How do you know subsidies are a dopey public policy? When it pays to smuggle rice into Thailand, even though Thailand already has enough rice to meet half the world's annual trade in the food staple.The reason is that the Thai government is subsidizing production so heavily as part of a campaign platform that it is paying its farmers almost double the prevailing prices in Cambodia and Myanmar. Farmers in those neighboring countries are sending their grain across the border to be sold.The equivalent of 750,000 tons of milled rice is being smuggled into Thailand a year, according to estimates of analysts and traders who have studied the illicit shipments.

Proponents of illegal immigration contend that they are doing jobs no one wants to do. Farmers worry about the cost of labor.Both immigration and wage problems are solved by just using robots.  The Lettuce Bot, for example, can "thin" a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand. A new generation of machines targets the last frontier of agricultural mechanization; fruits and vegetables destined for the fresh market, not processing, which have thus far resisted mechanization because they're sensitive to bruising.And it would solve policy and labor issues too. Bring on the bots!

If environmental doomsday prophets had been around 10,000 years ago you would not exist.Way back then, as a large tribe of people had begun to run out of food to hunt and berries to forage, some smart scientific person came up with the greatest idea anyone ever had - why don't we grow our own animals and vegetables?A doomsday prophet in charge would have been talking about who they could kill off. They would have rationed and mitigated and legislated and agonized about who they could kill, preferably a bunch of people they did not like. Reason won out. Like the idea of a 1,500 calorie Big Kahuna Donut Burger? Thank science.

Who says the hard sciences lack female representation?When it comes to murder using the awesome power of science, there is no gender disparity. Tianle Li, 44, a Bristol-Myers Squibb chemist for 10 years, has been found guilty of fatally poisoning her estranged husband, Xiaoye Wang, with thallium she got at work. She faces life in prison when she's sentenced Sept. 30th.She was convicted of poisoning Wang with the highly toxic
thallium
while they were in the process of divorcing. He died early in 2011.

Masao Yoshida, 58, former boss of the Fukushima nuclear plant, "died of oesophagal cancer at 11:32am today at a Tokyo hospital," said a spokesman for plant operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the group that owns the Fukushima plant which had meltdown concerns after towering waves from an earthquake and tsunami swamped cooling systems.Despite panic stories and concern among the public and the media, Yoshida was a classical stoic Japanese and stayed at his post.  8 months later he was admitted to the hospital and was diagnosed with throat cancer. After surgery for that, he had a brain hemorrhage and surgery again.

In the 1980s, basic science super-advocate President Ronald Reagan got a pitch about creating a futuristic non-lethal way to subdue people without injuring them. He loved the idea and by the end of the decade it was being developed.Most everyone has a microwave oven in their house. Its 2.45 GHz frequency gives it a long wavelength so it can cook your food by penetrating deeply. Obviously, cooking people is a bad idea so the microwave weapon they proposed had a much higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength. It would only only penetrate a little, where our layer of skin would absorb the microwaves and turn them into heat.

OTP is slang for One True Pairing, meaning your favorite combination of characters in a fandom.Sci-ence.org does cool art about science and under the OTP heading they used a neat story about a mammal forerunner and an amphibian that lived (and died) together in an African burrow 250 million years ago. 

The Voynich manuscript has delighted conspiracy theorists and researchers since book dealer Wilfred Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. Its illustrations of naked nymphs, unidentifiable plants, astrological diagrams and pages and pages of text in an unidentified alphabet is considered gibberish, part of a Renaissance hoax to bilk rich, dumb people out of some money, by most, but an elaborate code by a persistent minority, mostly people who believe in "Chariots of the Gods" and Loch Ness Monster stuff.

 In what the FBI called “economic sabotage”, genetically modified 6,000 sugar beets from two fields in Southern Oregon’s Jackson County were destroyed this month.Such modern hysteria makes the quaint clueless charm of the hipsters portrayed in "Portlandia" seem like a hundred years ago. At least in some counties these people are militant now.  The FBI isn't disclosing how the fields were destroyed - they know environmentalists lack imagination but love to copycat each other.

Modern science may seem slow and incremental but, as has always happened, small steps lead to awkward leaps and bounds - and revolutions.  It's why we make goat noises at people who claim their bachelor's degree in engineering has led them to come up with a Theory of Everything.  You have to know a lot before you can even know what is missing, much less how to fill the gaps.