Writing at Slate, Greg Laden gives a terrific overview of anthropology and also the war on Napoleon Chagnon:Our way of being is certainly tied to our biological heritage, but the differences we see across cultures are the products of lived experience, with cultural norms shaped by our environment and how we are brought up. It also seems true that within academia, there are subfields into which we are enculturated, and which inform and shape our thinking.

Doing a Top 10 List Of Science Bloggers is going to be subjective - so many people in science media write because so many in the audience prefer different styles and different content - that is why there are 700 TV stations also but blogging is cheap. Just know your stuff and write well and you'll get a million readers a month.

The latest Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center says sea surface temperatures in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem during 2012 were the highest recorded in 150 years. 
Sea surface temperature in the region is based on both contemporary satellite remote-sensing data and long-term ship-board measurements, with historical SST conditions based on ship-board measurements dating back to 1854. The temperature increase in 2012 was the highest jump in temperature seen in the time series and one of only five times temperature has changed by more than 1 C (1.8 F).

Large population-scale studies powered by high-throughput sequencing technologies have generated massive amounts of genomic data, with the potential to revolutionize genetics and medicine.But the translation of these data to actionable medicine is complicated by the challenges of extracting meaningful information from
high-throughput sequencing
 data. The challenge is beyond computational, as bioinformatics is bound by the experimental methods employed to produce genomic data. A successful experiment minimizes false positives and depends on the optimization of an entire pipeline, from sample preparation to computational analysis.

What was Earth like 5 million years ago?  We had camels in North America and got an Arctic ice cap due to the fact that Earth got cooler and drier.  And the atmosphere had 400 parts per million, about what the northern hemisphere could have next month, according to according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Lab.Old air preserved as bubbles in the Antarctic ice sheet tell us CO2 levels never exceeded 300 parts per million during the last 800,000 years but they started to rise with the advent of industry. Tuesday of this week the reading was 398.44 ppm as measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. It was 316 ppm when Charles Keeling, who the Keeling Curve is named after, began taking measurements there.

I don't follow "I F*cking Love Science" on Facebook for the most transparent, stodgy old guy reason; I don't like the name.  Sure, it's edgy and in-your-face and therefore cool to a lot of people who think that sort of thing is cool, it is just a turn-off for me.But being edgy and cool doesn't mean you get to rip people off.  The Ellen Degeneres Show is also cool and edgy and hip and the host comes dancing out to music every day; it's actually quite entertaining. The problem is that part of the program involved music they didn't have rights to use. In 1,000 different cases. Maybe they thought they were exempt because they were having fun. Or maybe they thought they were doing the artists a favor and giving them free publicity.

The Emotional Freedom Technique is a kind of psychotherapy, developed in the 90s, that draws on a variety of pseudoscientific bollocks, including accupressure, our old friend NLP (neurolinguistic programming), various kinds of laying-on-of-hands-type ‘energy’ therapies and a good dose of very confused neurobollocks.Essentially, what happens in an EFT counselling session is that you discuss your problem, while stimulating the ‘end points of the body’s energy meridians’. This stimulation takes the form of tapping yourself; on the head, the face, wherever.

2012 was the year that global warming came roaring back - in science media, anyway. Despite the IPCC asking the media to help a little less when it came to attributing every weather event to climate change, science media insisted global warming created a 'superstorm' named Sandy and that global warming had finally hit the American Mid-West, after peskily not rising in temperatures since the 1930s.

A study by the University of Winnipeg -   2,300 first-year psychology students were surveyed online for three consecutive years

- found that psychology students who do a lot of texting tend to be more shallow and ethnically prejudiced (that's racist, south of the border) and place less importance on moral, aesthetic and spiritual goals and greater importance on wealth and image. The one hour online psychology research survey included self-reported measures of texting frequency, personality traits and life goals.

Are your eggs free range?  Do you care?Well, chicken farmers care, because marketing success for 'free range' labels has made it a big business. There actually is a somewhat fuzzy limit, 1,500 birds a hectare, but a group in Australia says some larger producers are using the "free range" label for their chickens, even if they have 20,000 per hectare. Basically, the farmers claim, the eggs are being laid by caged hens even if they are not in cages. And the public does not know the difference and is paying $1-2 more per dozen.