Though Dr. Oz made a valiant effort at rehabilitating his reputation by appearing contrite in an NBC interview and conceding that his stethoscope and medical scrubs are to be taken as simple props, since his goal on "The Dr. Oz Show" is not to discuss medicine, but his bullying of detractors on his own program didn't go without notice.He may claim anyone who disagrees with him is a shill - though when it comes to GMOs, everyone in science is a shill - but he asks the audience to ignore his many efforts to become a corporate spokesperson in his own right.  And it isn't really a defense if the people on your side are anti-science activists like Lisa Graves, Joel Fuhrman and Gary Ruskin.

In a talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Frisco, archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery of numerous tools at the site of Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 1000 kilometers from Olduvai Gorge. In 2011 they spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and immediately launched a small excavation.The result: Stone flakes dated to 3.3 million years ago, 700,000 years older than the oldest-known tools to date and hundreds of thousands of years before our genus Homo even arrived.“The artifacts were clearly knapped [created by intentional flaking] and not the result of accidental fracture of rocks,” Harmand told the meeting.

Is there still bias in academic science? There is definitely unequal representation in some areas. The social sciences, for example, is 70 percent women while physics is 70 percent men, but there is no evidence that either gender is being blocked out.Instead, there is second order sociological claims of stereotype threat, with the NSF funding games like Gender Bias Bingo, but there is little evidence that there is still bias - instead, studies for years have shown that women have been over-represented in hiring. The numbers remain unequal because academics get tenure, and people are working longer than ever, so men still have more jobs - but when new jobs open up, women have been more likely to get them.

 India has once again had enough of Greenpeace. They suspended froze Greenpeace India’s bank accounts and essentially labeled them fifth columnists who put a political agenda of the best interests of Indian people.If not for the rapes on buses if women are out after 9PM it sounds like they are interested in joining the developed world - science is a competitive advantage, something that Europe has forgotten in its conservative efforts to retreat into the past.

We want to protect consumers from product misbranding and adulteration and so the Code of Federal Regulations, which govern 'standards of identity', was born in 1938. Yet what laws never account for is "innovation" and the modern environmental movement, with its food identity fetish, exploits that bureaucracy - for everything except organic food, anyway. Organic lobbyists control a sub-committee that controls the dozens of synthetic ingredients that can be allowed into organic food and keep their $100 billion business going and will sue to keep the USDA from being involved.

Geochemical tests on a burial box found in a tomb in 1980 have renewed questions about whether Jesus Christ was buried there. If he was buried there, in a family grave, there was no resurrection, The ossuaries have names like “Jesus son of Joseph”, “James son of Joseph brother of Jesus” and “Mary”, which is so conveniently consistent with the New Testament it could be a George Lucas film plot.

According to a new study of Olympic athletes, about 25 percent of swimmers had verified asthma. What is odd is that it is more common in athletes from some parts of the world than others which would seem to eliminate intensity of swimmer training, or long hours spent in the water, which may expose swimmers to more chlorine byproducts  - unless Olympic swimmers in some parts of the world do not train as hard.It could be that people with asthma self-select swimming. It could be that some have a doctor's note so they can use inhalers that are otherwise banned. 

Tripp Keber, the CEO of Dixie Brands, Inc., among the biggest names in Colorado’s legal pot business, says there will soon be legal THC-infused luxury consumer packaged goods in 27 states.And the big reason they will be so popular is because the culture war on smoking, funding by fines and taxes on cigarettes companies in the billions of dollars. has convinced the public that not inhaling cigarettes will prevent every kind of cancer - and therefore anything else goes.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/baseball-stats/?utm_content=buffer77f36&ut… the 1980s, sabermetrics, statistical analysis of baseball, was generally derided by scouts and general managers, even though baseball was the most quantified sport in the world.By the early 1990s, the use of statistics was so well known that Fantasy Baseball started an entire fantasy sports industry, what had once been the domain of Strat-O-Matic and computer simulations became available for real world players in real time and by the mid-1990s it was so popular that the very people who pioneered it dropped out, because baseball was being done by spreadsheets and people who had little love for the game.

Starbucks, the one place in the world where you can order a cup of whipped cream with a shot of caramel syrup and call it coffee, is ready to make you healthy. Fresh off its universally applauded "Race Together" campaign, which forced the wrong advocates to get in the face of the wrong audience in the wrong venue to talk about racism in the least racist country in the world, now they want to be pushy about the amount of vegetables you're eating every day. And they are doing it with kale.