Al Armendariz,  head of the EPA's South and Southwest region in Dallas, has resigned.  He has been criticized for using an unelected position at the EPA (he was appointed by Pres.

France is not exactly known for being pro-science (nor is Europe generally) but when it comes to autism, they are decidedly anti-science.For decades, France has turned its back on the latest scientific thinking and treats autism as a form of psychosis. Instead of using behavioral therapy (developed in the 1970s and '80s in the US and Canada and now the norm in most of the world) to treat autistic children, stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society, France puts its faith in psychoanalysis. Freud would be proud but most of the world is shocked.

Eli Yablonovitch and graduate student Owen Miller of U.C. Berkeley have designed and built a new type of solar cell that gets closer to the theoretical efficiency limit 33.5%, the Shockley–Queisser limit for cells using a p-n junction, by mimicking the behavior of a light-emitting diode.Result: 28.6% efficiency using gallium arsenide as a semiconductor and devising a method to do improved photon management. Multi-cell arrays have achieved efficiencies of 43% using combinations of gallium, indium, phosphorus and arsenic.

I've talked tangentially about a new book by Chris Mooney called The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality, but only because of specific studies he used in doing op-eds to promote the book.  

Is 20 times the speed of sound fast?  Yeah, that's fast.  So fast it seems likely that it caused the  unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) contracted by Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) to suddenly crash in the Pacific a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August.The engineers don't know exactly why but they have an educated guess; "impulsive shock waves"  were "more than 100 times what the vehicle was designed to withstand" and some skin peeling off actually resulted in all of it being lost. 

For centuries, women have been reporting engorgement of the upper, anterior part of the vagina during the stage of sexual excitement - but it took an 83-year-old cadaver to prove the existence of a G-spot.That's right, I said 83-year-old cadaver.  If you expected something sexier by that title, you can stop reading now.

The Internet accomplishes a lot of good, especially in politics where opponents can trip up the other side when fake claims or documents are produced.But that doesn't mean it is a substitute for real reporting. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Washington Post reporters behind uncovering the Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration, were not all that impressed with students in a Yale advanced journalism class - that makes sense, one of them has no degree at all and obviously did pretty well in journalism and the other was a history major.

iPads are apparently pretty sexy.  I don't know, I don't have one. I do have a Kindle Fire, I like to be able to download and read old books I have that are too valuable to me to risk reading in hardback, and I bought an iPad for my wife, but I do most things on a laptop, so an iPad is too small, and my Kindle Fire is about the size of a book, so an iPad is too big.But 10% of Internet gambling men in the UK said they would rather than an iPad than a girlfriend, and 3% of respondents to the RoxyPalace.com survey said they would leave the girlfriend they already have.  That's sexy folks.

A closed U.S. Government-requested meeting last month set out to determine the fate of two controversial unpublished papers on the H5N1 avian influenza virus but it was stacked in favor of their full publication, a participant now says. The meeting agenda and presenters were “designed to produce the outcome that occurred”, according to a letter leaked to Nature by an anonymous source.It's open science versus bioterrorism concerns. 

When we are talking about anti-science beliefs that fall on the left and the right, we often use astrology and belief in ghosts for left-wing crazies.  But astrology may be as accurate as psychology, at least when it comes to personality assessments (1) so perhaps it deserves more respect.Neuroskeptic, the, well, neuroscience skeptic, from the UK recently discussed this 2008 update of a 1985 double-blind test of astrology.