Most in science knew this - exaggeration tends to whittle away at the trust level of the public - and a UC Berkeley study set out to determine which worked better, data or dire, in changing hearts and minds about global warming.The result; they found if scientists and advocates communicate their findings regarding climate change in less apocalyptic ways, and present solutions to global warming, even skeptics can get past their skepticism.

Progressive blogging site Huffington Post, valued at $100 million when it last raised venture capital in 2008, is getting sued by two consultants who say it was their idea and they went to Arianna Huffington and Ken Lerer with a plan and had a handshake agreement to work together, according to a lawsuit to be filed in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.But Peter Daou and James Boyce were then boxed out, they contend, and Huffington tells a different tale about the origins of the site.   

During the collision of India with the Eurasian continent, the Indian plate was pushed about 500 kilometers under Tibet, reaching a depth of 250 kilometers. The result of the world's largest collision was the world's highest mountain range but that isn't the end of the story. Cut to 2004 and a tsunami that made world headlines ...

A Chinese team's brain imaging device has come under question from developers of a U.S. device who say it's a near duplicate of theirs, LiveScience has learned. An article on the Chinese device was published in Science.According to the report online in Science Nov. 4th, the Chinese imaging device used a diamond knife to shave ribbons off a centimeter-size mouse brain and imaged the slices during the process, which allowed the Chinese team to create a 3-D map of the brain that revealed details as small as the axons and dendrites — the circuitry that transmits signals between brain cells — as a step in the race to map the connections in the brain.

A year ago, you probably did not know what a vuvuzela was but, if you read this site during the World Cup, you know it now.Turns out so do a lot of other people.  The Global Language Monitor, which analyzes trends in word usage (read: English) says Vuvuzela was among the top new terms of the year, along with Tea Party and others, while last year Twitter and H1N1 were big winners.

A Japanese physics team have turned theory into reality and, more importantly, information into energy.   By applying an electric field to a lattice of tiny plastic beads, they were able to extract more work from their experiment than they put into the apparatus.It looks like that old Maxwell's Demon just got chased a little further into one side of the room.Science 2.0 fave Dan Vergano has the story at USA Today.

Are you willing to switch to an @Facebook.com e-mail address?Email wars, which have been dormant since the 1990s, appear to be back and social-networking behemoth Facebook is leading the charge.  But it isn't just mail, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and it's more than just chat.   It has messaging across a variety of platforms, including SMS and texting conversation history across those platforms and a "social in-box", so people can parse messages from friends and family before the inbox.

It's a funny title but the meaning is more serious; Surgical items, such as sponges and small instruments, left in the bodies of children who undergo surgery are uncommon and rarely fatal but obviously dangerous and expensive mistakes, according to a Johns Hopkins Children's Center study.Those kinds of errors added an average of eight days to a young patient's hospital stay and nearly $36,000 in extra hospital charges.

At Oddee, Gracie Murano has compiled 10 Bizarre Medical Discoveries, among them items like "asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride" and coffee drinkers are more likely to have hallucinations.

Facebook may have gotten metadata right, says Tyler Bell on O'Reilly Radar.   Facebook's OpenGraph Protocol is neither open nor a protocol but is an extremely straightforward and applicable standard for document metadata.Where the semantic web collapsed - greater interest in standardization and semantic purity than ease-of-use - linked data may succeed.  "Where the semantic web stumbled, linked data will succeed" - Tyler Bell on O'Reilly Radar