California, the U.S. state in the midst of a budget deficit that would make third world nations cringe, didn't stop finding ways to tinker with an already perilous economy.   100 watt incandescent bulbs will no longer be allowed to be sold along with over 720 other laws the legislature found time to pass while being unable to approve a budget.

Like the right, the left has its anti-science contingent and agriculture is ground zero for the zealots in the environmental movement.   To be sure, any science that is misused can have devastating consequences but genetically modified foods - those that can resist blight or grow in poor climates - have done a lot of good for feeding poor people and had no ill effects whereas so-called 'organic' food can only be purchased for reasonable cost by those fortunate enough to live near it.    

Ancient rock art in Western Australia has maintained its colors because it is alive, researchers have determined.   Obviously most art fades in a few hundred years but the "Bradshaw art" has looked good for 40,000.Bacteria and fungi have made homes in there, preserving the color, though making it difficult to accurately date.   A black fungus like Chaetothyriales cannibalizes its ancestors, making a 'biofilm' that can muddy the waters for research.

Broken glass isn't some hysterical metaphor by zealots who hate business, a PNAS study found that microscopic particles of dust emitted into the atmosphere when dirt breaks apart follow similar fragment patterns as broken glass and other brittle objects.Dust is important in the study of atmospheric cause and effect because it is not just a big issue, like climate change and the resulting global warming/cooling/variation (your choice, depending on whether or not you are buried in snow at the moment) but also in weather forecasting (so you would have known you were going to be buried in snow during the third warmest year recently).

It's not going to be a surprise to anyone that Julian Assange has become a classic paranoid, especially given the business he has chosen for himself.    You don't publish stolen secret documents without worrying a little - or a lot.Now he is worried that if the UK extradites him to the US for espionage he will be killed "Jack Ruby-style" - a reference to the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald before he could stand trial for the murder of President John F Kennedy.The Kennedy assassination and then-murder of his shooter has been fodder for conspiracy theorists since it happened in 1963.

Things probably looked rather good for Germany in 1941.   Hitler hadn't been wrong yet and Regular Army leaders like Guderian had make him look smart, with runaway successes through the low countries and France - meanwhile, he believed it would take years for the U.S. to mobilize for war and the true morass of the Russian campaign was not known yet.

It turns out I am not the only person suspicious of "URL shorteners" designed to make very long links into shorter, manageable ones.    On a service like Twitter, where communications are limited to 140 characters, shorteners are absolutely necessary and utilities like TweetDeck build them in for you automatically.For people you know, shorteners are obviously fine, because there is an element of trust.   For strangers, though, I never click on shortened URLs because the URL can usually tell me something about the link.

Every government has UFO files.   That doesn't mean they have aliens hidden in secret, underground lairs or futuristic spaceships being studied, but they have various claims of UFOs by citizens.UFO technically still means just unidentified - the kookier sorts infer that always to mean alien flying saucers.

Really, no one needs to add anything to the title to make it funnier but the fact that the CIA, with its vast store of intellectual talent, didn't figure its WikiLeaks Task Force and acronym WTF would get chuckles in the Internet age makes it that much more humorous.The WikiLeaks Task Force is no laughing matter, of course - it was created to ferret out the source of 250,000 leaked U.S. diplomatic cables and determine their impact, and it was also partly created because WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an annoying prat.

Atsuo Takanishi from Waseda University in Tokyo says that walking on the moon is harder than running due to the low gravity - and for robots even worse.   His work simulates robotic movement in low gravity and he has determined the solution to keeping robots like the WABIAN-2R bipedal robot moving may be jumping with 'feet' together rather than leaping from foot to foot.New Scientist has the story.