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 »

Blogging The AAAS Meeting In Chicago

Feb 14 2009 | comment(s)

AAAS bills its annual meeting as 'the world's largest general science conference', which sounds just narrow enough to be true and since I am a patron member and we're a science community (indeed, we are the world's largest independent online science community) I decided to hop a plane and attend.

Yes, to Chicago in February. In two hotels that are not connected. Obviously this is a cost-saving measure, though it seems likely none of the savings AAAS made were passed on to members, who paid the same cost as usual.

In Physics, What We Don't Find Can Be Important Too

Feb 13 2009 | comment(s)

In all the hype surrounding the Large Hadron Collider during the last few years, it was easy to miss the fact that low energy physics was still accomplishing a lot - and that no one was sure what the LHC could really do because we didn't know what needed discovering.

What we think it will do is based on the success of the indirect approach in science. Darwin's evolution by natural selection, for example, gained early acceptance because without it nothing much in biology made sense. Later discoveries including genetics and a detailed fossil record reaffirmed that what makes the most sense can often be true.

Valentine's Day - 5 Easy Solutions For You Recession Romeos (And 2 For You Really Lazy Ones)

Feb 13 2009 | comment(s)

The Brits are always thinking ahead and we could learn a thing or two from them on this side of the pond. Those cheeky blokes are ditching pricey baubles in favor of if-we-keep-printing-money-we-will-be-Zimbabwe type ways of romancing loved ones this Valentine's Day - that is to say, without throwing out a lot of dough.

Research from a voice-to-text company over there called SpinVox claims almost two thirds of men (65%) have made huge cuts in spending this Valentines day. 1.6 million even claim they are following in the footsteps of Byron, Keats, and Shakespeare; not just by being poor, struggling lotharios getting by on charm but also by penning their own love poems this February 14th.

StumbleUpon Partnership, Darwin Day And The Return of the Author Index

Feb 11 2009 | comment(s)

There are some big things happening this week so I will just take a minute to fill everyone in. Of course, you must know by now Darwin Day is tomorrow and we are doing everything we can to boost understanding and acceptance of evolution by hosting a community-wide event. You can reach it through us here or by going to www.darwinday2009.com.

If you know people who are writing good stuff on Darwin or evolution, tell them to put the badge on their site so we see/get a notification and we'll include them.

Oh Genetic Drift, Take A Random Walk With Me

Feb 11 2009 | comment(s)

Coming up on Darwin's birthday, a lot is written about natural selection by non-biologists because opponents of evolution prefer to believe that biology stopped in 1859. Criticizing Darwin and Natural Selection is a lot easier if you ignore the 20th and 21st centuries.

And that's okay, if the goal is a culture war rather than a science discussion, because even in Darwin's time it wasn't all balloons and ponies for Natural Selection. It was years later that evolutionary biology got help from an understanding of genetics and Natural Selection became accepted after rigorous scientific investigation.
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Want To Find Out About The Science Stimulus Package? Here Are Two Places To Get The Short Versions

Feb 08 2009 | comment(s)

There's no question younger scientists who have only really known the Bush presidency believe that Bush was a problem in science, despite the budget increases and the fact that a lot of really terrific science got done in the last 8 years - so they may not see that a stimulus package in science under a president everyone has enthusiasm for could be setting us up for the very same funding bubble (and collapse) that occurred under Bush.