Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As frequently happens in modern times, they are not chemists.  Lefkowitz is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina while Kobilka is a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.  They received their award for their discoveries related to G-protein-coupled receptors. The human body has about 1,000 kinds of such receptors, structures on the surface of cells, which let the body respond to a wide variety of chemical signals, like adrenaline. Some receptors are in the nose, tongue and eyes, and let us sense smells, tastes and light.

Sometimes when I add a cool link, I want to make it funnier, or more prescient.  Sometimes the weird vibe of a writer straining for edgy legitimacy just stands on its own.  So, Science 2.0 audience, I present to you a sample of a site you may never need to bother with again, OpEdNews - because even its name is in conflict with itself and insecure, kind of like calling a site Belt And Suspenders:

Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman - a laureate in economics but a psychologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, has thrown the gauntlet down to one group of psychologists to restore the credibility of their field - by creating a replication ring to check each others’ results. Kahneman is a pioneer in behavioral economics, the irrational ways we make decisions about risk. If you like "Freakanomics", thank Kahneman.

Russian feminist punk-rock (and, if we are being honest with each other, not very good) band Pussy Riot's 15 minutes of anti-religion fame may be about up.  Russia has turned its social authoritarianism on something new; PepsiCo.

In the mid-1980s something odd occurred in Scandinavia that would be mirrored throughout the western world. Pediatricians in Sweden started reporting an increase in babies and toddlers with celiac disease.Better diagnosis, right?  Maybe.  Or maybe, says new research, it was how babies were fed.  Not mote gluten as a problem, less.  In 1996, gluten diagnoses began to drop again, after quadrupling from 1984 to 1996.

There is an obvious demographic thread that connects anti-science groups in food, in medicine, in research and pharmacy too, but most science media pundits are incapable of seeing it or flat out deny it.Yet it is hard to deny.  Meanwhile, every science media outlet publishes articles claiming the entire Republican party must be anti-science because more of them deny global warming and slightly more Republicans than Democrats deny evolution.The anti-biology movement among the left, Jon Entine notes, is "enabled by advocacy NGOs and campaigning journalists who, ironically, took the lead in debunking the pseudo-science of the right."

Unlike mainstream journalism, science journalism is under no expectation, feigned or real, to be objective.  Because no one reads science journalism any more. 

How do you turn political science, economics or surveys of college undergraduates into science?  You claim scientists are mean to people and not liberal and tolerant at all unless they agree with what you say next and then set out to redefine science so that just about anything can qualify.Anyone thinking on this for a moment can deduce there are going to get two reasons to do so, and they apply to almost anything: money and politics.Writing in USA Today, Dr. Alex Berezow and I dissect the recent efforts to insist the social sciences and the humanities are part of the science continuum, and therefore should have the same legitimacy conferred on them, despite the fact that we all know society is not a laboratory,

A contest co-organized by the European Science Foundation has a cash prize sponsored by Nobel Prize winner Brian Schmidt (Physics, 2011) - the goal, make a better video than the EU's "It's a girl thing" video.Now, I didn't see the big deal about the original but then again I am not the target market - American white guys approaching middle age tend to let things slide, all outreach is good outreach, etc.  That doesn't mean a whole lot of women didn't have a reason to be irked by it, but rather than just blowing up the blogosphere with indignant rage about the efforts someone else made and doing nothing, people are making a positive alternative and that is always a good thing.

A parasite that caused bees to lurch around like, well, zombies, and fly at night until they die has been found in Washington State.  Colony Collapse Disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die, has already been causing bee populations to drop. Such zombies were first discovered in California in 2008 by San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik who now runs a website ZombeeWatch.org that is aided by a network of citizen scientists to help determine how widespread the parasite is and whether it is contributing to the demise of bee colonies across the country.