Simon Baron-Cohen,  Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor labeled by fans as a world expert in autism and developmental psychopathology, says evil doesn't explain...evil.He thinks the word is a leftover from an ancient time and the concept should be rebranded as something new, something you should, well, buy his book about.

Neurowear of Japan have created “necomimi” (neco and mimi being the words for cat and ear)  which takes brain signals and, they say, turns them into visible actions in the form of wiggling cat ears.Really, do I need to write anything else?   They say it has practical applications, like allowing mentally disabled people to show their feelings, but we all know it is really just a way for Japanese gearheads to make every female in Japan look 13.

Lou Gehrig, "The Iron Horse" first baseman for the New York Yankees, had played for 2,130 consecutive games and endured any number of sprains, bumps, bruises and illness.  It was a shock when it finally ended, with him telling his coach, in his understated way, he wasn't "feeling well."

It may seem silly to have to say this, but in a culture where science and politics are often mish-mashed, climatologists and meteorologists are noting that the recent devastating tornadoes were not caused or aggravated by global warming.  Hey, if you saw an "Inconvenient Truth" and images of Hurricane Katrina, making it look like global warming was to blame for the destruction, you can understand why scientists are in the uncomfortable position of having to deny things no one has yet asked about.

Politicians want to control their image - and that means controlling the media when they can.   And when they can't, that means removing a highly respected journalist in one of the most liberal cities in the country, one that voted 80% for Barack Obama during the 2008 election - and even re-elected Nancy Peloso in 2010.Part of the press' job is to strip away the cloaks and veneers politicians and their media flaks create.    But they have rules and one of them is that if you are a 'pen and pad' reporter, you shouldn't take video with your phone, it seems - especially if the video is a protester of Pres. Obama.

A short in a switchbox or an electrical line appears to be the reason one of the  heaters for the fuel line powering one of Endeavour's three auxiliary power units failed.   The heaters keep the hydrazine from freezing on orbit.  Thus, the mission has been scrubbed.The power units provide hydraulic pressure to the main engines at liftoff and to the rudder and speed brake during landing and for redundancy all needed to be functional in order to give the go-ahead for Endeavour, 
the shuttle built to replace the Challenger shuttle destroyed during liftoff in 1986, to return to the International Space Station for its last mission in its 19-year history. 

Apple now admits that iPhones store location information and plan a patch to scale back their data collection but also say it was no big deal.   Steve Jobs, however, reportedly claimed “We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.”

European scientists are taking to the people to protest the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which would ban patents on embryonic stem cell-related technologies.Their contention; it would hurt large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer,  AstraZeneca and Roche.   They say without patents drug companies will not pursue life-saving treatments because there is no profit.   It stands to reason that would apply to all of health care.  Maybe those Europeans are onto something letting the private sector handle all that stuff.

Google traffic to Demand Media sites is down 40 percent and other content farms seem to be following, according to an analysis by Experian Hitwise.  They looked at downstream traffic from Google, what sites users visit after visiting Google.com and Demand dropped from 0.57 in January to 0.34 percent last week, a 40 percent decline from the start of 2011.That means their Panda upgrade to penalize content farms and (hopefully) make way for quality sites like ours to show up in the best results, and not just the best-SEO results, is having some impact.

If you read How Is The Date Of Easter Calculated? The Science Answer you learned about astronomy and why Christians established the paschal full moon after the vernal equinox as Easter - Christ was resurrected on a Sunday and died on a Friday, the paschal full moon was the date of Passover in the Jewish calendar, and the Last Supper (what Christians call Holy Thursday) occurred on the Passover.