A winged ant queen fossilized in 49.5-million-year-old Wyoming rock ranks as the first body of a giant ant from the Western Hemisphere.Its new moniker?   Titanomyrma lubei.And they didn't even have to get all sweaty to find it.   The new fossil caught paleoentomologist Bruce Archibald of Simon Fraser University’s eye as he and coauthor Kirk Johnson poked around storage drawers at the Denver Museum of Nature&Science, where Johnson works. 

Since 1988, students at the University of Arizona were given a questionnaire in order to determine their attitudes toward science and pseudoscience, as well as examine their basic scientific knowledge.   Hadas Shema, Information Science PhD student, tackles those results and compares them to similar NSF studies.   The results show a large amount of pseudo-scientific acceptance.Should it be surprising?   Perhaps not.  Students are supposed to be open to knowledge and learning early in their college days and a lot of those students will be in the humanities and unfamiliar with what makes science into science.

"Within human culture, the hymen has great significance for its perceived correlation to female sexual status. For many cultures, the presence of an intact hymen before marriage suggests purity and cleanliness. Outside of weddings and marriage, hymens have also had cultural relevance as the word “hysteria” is derived from womb-fury, which was associated with the hymen."Really, if that hasn't grabbed your attention, I don't know what will.  Enjoy the fun aquatic ape reference also. The Curious Case of the Present Hymen

Science 2.0 fave Darlene Cavalier, the Science Cheerleader, has big news.   The “Science of NFL Football”series, produced by NBC Learn, NBC Sports and the National Science Foundation in partnership with Science Cheerleader and the NFL, won a Sports Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for Outstanding New Approaches Sports Programming.Gooooooo, Darlene!  Gooooooooo science!

Everyone issues forth platitudes about how science should be more 'open' and, in a world of social media, it will certainly stay harder to remain closed.A few weeks ago, a leak about a possible new discovery (for the comprehensive explanation from a member of the collaboration, see Tommaso Dorigo) set the media aflame.    A preliminary document seemed to show γ-rays from a decaying Higgs particle with a mass of 115 gigaelectronvolts and the details about what it really or really was are best left to experts like Tommaso but the issue here is, will open science, part of the Science 2.0 vision, make any headway or not?  

From BathMums, a brewing controversy over a baby friendly cafe for new mothers that has suddenly started charging a 'corkage' fee (if you are unfamiliar with the term, it is a fee a restaurant charges if you bring your own wine to go with your meal rather than buying it from the restaurant) to mothers who bring their own baby food.Jika Jika, means "twist" in Zulu so it's no surprise.   The obvious question is, what's next?   Will mothers get charged for breast feeding too?

Ethan Siegel is not the most popular writer on Scienceblogs.com but he may consistently be the most enlightening.    He writers that the future of particle physics is commonly believed to be either going from the Large Hadron Collider to a Very Large Hadron Collider for protons, or going back to electrons and building a huge Linear Collider. There is another option, he says. What if we could find a particle that had the best of both worlds? 

You know times are hard when thieves are stealing research bees.  It may make sense, though, since in the modern world stealing money is hard - no one carries money - and you'd have to be an elite computer hacker to get anything from a bank.

About women and lesbian sex, 'an experimental phase in college' is a litany in humor circles.  When it comes to casual sex among women, everyone seems to have an opinion, a statistic, and evidence, be it anecdotal or scientific. And no one is sure how "lesbians" and "lesbian sex" are qualified and quantified in any of these research missions. Writing in The Edge, Stephanie Schroeder says that as lesbian sex and homosexuality become more accepted, the popular perception of young lesbians as experimental consumers of casual sex is going away.

Does torture work?  Hard to say, it certainly has proponents and the line of where people would use it versus the lives it might save is a subjective one but certainly whether it works at all can be solved using the scientific method, right?Alex Berezow, writing in The American Spectator, proposes a randomized controlled trial(!)He says, since we already have the participants at Guantanamo Bay and they are terrorists, 50% of them will be better off if a controlled trial gives them rewards (like cookies and milk) versus getting dunked into the sink.   Then we see who gives up the better data.