Bank of America was recently so crushed by its risky derivatives investments it needed $45 billion in bailout money from taxpayers - and then proceeded to engage in questionable practices to cover its losses, much like it engaged in questionable practices to acquire the losses.  Things are so much better now they can afford to fix global warming and are devoting $50 billion to the cause. 

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the Elizabethan theatre where some of William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The Curtain Theatre was the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.”The remains of the polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theatres were found behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment.  They uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, just east of London’s business district.The Curtain opened in 1577 and was home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597 until the Globe Theatre was built across the river two years later.

If we want to start cutting budgets, Republicans are not wrong for noting that the Education Department and the Department of Energy could disappear without any consequence at all to America beyond the government union employees working there.But one darling of the right, the military, could do some cutting as well.  America has 16 different intelligence agencies and one of them you likely never heard of, the National Reconnaissance Office, has donated not one but two Hubble-sized military telescopes to NASA because, darn it, they just don't need them after all.

Every two years an international standardized test is given and a lot more often than that we get treated to mainstream media claims about how bad science education is.  They never want to say students are dumb - it is just the ammunition in their culture war against...someone.  Mostly taxpayers, it seems, since they are buying into propaganda by well-funded education lobbyists that hiring more teachers or spending more money will solve the problem.

Count on economics, the dismal science, to claim that the one economy not crippled in 2012, is in peril.Change it must, argues political scientist Victor Shih of Northwestern University in Financial Times, because its net exports to GDP is falling rapidly. Since its trade surplus, the cheap engine of its financial machine, has shrunk, they must consider

Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate, Science Education advocate and general shining light of reason in the Obama administration is stepping down as associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.Three years in politics is a long time if you are not a career politician and Prof. Wieman has likely accomplished all he can at a high level and may simply want to get back to direct involvement.  The OSTP communications director told Nature he was leaving for 'personal reasons'.

Conservatives and more taxes are kind of an oxymoron in the same sentence but pretend for a minute that more taxes are going to happen.   Because they are.  Do you want a bad one or a really terrible one?America has been trying to get a really terrible one but even President Obama couldn't pull that one off - he gave us terrible health care law instead.  But he had limits even on what he could do with a bulletproof majority.  When it came to higher taxes in the form of cap and trade for emissions, his own party's Senators were airing commercials shooting the bill with an assault rifle.

Hey, if the California Air Resources Board can create an entire cap and trade industry just by inventing emissions 340% higher than any actual evidence, it can go the other way.  Science is all postmodern and relative that way - once you let people you agree with make stuff up, anyone can do it.

Sorry economists, you don't do science, no matter how much envy you have.  Nor you, mathematicians, and social psychologists surveying undergraduates are disqualified too. In order to be a science you have to be scientifically rigorous - that doesn't mean just using some statistics. Obviously, even getting funding from the National Science Foundation doesn't qualify as science, though it should.

Be careful when ordering things through the mail - especially chicks.Apparently, 50 million live poultry are sold through the mail each year in the United States.  Business has been booming because wanna-be farmers regard backyard chickens as a great way to raise their own food. So they buy chicks, for their kids or themselves.I imagine they only think that chickens are a great way to raise their own food until the little eco-terrorists ruin the yard and smell up the place - or give their kids salmonella. 316 cases have been reported in 43 states since 2004.