When the traditional American mafia was at its apex, they would 'launder' their money through legitimate businesses. If a mafia drug lord wanted to have anything approaching a worthwhile life, cars and rings and goomahs, but did not want to go the route of Al Capone and be busted for tax evasion, he had to find a way to make enough money appear to be legitimate that the illegal money can be used. So they would invest in businesses that provided them with income that could be taxed and explain their lifestyles, allowing them to use the much greater illegal money.

If you make an arbitrary decision not to vaccinate your child, and a bunch of people get sick, should you go to jail, just like if you starve a child or let them live in feces?

Though we once got a promise to restore science to its rightful place, instead it looks more and more of the same anti-science mentality we got from President Clinton in the 1990s: Catering to environmental fringe groups - even going to far as declaring a small oyster farm "heavy industry" in order to shut them down.Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, as staunch a liberal as we can get, tried to take a stand for science and small business but was unable to prevent the Department of the Interior from "using scientifically unsound, and at times bizarre, tactics to prove the oyster farm had to go."

Science media is a tough place to be independent and it just got tougher. Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, the part of the family company that owns Nature and Scientific American and others, with 
Springer Science+Business Media, investment banked by BC Partners. Macmillan Science and Education, namely Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and the global businesses of Macmillan Education will all be under the same banner.

Spores on the conidiophores of the fungus Penicillium notatum. Dr. Fred Hossler/Visuals Unlimited/CorbisWe used to recycle patient urine - to get penicillin.Why? Because in 1940, during a World War, it was an intensive process. Getting usable penicillin from Penicillium notatum mold was no easy feat, says PBS: “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”

Real Clear Science editors curate science stories from all over the world so they read outside the lines of corporate or government-controlled science media. That means they are going to find things we may not find on our own. To close out 2014, editors collated the most intriguing articles, on everything from ball lightning to DNA, and gathered them into one piece. So you won't have to read for 365 days to learn what happened, you can read for one.Top 10 Science Stories of 2014

The Food Babe, Vani Hari, recently got renewed attention for a post she wrote in 2011 about the perils of air travel. Like much of what she says, it was unmitigated nonsense except for obvious stuff, like 'drink water' and move around every 30 minutes. Those are fine, though 150 people getting up in a tiny walkway every 30 minutes because they drank all that water is going to be nothing short of hilarious.

California is no stranger to anti-science beliefs; from anti-vaccine to anti-agriculture to anti-energy, you can stick a pin in a map of the coast and find alarmingly one-sided views on politics, medicine and science.

Do you have a hypothesis but think replication is a waste of time? Do you have no underlying theoretical basis for your field but feel like your particular study is well-controlled?You may not be as scientific as you think you are.

California has a lot of quirks that outside people jeer at. There is no defending it, when people ask about California, I simply tell them 'all of the weird things and the good things you hear are true.'One of the biggest cultural disconnects is that Californians will promote tolerance and diversity and choice by banning everything. This downward spiral did not happen in the 1960s - the hippie movement was mythologized but it was more of a New York thing than a San Francisco one, Frisco just had better public relations.