Science 2.0

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Asteroid 2012 DA14 is not going to hit Earth. The bad news is, even if it were going to hit Earth, it wouldn't happen until February 15th so you will still have to buy a Valentine's Day gift.Asteroid 2012 DA14 was discovered last year, on February 22nd by astronomers at La Sagra Sky Survey observatory near Granada, Spain. Because it is small in size it was only noticed after it had flown past us, but astronomers knew then it would be back, this time much closer.How close? 24,000 KM close.  As in the distance of some satellites. That means you will be able to see it with binoculars.

It's the weekend, which means it is time for scientists, science journalists, book authors and intellectually curious readers to think about microbiology.  And that means beer. Beer is actually safer to drink than water. You didn't know that?  Let's talk some biology.
The master ingredient in beer is yeast. That's a microbe! So if you do experiments with beer this weekend, you are advancing the world of science.  If you make beer, you are a microbiologist.  If you drink beer, you are a microbiologist. Microbiologists understand beer and bacteria and stuff, which is why they drink beer more than water.

President Obama recently got some ridicule for hastily claiming he loved skeet shooting and therefore was not against sportsmen when he wanted to tell Americans they couldn't be trusted to decide how many bullets to buy for their guns.
That he was simultaneously offering bombs and fighter jets to terrorists in Egypt while he didn't trust his own citizens with small arms ammunition was not lost on his critics.

What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate?

Two Asian charities have joined forces with the U.S. National Funeral Directors' Association (NFDA) to get people to start thinking about deathcare rather than healthcare.
No, deathcare is not another tine in Britain's expanding Liverpool Death Pathway fork, it is a chance to think about the way your final exit is made, assuming you were told you are on the NHS' mandatory road to demise in time to plan. 

Medical research is both derided and essential.  The public complains that a new experimental drug is not available due to the FDA being too conservative while also complaining that drugs have too many side effects and companies should be sued over the lack of proper testing before release. In popular television, every show that has a character who enrolls in a medical research trial develops giant boils and body tics, it is a humor standby to show that medical research is only done by the economically desperate. In research itself, scientists trust other scientists little and they trust researchers not under the government umbrella even less. Corporations are bad and pharmaceutical companies worst of all.

Professor Steven Chu, who was appointed Energy Secretary under as much optimism as can be imagined in late 2008, has officially resigned, a move everyone knew was coming.Except for his irrational CO2 fanaticism - an energy Nobel laureate who takes a job in the cabinet has to know we can't just cut off CO2, the way an academic working at a national lab can talk about it - Chu was a much safer choice than the UFO believers and Doomsday prophets the Obama administration was determined to hire after his victory in November of that year.

It's no shock to know there is no anthropology without beer. No history either. Really, it took alcohol to get someone to write down mundane events in longhand.  And beer-making equipment was prized above all else, that is why many of our earliest finds from ancient civilizations have been related to it.

During the short time that Roy Thomas took over as writer of the Fantastic Four from Stan Lee, the original writer, it got a lot better.  I know, I know, that is blasphemy.(1) There is a reason Stan Lee gets a cameo in every movie about every Marvel superhero - he co-created them all, he made them all famous. He is a bigger legend than the guys behind Batman or Superman, his economic impact rivals the GDP of many small nations.Still, when is the last time you read a good Stan Lee comic? Eventually, people are just phoning it in. And that had happened on the Fantastic Four by 1972.

In the United States, billions of dollars have been spent on marketing to convince people to go into science careers, despite the difficulty many PhDs will have finding jobs in academia. That, coupled with the fact that efforts are on to make funding more 'equal' and establish quotas for young researchers, minorities and female grant applicants means a finite funding pool could be even more limited. The best and brightest, regardless of demographics, could end up leaving to other countries where science is more of a meritocracy.

When fiscal hawk Sen. Tom Coburn set his sights on waste (funding humanities nonsense) and duplication at the National Science Foundation, there was outrage that a politician might actually look out for how taxpayer money was used.

Can anyone ever truly take credit for a discovery? Every researcher stands 'on the shoulders of giants', as Sir Isaac Newton said. Scientists talk to each other and argue and hone their thoughts based on the criticisms and reactions they get. No one lives in a bubble and great things happen when a lot of smart people know each other and debate as often as possible.
But when the debates are well-known, it's difficult to assign credit and far too easy to take it away. In modern times, tearing down statues of giants and standing on the rubble happens more often than standing on their shoulders and reaching new heights. And everyone wants to stand on the rubble of Albert Einstein.