Long ago, in a galaxy very, very near (because it was this one) we all talked like Yoda from "Star Wars", one hypothesis suggests.The original "proto-human language", linguists contend, used subject-object-verb (SOV) ordering, with some variation.  So when prehistoric men met prehistoric women, he likely said, "Make out with me you will."The researchers came to their conclusion after creating a language family tree, which shows the historical relationships between all the languages of the world.The Original Human Language Like Yoda Sounded by Natalie Wolchover, Life's Little Mysteries

Add Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.It turns out Jobs had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet prescribed by the alternative medicine promoter Dr. Dean Ornish instead of opting for early surgery. A Lesson in Treating Illness by Brian Dunning, Skeptoid

If you're in the life sciences, you have like heard of The Scientist.  After 25 years of making a go of it, they announced they are closing the doors.It's a tough market out there, as we can attest.  If we had 2008 advertising rates and 2011 traffic, we would be making pretty darn good money.  I have no idea how companies with expensive midtown Manhattan offices do it.   Well, they have a sales force and we don't, and multiple publications.   But you get the idea.  It's always a difficult market for science; Henry Donahue, former CEO of Discover, once said to me over coffee, "I think media buyers went into that business because they hate science."

Americans sometimes believe things have to be expensive, from science to technology.   Yet getting adopted by the masses is the road to long-term success so a country that can make a microscope out of bamboo for $4 is now putting a tablet computer in reach for its poorest people - a fraction of what the hyper-priced iPad retails for.

Pity Pittsburgh. The Steelers are not having a good year and don't even get me started on the Pirates.  I got to wear my baseball jersey out of pride rather than defiance for the first time since Barry Bonds left for free agency - and then the first week of August arrived and they remembered they were the Pirates.It's not even great to be a bridge in the Steel City which, since there is really no steel any more, is more accurately a City of Bridges.Outside the city, in North Beaver township, thieves just stole a 50-foot-long bridge.  The whole thing.  It was a private bridge and made of corrugated steel.  Value?  About $100,000.

Can the Nobel prize be fair today?  I am not talking about the Peace prize, those are always something of a running joke (given the dates of the nominations, for example, and the awards, Pres. Barack Obama seems to have gotten a Peace prize for his inauguration speech) but the actual prizes based on merit and not simply not being George Bush.

Sarah Churman: “I had an implant put in 8 weeks ago called The Esteem Implant by Envoy Medical. I was born deaf and have worn hearing aids from the age of 2, but hearing aids only help so much. I have gotten by this long in life by reading lips. This was taken as they were activating the implant.”Her husband recorded the moment her hearing implant is activated:

As more people sign up for research projects and have their genomes sequenced, an ethical issue will become more prevalent; whether to tell them about mutations that might affect them or their families.The law says an independent lab has to confirm any results, or the paper is published, and that makes sense but concern arises about exceptional circumstances - at Nature, Erika Check Hayden writes about researchers who discovered a pregnant mother was carrying a genetic mutation linked to Ogden syndrome, that had caused cardiac death in babies in the person's family before their first birthday.

People want to live in important times and no one has more acolytes than Steve Jobs - he can do no wrong.  When he was caught illegally giving himself stock options, which other CEOs went to jail for, he simply gave them back and even his most progressively anti-corporate fans dismissed the problem because the stock did not go down.   

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Defense Sciences Office wants you to rethink underwear - but be revolutionary, not evolutionary. They like saying that before they give all the money to multi-billion dollar companies anyway.  And no nanotech muscle suits that deflect bullets or hydraulic-powered exoskeleton suits or super-strength cyborg penguin suits - as Wired notes, those have all been done.Instead, they want something that will 'harvest energy'.