Halloween Horror Science: Are Chickens That Learn A Bigger Threat To Us Than AI?

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group ...

Ignore Critics, Gen Z, We Weren't Smarter In 1984

It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow...

Taking The Book Of The Dead To Heart

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed...

American CO2 Is Below War War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries

In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors...

Hank Campbell

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Scientists aren't the only funny people ...

Mar 18 2008 | comment(s)

That's right, it's not just scientists who are funny. In trolling the internet as I do, I came across mention of Increased Complexity: Is This The First Rule Of Evolution? on a site called ChristianDiscussionForums.org, linking to the article and with this comment:

It's too bad they didn't bury Stephen Jay Gould in a magnetic suit and wrap wire coils around his coffin.

Botox Is The New Prius, Except Of Medicine

Mar 18 2008 | comment(s)

Twice in two days Botulinum toxin (Botox) has graced our front page, and it's not just because it makes Joan Rivers look like The Joker.

Yesterday we reported that Botox has helped infants with CHARGE Syndrome and today we discovered an article in Medical Hypotheses talking about its many beneficial effects.

Not bad press for an often fatal poison produced by a rare type of food poisoning bacteria.

The Big Organic Questions - What Is Organic Food And Is My Food Really Organic?

Mar 17 2008 | comment(s)

You can tell a lot about the concerns of society regarding science by the kinds of topics that bring people to sites like ours. Not a day goes by that people don't arrive using Google searches looking for answers about organic food. The top query is something like 'what is organic food?' and it seems odd that after hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and $20 billion in sales, no one is sure what organic food is.

There are two sides to the organic food issue to most people; genetics and chemicals. I don't worry too much about organic food from a genetics standpoint, for example, but I am not a fan of most chemicals. I am not even a fan of other people touching my food.

Tell them they can publish it here ...

Mar 17 2008 | comment(s)

We have a much bigger audience than Physical Review Letters anyway. From New Scientist:

Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums. The physicists were upset after the American Physical Society withdrew its offer to publish two studies in Physical Review Letters because the authors had asked for a rights agreement compatible with Wikipedia.

Discovery: First methane around a distant star

Mar 14 2008 | comment(s)

We've never found an organic molecule (methane) in the atmosphere of a planet around a distant star before but NASA folks intend to announce next week it has been done. Should any of you desire to participate in this briefing, contact the Space Telescope Science Institute (Ray Villard at 410-338-4514 or Cheryl Gundy at 410-338-4707) by noon on March 19 for the call-in number and passcode. Plus, since we're discussing efforts to subvert science:

Are we secretive and teaser-y? Maybe we are

Mar 07 2008 | comment(s)

At least the folks at Galactic Mu think we are, because we print a summation, New Take On Invisibility - 'Shrinking' Nanoparticles Visible Size Without Reducing Physical Dimensions, rather than just violating the copyright of the Advanced Materials folks and reprinting their whole article. Well, we do what we can. The topic is interesting because current metamaterials can't be made (yet) in the optical range due to the limits of nanotechnology, so this is an interesting waypoint. I think it is a waypoint, in much the same way that disk compression was a waypoint on the road to ginormous hard drives.