Two weeks ago I got a call inviting me to attend one of the inauguration balls for President Obama. But it wasn't to be held in Washington, D.C. it was in Texas.

Texas? you might think, but aren't Democrats irrelevant in Texas, almost as irrelevant as Republicans are in California?

Jared Diamond is not impressed by modern social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, because of the need to try and make claims about human nature by doing surveys or visiting a place and then framing the results through their own - not to invoke the most overused cliché of 2012 but just this once it fits - motivated reasoning.

The reaction from the social sciences and the mainstream media elites who need the social sciences to seem science-y was about what you would expect to him making his case yet again: 'shallow' and that he doesn't understand what it means 'to study human diversity' - in other words, he is a geography teacher trying to invade the big pants super-scientific world of anthropology.  

You can stop laughing now.

The rumor mill has it that Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Science 2.0 fave Mendeley, a platform academics use to collate PDFS and share research and collaborate via a social network (and a terrific company all the way around, in my opinion). 

TechCrunch says that the sale might close by the end of February and could be in the region of $100 million. But they also say Mendeley has closed a recent round of funding for ~<$10 million. The company has only publicly disclosed raising $2 million.