In western civilization, New Year's Resolutions are a big deal.  A new year means a new opportunity to meet goals - and losing weight is a popular one.But do they work?  People binge like crazy during the holidays and heavy people were not eating moderately before that. So dieters are already in the hole, weightwise.  And eating less food is hard.Writing at Policy Mic, Cameron English says 80% of all dieters fail to lose weight, and one-third even gain additional weight but their health loss may be psychology's gain.  The big question they want to address us: Why is willpower so useless when it's most needed?

It's not biology versus physics but in many ways it is science versus culture: Peter Higgs, he of the Higgs Boson, colloquially called 'the God particle', doesn't think much of Richard Dawkins, the biologist not famous for biology but rather for hating religion.Why does Dawkins, and by extension a number of biologists, hate religion so much and why don't more physicists give a crap?  Don't physicists see that religion is solely responsible for all of the evils of the world, as Dawkins and his acolytes do? 

Over the past 50 years, about 50 dogs have jumped to their deaths from the exact same spot on the 100-year-old Overtoun Bridge in Milton, near Dumbarton, Scotland.What gives?  Almost all the incidents have taken place on clear, sunny days and the dogs always being long-nosed breeds – collies, retrievers and labs.
 The canine suicide spot is located between the last two parapets on the right-hand side of the bridge.

If we were to tell Jimmy Wales that the Science 2.0 entry is an unmitigated pile of garbage written by someone who either knows nothing about Science 2.0 that he didn't Google in 5 seconds (I say 'he' because the place is legendarily hostile to women so it unlikely to be a 'she') he would simply respond that we should fix it.  Well, his own site does not work that way. The person who knows nothing about Science 2.0 other than to declare it a subset of the meaninginless 'open science' generic term and deny its actual history simply reverts any edits and then gets together and tries to ban people who do fix it.

New York City is willing to hire thousands to make sure you can't buy a Big Gulp but actual fraud is no big worry.The group Oceana did genetic testing of foods labeled at restaurants and found that every one of 16 sushi bars they investigated sold the researchers mislabeled fish. 39 percent of the seafood from 81 grocery stores and restaurants was not what the establishment claimed it was.Is this a new problem?  It's no secret to anyone not educated by advertising that a lot of organic food is not organic and if you have not bought veal and gotten pork at some point in your life, you are just lucky. 

Organic food is a $29 billion industry, clearly Big Ag, but they have managed to convince believers that they are small farms that use no pesticides and are nutritionally, structurally and morally better for humanity.But the glow has been fading. Framing organic food ethically now creates a backlash, according to surveys by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, which asked 371 test persons about their perceptions of food products with and without an organic label.  

Hate the captcha that Science 2.0 uses when you want to leave a comment?  So do we.But spammers make money spamming and there is no money at all in preventing it, so many media companies are a lot more annoying than us.  They make you create a proprietary account just to leave a comment, some allow third party general tools, like Disqus or Facebook. We don't want anonymous people here so we are stuck with captcha.Maybe not for long. The minteye startup has created a “no-type solution” which utilizes a slider that tasks users to straighten out a contorted image.

Geneticist A.J. Bateman did an experiment in 1948 which showed that, in mating fruitflies, the male insects' strategy was to mate with many females, whereas the females' strategy was to be discriminating in their choice of partners. Male reproductive success, in other words, correlated positively with number of mates, but female reproductive success did not.

I'm pretty confident the world is not going to end because a bunch of people who couldn't even keep Spaniards - SPANIARDS - from taking over their country were too lazy to make a new calendar.NASA is confident also. So confident they created a video to explain why the world did not end December 21st, 2012 in order to appease a wacko Mayan conspiracy theory - and they even released it 10 days early.Man, are they going to have egg on their faces if we actually are acting out scenes from Fallout 3 a week from now.

A NASA photo error showed just how many sheep in science media are blindly regurgitating anything about space they read.  NASA got a snapshot from Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko on the International Space Station, 230 miles above Earth, wrong, saying a summit in India was Mount Everest rather than what it really was, Saser Muztagh in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India. It could have been worse, they could have put Mt. McKinley in Europe or something.