The IPCC's head should quit to avoid harming the global warming cause further, says Geoffrey Lean.

It’s an 80-year-old illustration showing the largest animals and plants in the world. The ugly little secret is item no. 10, that totally unnoticeable line in the middle of the picture just below the dinosaur and the snake.The image first appeared in H.G. Wells, J.S. Huxley and G. P. Well’s book "The Science of Life", published in 1931.

Consider this sad fact: 15 years into the era of Web publishing, most print publications still don’t link at all from inside the text of their articles posted online. They began shoveling their print stories, sans links, into the content-management system way back when; today, they’re shoveling still. How did we get here? 

If you are anti-military this is not for you but if you've ever shot competition rifle, or just have an appreciation for anyone who is among the best at what they do, you can appreciate this Marine sniper who takes out a target over a mile away - through a brick wall.  The tactical breathing issues alone to make a shot from a mile away are unfathomable.    Better: after he makes the shot, the sniper stays there for another 12 hours.   I don't recommend doing this at your local shooting range, even if they have a .50 cal.  Why?   The air will positively shimmer when that thing goes off and the recoil, even with a low-recoil gas system, will make inexperienced shooters physically ill.

With Phil Plait getting his own TV show this weekend, look for new homages ... but why would anyone want to be bad?  I am not sure, though when you make something popular people will copy it, often for the best of reasons.We even had a Bad Archaeology here years ago, for an article anyway.   Will we now change our name to Bad Science 2.0?   We don't like Phil that much.

A robotic hand attached to a small helicopter can successfully and autonomously grip objects while the helicopter is hovering(link to video there too) ...Article: Paul E.I. Pounds and Aaron M. Dollar,  Hovering Stability of Helicopters with Elastic Constraints, proceedings of the 2010 ASME Dynamics Systems and Control Conference (DSCC 2010).

Britons may be famous for their lack of fashion sense but they may have inherited one of their biggest sartorial crimes, wearing socks with sandals, from Italians.

From Daily Life in an Ivory Basement:I'm a big believer in open science...but it's always interesting to think about how such things as "data release" can be perverted by clever scientists. I'm currently in France working on some ascidians with Billie Swalla...and we've been talking about what data we plan to release, and how. During these talks...Billie brought up an interesting historical parallel.Read more

Here's a  video showing how many asteroids we’ve discovered since 1980.  Is it accurate? No idea but we want it to be accurate, which is good enough.

In the interest of your to-do list (and wallet), we’ve adapted Stephen Covey's best-selling self-help book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" to create The Seven Habits of a Highly Successful Scientist…