Current policies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are inadequate for dealing with the threat that they pose - for every emission that America alone reduced (and we have reduced a lot, we are back at 1992 levels) China added that and more, and India would also like to have air conditioning.Yet anyone who contends there has to be a hard stop on fossil fuels has basically eliminated themselves from a rational policy discussion - the energy density of gasoline is unmatched and we would need to create a nuclear power plant worth of clean energy every day for the next 50 years to meet our energy needs right now.  

Self-righteousness is a form of addiction?  Bags of urine in interstellar commerce? An autism plague?Astrophysicist, futurist and author David Brin gets interviewed in the Wired Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast and you can read a transcript here.He goes after George Lucas, the kind of succinct evisceration we all imagine in our minds but lack the clarity to pull off, and clobbers Yoda too: 

There is a subsection of the science community that loves Rachel Maddow; she is literate and she has the right politics.  But most of science is doing a facepalm because her slippery slope reasoning about 'fracking', if applied to any field of science, would call a halt to research all over the country.

Writing on Scientific American blogs, Maria Konnikova makes a point numerous scientists have made, yet one that makes science journalists and many psychologists bristle with irritation.

Global warming and more water would be good for surfers, right? Nope.  Did you see any surfing in "Waterworld" or"The Day After Tomorrow"?  Nope, because higher sea levels mean terrible breaks.  As Sam Kornell at Pacific Standard puts it, "the contour of a wave is as important as its size, and the way a wave builds and breaks is determined chiefly by the shape of the ocean floor as it meets the shoreline."Even a foot change in the tide line can mean the difference between great and mediocre waves and researchers believe sea levels could rise six inches by 2030, and a foot by 2050, or more.

Say what you want about former President George W. Bush, he was good for science.   Sure, he had a moral position against human embryonic stem cell research, but President Obama has only been different, and no better.   Where they stand apart is funding research.Supporting science is more than flowery prose.   "Is it what anyone says or is it where money gets spent?" asked astrophysicist and Science 2.0 fave Neil deGrasse Tyson. It's funding, plain and simple and in funding, Republicans are more pro-science than Democrats.

Usain Bolt runs faster than you.  He makes it look easy but he certainly works hard at it.  He also has an advantage you don't - the right genes.Is that random?  Maybe.  Mutation and genetic drift and random walks are all aspects of how we got to where we are but we may be on the road to creating better athletes too. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans writing in Nature News note that almost every male Olympic sprinter and power athlete ever tested carries the 577R allele, a variant of the gene ACTN3. About half of Eurasians and 85% of Africans carry at least one copy of this 'power gene'(Berman, Y.&North, K. N. Physiology 25, 250–259, 2010).

Medical science has done miraculous things - namely saving billions of lives.  But anti-science activists are driving workers who develop new drugs out of research, by attacking them and and smearing them as pedophiles to introduce a 'chilling effect'.One female Harlan Laboratories worker told the Observer: "When you arrived in the morning, you would have to queue for up to five minutes to get through the gates. Their loudhailers were deafening. They would scream at you that you were a puppy killer and would bang on your car. It was horrible. I was left shaking for hours afterwards."

Traces of 2,500-year-old chocolate on a plate in the Yucatan peninsula may mean chocolate was a condiment or sauce with solid food in pre-Hispanic cultures rather than as a beverage reserved for the elite.Or it could have spilled. The discovery announced by Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History also suggests that there may be ancient roots for traditional dishes eaten in today's Mexico, such as mole, the chocolate-based sauce often served with meats. The traces of chemical substances considered "markers" for chocolate were found on fragments of plates uncovered at the Paso del Macho archaeological site in Yucatan in 2001 and recently analyzed.

India suffered the worst blackouts in history this week, leaving over 600 million people without power and providing evidence of deep problems in a sector teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for the second time in a decade.