While there's no question there is biology in taste buds, actual wine testing has proven to be in the astrology and psychological assessment range of accuracy.Most people are not able to discern expensive wine from cheap and neither can wine sommeliers.  That's why various wine festivals rarely agree on wines - a gold medal at one can yield nothing at another.  It isn't just subjective, argues a small winery owner, it is almost random.

In the more urbane sectors of New York and Los Angeles and Austin or wherever you find Whole Foods–levels of gastronomic consciousness and sufficient disposable income (rich, liberal, anti-science) you'll find people on a cleanse diet.Cleanses and their cousins, colonics, have about as much medical merit, declared Michael Gershon, a professor of pathology and cell biology at Columbia University’s medical school to The New Republic's Judith Shulevitz, as the acts of penance done by monks who’d “walk across Europe and hit themselves on the back to purge themselves of the plague.”

It's kind of meta that continuous "machine learning" using artificial neural networks (ANNs) may improve the ability to predict survival in patients with advanced brain cancers.But there you go. The pilot study  used data on patients treated for advanced brain cancer at several hospitals. The results showed that ANNs beat standard prediction models for predicting patient survival - 84% versus 74% using statistical techniques. Artificial Neural Networks Predict Brain Cancer Prognosis - Science Codex

Not that most people were worried but the US Department of Agriculture has found that genetically modified wheat found in Oregon last month has remained in one field. Genetically engineered wheat is not sold in the U.S. so the USDA is investigating how the engineered wheat got there. It is the same strain of Monsanto grain that passed tests a decade ago but it has never been submitted for approval to be sold.Three countries, including Japan, suspended imports of western white wheat from the Pacific Northwest while the USDA investigates. That's okay, we don't buy produce from Fukushima prefecture either - at least our mutations are controlled.

2012 saw a drought in the American mid-west.  As a result, withered corn plants didn't suck up all the nitrogen spread on fields.  But 2013 gave Iowa citizens the wettest April in 141 years, and that rain washed the unused fertilizer into rivers, the primary source of drinking water for 45 percent of the state's population. The problem will pass, but nitrate levels will always be a worry which has reached levels never seen in Iowa. Nitrogen is crucial because corn requires so much of it but Iowa is especially vulnerable to nitrate level concerns because about 90 percent of the state is dedicated to agriculture.

Have you heard of volcanoes, earthquakes and British weather?If so, maybe you can blame the North Pole if you don't like any of those things. If you have been asleep for 110 years or never read anything about continental drift, you may not know the North Pole is moving.This video alleges that the North Pole will soon be in Siberia at this rate. The video blogger says his calculations have shown it moving 161 miles in the last 6 months, a mile a day toward the south, and it will have migrated 40 degrees across the northern hemisphere soon. Then the poles will shift at high speed over the equator until it reaches 40 degrees south.

John Edward Mack, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist, believed lots of people had been abducted by aliens.Never heard of him? Most people haven't. His fame as an Ivy League believer in alien abductions was more novelty than anything enduring but 'experiencers - alien abductees don't want to be called abductees - said he was “the most important scientist ever to dare to admit the truth about the abduction phenomenon.” 

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been stacked to make sure that nuclear power in America is hindered as much as possible. Without a proper storage policy, nuclear power is barely a blip on America's radar as a solution to creating clean energy.And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is being run, for the second time, by a non-physicist who got the job because they were opposed to the solution that decades of scientists agreed was the best method for storage of nuclear waste.

With unpredictable annual rainfall and drought about once every five years, the potato is becoming a more important crop there.Semagn-Asredie Kolech, a Cornell doctoral candidate, shuttles between Ethiopia and Ithaca to examine and research efficient agricultural practices. “The potato is a good strategy crop for global warming. It has a short growing season, it offers higher yields, it’s less susceptible to hail damage, and you can grow 40 tons per hectare. With wheat and corn, you don’t get more than 10 tons a hectare.” 

A Kansas farmer has sued Monsanto over genetically modified wheat in Oregon. The attorney who talked to the Associated Press from Dallas said lawsuits were the only way to police the agricultural system. Only a few hundred million dollars in penalties will protect us from food.The lawsuit alleges that the unharvested crop drove down wheat futures prices and caused a backlash from some international markets.The USDA has determined that the genetically modified wheat is safe but Monsanto does not sell it.  Since no contamination has occurred Monsanto is dismissing it as 'tractor-chasing lawyers'.