TED Talks have always been a little light on the science and heavy on the cultural etherealism. That's cool, they are obviously successful and you can't charge anyone outside government-grant funded academics or corporate-funded scientists a lot of money to attend a conference on just science but people will pay a lot more if you also throw in speculation about the future, a human rights activist and a dobro player.TEDx took that to a whole new level - these franchised events just grabbed whoever they could grab and it was open season for woo, pseudoscience and mysticism to be ensconced under a technology and science umbrella. 

There once was a time when biologists wished more people embraced biology - now they mat be wishing people loved their field a little less.Almost every crackpot notion can be linked to a brain scan, or a survey of college students, or a general behavior linked to results from twins, and declared biology. And if biologists object, those psychologists, economists and sociologists will say it doesn't have to be a genetic link, it can be epigenetic. It's the go-to safety net for runaway speculation and end-oriented belief that seeks science legitimacy.A neuroeconomist writing in the New York Times discusses an 'experiment', hooking a dog up to an "MRI stimulator" and the conclusion that followed:

It's popular to lament the politicization of important ideas like health care but it didn't start during the term of President Obama; let's keep in mind that war protests conveniently stopped after November of 2008, for no other reason than that the people behind the protests got their candidate elected - troops are still everywhere, the president launched two more military strikes against 'sovereign nations no threat to anyone outside their own borders' last week. And President Lyndon Johnson handily beat Senator Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, thanks in part to producing a video showing a little girl being vaporized by a nuclear bomb. 

Paleontologists usually find fossils jumbled up, broken apart, crushed and spread out over a large area, not in one piece.A whole 35-foot dinosaur may be slumbering inside the rock a construction worker hit while clearing a site in the town of Spirit River. He was making way for an oil pipeline - see, Big Energy is good for science in lots of ways!"The last time I've seen something like that was in a museum. I've never found something like this before,"  said paleontologist Matthew Vavrek, who went out to inspect and wasn't expecting to see what he found on the side of a sandstone boulder...

1,000 years ago in North America, long before pilgrams set foot in Massachusetts, there was once a large civilization whose city center was ringed with enormous earthen pyramids, vast farmlands, and wealthy suburbs. For hundreds of years it remained the largest city in North America - but no one knows its name.

According to Dante, the Styx is not just a river but a vast, deathly swamp filling the entire fifth circle of hell.It sounds a lot like Lake Natron in northern Tanzania, where temperatures can reach 60 °C and its alkalinity is between pH 9 and pH 10.5. When salt islands form in the lake, lesser flamingos take the opportunity to nest – but it is a risky business, as this calcified bird illustrates...

Last week,

To translate one language into another, find the linear transformation that maps one to the other. Simple, if you are part of an elite team of Google engineers.

In the world of academia, the number of citations an article receives means money at grant review time, and that means career success.However, with the emergence of new article metrics, researchers are increasingly looking to usage data (downloads and article views) and other article-level metrics, such as social media mentions, to understand a paper's impact. Last year, Elsevier ran a pilot for a new initiative designed to meet the demand for alternative metrics: the Article Usage Report. Based on the positive results of that pilot, the decision has been taken to offer it to all journals on ScienceDirect this autumn.

A magnitude-5.3 earthquake has hit the Japanese prefecture that is home to the nuclear power plant crippled in the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The U.S. Geological Survey says the quake struck early Friday at a depth of about 13 miles under Fukushima Prefecture and about 110 miles northeast of Tokyo.The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not issue an alert and the Japanese news agency Kyodo News reported that the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., observed no abnormality in radiation or equipment after the quake.Magnitude-5.3 Earthquake Hits Japan's Fukushima By Mari Yamaguchi, Associated Press