Mohammed El Naschie brought a libel suit against Nature Publishing Group and a journalist there and at Bristol Crown Court today the judgment stated, "My conclusions are that the Article is substantially true, whether one considers the meanings complained of by the Claimant or justified by the Defendants, that it contains comments which are defensible as honest comment, and that it was the product of responsible journalism, so that the defence of Reynolds privilege succeeds."In other words, the truth is still defense against libel.  

Well, that Nibiru rapture on July 2nd never happened but it does not mean we are out of the woods.  In July of 1996, a barely tolerable movie called "Independence Day" had a plot where aliens invaded Earth.  It accomplished two things; the jingo-istic neo-cons in Hollywood of the Clinton years got to make July 4th a world holiday and they showed a Mac is so crappy it can ruin an alien civilization.Maybe they also inspired the US army.  

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, General in the War On Choice, is nothing if not inconsistent.  You can't decide how much salt to use in NYC or decide what size soda to buy, thanks to imperial fiat, but you can gorge yourself on hot dogs in public and be a bad role model for what Bloomberg considers the most gullible and unintelligent people in the world.Mayor Bloomberg does not want to look hypocritical so he now says there is nothing wrong with the occasional fast food meal. Why ban something if it is occasionally okay?  I guess he means there is nothing wrong with occasional fast food as long as he decides when that occasion is. Like when it gets him a photo op.

Are you smarter than a cat?Not if you are a vegetarian. Cats know what is good for them and that is why cats are basically carnivores.  Cats can't produce taurine,  2-aminoethanesulfonic acid, which is vital for eyesight. Good luck getting taurine from a vegetarian diet. But mice and other critters?  Absolutely.Because being a vegetarian is unnatural, people in Norway are prohibited from putting their dogs or cats on vegetarian diets under the country’s Animal Welfare Act. That's right, Norwegians won't let you do to pets what PETA wants to do to all Americans.

The government has mandated labeling standards to warn consumers of potential hazards, like smoking's link to cancer and lung disease.But science illiterates (AKA progressive social authoritarians) are taking that example and insisting GM foods should also carry a warning label - despite no instance of them being harmful or unhealthy. 

Purdue Pharma, makers of the painkiller OxyContin, are going to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to label it for use by children as young as 6.Oxycontin earned them $2.8 billion last year but drug companies have a tiny window in which they can make any money so they are always looking for creative ways to extend that. Even a 6-month extension is a billion bucks so Purdue is putting together a pediatric trial which will involve 154 children ages 6 to 16 that would finish in August, 2013.

A recent air leak from a laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, a lab that studies dangerous pathogens like influenza, tuberculosis and rabies, is a very serious issue because it has the potential to harm both employees and the public. Leave it to Congress to put on some political theater and declare they will investigate - using lawyers.  It's not that there are no people in Congress with expertise,  Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., is a microbiologist.  She just isn't on the committee of 54 law school graduates figuring out what went wrong.Thanks, Congress.  I feel safer knowing you will be posturing and grandstanding about this. 

LEDs are the future of lighting but they aren't new.  British experimenter H. J. Round reported a light-emitting solid-state diode in 1907 while Oleg Vladimirovich Losev published the paper "Luminous carborundum [[silicon carbide]] detector and detection with crystals" in Telegrafiya i Telefoniya bez Provodov (Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony) but they were truly basic research and  no real work was done with them for decades.In 1962, Nick Holonyak, Jr. of the General Electric company patented the first practical LED and by the late 1960s they were in common use.

Bees use mathematical prowess to communicate the exact location of nearby food to other bees via a technique dubbed the "bee dance." It is the only known instance of symbolic communication in the animal kingdom (unless we consider there are deeper metaphors in "Real Housewives of New Jersey") and today a group of scientists are building a robot that can mimic that behavior of bees.In the 1940s, ethologist and Nobel laureate Karl von Frisch became the first person to decode the bee dance.

Almost all scientists claim citizen science is a good thing.  Hey, doctors all claim that patients who can Google and ask a lot of questions about diseases and treatements are a good thing also.  But not all really feel that way.Climate scientists certainly wish there was less citizen science. If they wanted to shut up climate deniers (and skeptics) about data, they would do what physicists do - send all 10 billion pieces of raw data. Good luck making sense of that, citizen scientists.  Biologists could also likely do with fewer people who know just enough science to be wrong.