Fake Banner
Marijuana For ADHD?

Cannabis and THC, its main psychoactive compound, have been endorsed by people suffering from anxiety...

Rutgers Study - Forcing DEI Programs On People Increases Hostility

If you have done nothing wrong, do you want to be treated like a criminal? That was always the...

Minnesota Trial Lawyers Want To Ban Neonics - Here Is Why That Is A Mistake

Minnesota is having a challenging year, so challenging they are approaching California as the wackiest...

The Toxic Masculinity Of Disney Movies

Once upon a time, stories were just stories. They were fantasies that took people to a new world...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Robert H Olleypicture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Ilias Tyrovolaspicture for Fred Phillipspicture for
Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Blogroll
Credit: Millionaire Chess tournament

When I was a kid, no one outside Texas played Texas Hold 'Em. We played Stud, we played Draw, we played Liar's, but not Hold 'Em.

Like Esther Williams movies and organic food, some things just make their way into pop culture and there is no rational reason why. Texas Hold 'Em is now the most popular card game in the country, every month or so our neighborhood gets together at one of our homes and puts in 20 bucks each and we go at it.

Credit: Shutterstock

One thing certain about nature - it sure isn't efficient. Just take a look at the human male reproductive system and you get the idea that if it was designed, it was designed by fish, and on a dare. It is a problem waiting to happen, but evolution is about the survival of the fitter, not the fittest - and then we add in some random walks and mutations. 
The 21st century promises to bring a kind of science warfare only dreamed about in science fiction. Already it's become clear that it is possible to paralyze a large chunk of America and get policymakers in perpetual crisis mode, even with something as well-known as ebola.(1)

That kind of threat is getting mainstream attention now, but it has long been researched by government agencies that are in the business of predicting threats. And scientists working for them have recently created a hybrid bacteria - a cyborg mix of computer chip and genetically modified organism - that can not only detect infectious diseases but automatically mobilize to defeat them. This ain't your daddy's Deathlok.(2)
Dr. Steve McKnight is President of the American Society For Biochemistry And Molecular Biology and chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of Texas-Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He has probably also made a few enemies among young researchers in the society he manages. 

California Governor Jerry Brown has sided with the usually-anti-science National Resources Defense Council and vetoed a bill that would have forced factory farms to adhere to US Food and Drug Administration standards.

Yes, the governor of California and the NRDC don't want farms to use FDA guidelines.

A few years ago, Susan Greenfield said something zany, even for Susan Greenfield: that the rise in autism diagnoses were related to the Internet.

As Robery Olley once noted, she is the scholar who in 1994 during her famed Royal Institution Christmas Lecture claimed that playing Prokofiev at half speed was linked to suicide. That was not a shock to music listeners but it was to serious scholars.