In a fit of Keynesian pique sure to make wackier economists like Paul Krugman proud, Tom Mulcair of the New Democratic Party of Canada has claimed that the robust economy in Canada, during a worldwide recession, is a disease.Mulcair claims because the economic gains are boosting the value of the Canadian dollar, it is  hurting Canada's manufacturing sector — a phenomenon dubbed the "Dutch disease."  Yes, if poor people can buy more stuff but the boom is coming from energy, it must be killed.

It's Fascination of Plants Day! 39 countries are celebrating plant scientists and they work they are doing to feed the world, improve health and develop sustainable energy supplies.But it isn't just serious 'save the planet' stuff - scientists have given themselves a bad rap by adopting the stoic Mr. Spock logic role.  They are having fun too.For example, James Meredith and company at Warwick University are trying to use hemp fiber in place of carbon for automobile bodywork. A material called Kestrel has already been created and is looking for people willing to try it - don't get pulled over by the DEA, though.  It will be tough to explain unless the traffic enforcement officer has a PhD in chemistry.

While the word 'consensus' is commonly used in science, it isn't a great one.  Consensus means basically voting and the public does not want to think science is like the United Nations where everyone, no matter how right or wrong, gets to insure nothing ever gets accomplished because some remote dictatorship can cancel out the US.So a vote on the existence of Dark Matter isn't legally binding but it is still sounds like fun.  

Barbarians don't get a lot of respect but a previously unknown ancient language buried in the ruins of a 2,800-year-old Middle Eastern palace may get them some.Evidence of the long-lost language, probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Ira, was translated to reveal the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer program. But when the Cambridge archaeologist – Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars.

Last year, fiscal hawk Senator Tom Coburn stuck his economic talons into waste at the National Science Foundation. Scientists, alarmed at the prospect of losing funding, circled the wagons while the usual kooky progressive suspects claimed because Coburn had an 'R' in his political party, he must be anti-science.

North Dakota pumped 17.8 million barrels of oil in March, with a daily average of 575,490 barrels, and has passed Alaska to become the second-leading oil-producing state in the nation, trailing only Texas.North Dakota owes its quick rise from the number nine spot just six years to improved horizontal drilling techniques in the rich Bakken shale and Three Forks formations in the western part of the state.Texas is not worried just yet. It produced 1.1 million barrels daily in February and 32.9 million barrels for the whole month and oil production has increased more than 8.2 million barrels from February 2011 to February 2012, records show.

Jonah Goldberg, writing a guest piece in USA Today, tackles what he calls 'the new conservative phrenology' - basically, pseudosciencing up why Democrats are super-smart just for registering to be Democrats and Republicans are not part of the reality-based science community:"They were born that way."

The Diamond Sutra is a 16-foot scroll of Buddhist texts dealing with the practice of non-abidance. A dated colophon is included, making it the first known block-printed text to carry an explicit date.Translated, the date of printing was May 11, 868 but that isn't the most fascinating part of the colophon. It reads...Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.

Are you a 20-something with a brand new degree and looking for advice?  Well, thanks to warmed-over Keynesian economics America is now a financial demilitarized zone and it isn't going to change any time soon so Forbes has crowd-sourced advice for the graduates of 2012 and condensed them into 30 pearls of wisdom that are a lot more practical than the pithy 'wear sunscreen' stuff we foisted off on the last generation.

In 1888, someone killed five prostitutes in London's Whitechapel district and came to be called "Jack The Ripper" - since then, everyone from Sherlock Holmes to officers on "Star Trek" have weighed in on who the killer might be.  The suspects are a Who's Who of people from the period because, apparently, it could just not have been some crazy, unknown sociopath, it had to be a member of Parliament or a famous writer.