Maybe political correctness can get an autistic student voted prom king?   Only in Hollywood movies.  In real life, high schoolers can be vicious.    But for one socially awkward young man, diagnosed as autistic at a young age, high school has been pretty good and he was well regarded enough that his peers at Mariner High School. voted him prom king.There may be some political correctness at the administrative level - kids like Justin Amandro are in the Exceptional Student Education program while they call the students without any sort of disability regular, which is confusing to non-Americans - but the students do the voting and they clearly like him and took the time to see past a label.

What do you get when you add 1 billion daily Google searches,  60 million Facebook status updates, 50 million tweets and 250 billion emails per day?A whole lot of melting glaciers, that's what.   While activists are happy about the Depression-era economy and its drop in carbon emissions, the one area of business still working, the Internet, is now getting an evil gaze.   The Internet has become the fastest growing source of carbon emissions - if the Internet was a country, it would be the planet's fifth-biggest consumer of power, ahead of India and Germany.   And that's only going to grow more.

Like fresh fish?  Apparently so did the Romans, to such an extent a hydraulic system found on an ancient wreck suggests they must have hauled live fish across the Mediterranean for sale and trade.Consisting of a pumping system designed to suck the sea water into a fish tank, the apparatus has been reconstructed by a team of Italian researchers who analyzed a unique feature of the wreck: a lead pipe inserted in the hull near the keel.Roman Ship Carried Live Fish Tank - Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News

Cranky militant females in science resent the heck out of attractive women who are also smart - they insist it is objectification but really it is plain old discrimination to demean the intellectual accomplishments of a woman just because she has great legs - no differently than it would be to understate the intellectual accomplishments of a woman, or anyone else, if they didn't have great legs.To encourage tolerance and diversity in science, we present the latest in the Science Cheerleader pantheon of women who are in the science field and can kick a hole through a wall with their legs - Mariela:

Colombian immigrant Carolina Salguero came to the U.S. as a teenager, alone and not knowing any English, but she did have a dream: to study science.Yesterday, 28-year-old Salguero graduated from Hunter College with a double major in biochemistry and economics - and a full scholarship to Harvard awaits.  Salguero's parents sent her from Colombia to Miami - alone - at 16 and she spent eight years wandering and finally got the chance to pursue her science dream at age 24, when Hunter College gave her a science scholarship.  

Extraterrestrial life gets invoked in some study or another every three months - astrobiology approaches astronomy levels of hype with its over-the-top claims about incremental studies. But a rock wall in a South African mine near where "radiation eating microbes" were found a mile underground may be something else entirely.   

Erica Jong, most famous (I think) for "Fear of Flying" and generally for talking about sex at a time when it was daring, has a daughter Molly , who contributed a piece for a new collection of essays edited by Jong called "Sugar in my Bowl: Real Women Write about Real Sex".   And it begins...

The wizards at the Czech Technical University's Department of Control Engineering created a machine to show off how their servo motors can be used for precision tasks - and so they made it juggle.  Juggling is, of course, both easy and hard.  Anyone can do it, like playing golf, but doing it will is something else entirely.  Jugglers often have to move to keep the balls in the air because of subtle changes in throwing force and angle.  Not so this Juggler machine:

I get why New York people read the New York Times, what I don't get is why people elsewhere read it - and I have said publicly I am sure many in science would happily trade a 3-day waiting period on gun purchases if the NY Times would agree to a 3-day wait period on its science stories; in both cases so the suspects can be investigated thoroughly.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has created another cultural tizzy because some people persist in an irrational belief that anyone in the UN knows anything about anything. Recently, WHO issued a fuzzy statement saying maybe, perhaps, alarmism about cellphones and cancer was right after all.   This, despite no quantitative data, no published study, no absolute risk factor and even no definition of "limited evidence" hidden in a footnote