense slipping neatly inside Steve Jobs' "spaceship" with room to spare.

A marble statue of Hercules from the second century has been uncovered during excavations by the Israel Antiquities Authority at Horvat Tarbenet.

Horvat Tarbenet is located in the Jezreel Valley, three kilometers northeast of Kefar Barukh, and four kilometers northwest of Afula. Tarbenet was a Jewish settlement in the third century AD, which is mentioned in the Jerusalem Talmud (Megilla 4, 5).

According to Dr. Walid Atrash of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “This is a rare discovery. The statue, which probably stood in a niche, was part of the decoration of a bathhouse pool that was exposed during the course of the excavations. It is c. 0.5 m tall, is made of smoothed white marble and is of exceptional artistic quality."

Not all of Adolph Hitler's family were homicidal megalomaniacs - his sister Paula was quite nice, for example. So the precursor to the CIA thought they might like to make him more like her.

British spies at one point hatched a plan to feminize Hitler a little by doping up his food with estrogen. Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University discovered that, and other ingenious plans in old unclassified documents, and outlines them in Secret Weapons: Technology, Science And The Race To Win World War II.

Fingerprints? We don't need no stinking fingerprints.

Police have used dentures to nab Milton Cesar de Jesus for a purse snatching in Severini, Brazil.  A hobo found them after the robbery and turned them over to cops, along with a description of the assailant so police picked up de Jesus based on that.  de Jesus denied the crime but the cops put the dentures in his partially toothed mouth and they were a perfect fit.  

A risky move but it worked.  As Johnny Cochran famously said, "if the gloves don't fit, you must acquit."   Don't you miss the 1990s, when rhyming tort was still cool?

If you've read Science 2.0 for any length of time, you've seen Bayes' Theorem - mostly in sports.  We use it to predict who will win the baseball playoffs, for example.  

Bayes’s theorem, named after 18th-century Presbyterian minister Thomas Bayes, has become an invaluable tool for scientists.