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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 »

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Since it's the weekend and you are reading this, you are intellectually curious about science, which means there is also a statistical likelihood you enjoy beer.

Because of the natural confluence of interests that cause science and beer to go hand-in-hand, we have written a lot of articles about beer.
Sometimes you put things in the platform of a political party because it's a lot of drama to exclude them even if you don't really believe.  So we get hilarity like last week, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney disavowing some of his own platform (he doesn't believe it all personally, he said) and then this week the Democrats had the same problem; The official platform of the Democratic National Convention decided Jerusalem was no longer the capitol of Israel and they removed any mention of God.
If you, like me, are possessed with that gene that makes people eat the whole bag of chips (don't laugh - somewhere in that 100,000 words of ENCODE public relations blitzing, I saw it), there is good news; not all of science is busy curing cancer and solving the big mysteries of the universe.
If you've been in science media for any length of time, there are two arguments you will hear invoked to support almost any questionable position; that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk and that Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church.

One of those is wrong; Galileo was not actually oppressed by a Church, he was really oppressed by fellow scientists(1) , the Pope was actually quite supportive of Galileo but fellow scientists were looking for ways to torpedo him. Yet colloquially, Galileo is held up as this sort of 'religion against science' example in a way that shows many people believe it was some sort of unscientific Dark Age prior to his arrival.  Not true at all.
 
Dr. Brian Wansink, professor of marketing  and director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab, has tackled weighty issues such as what the paintings of "The Last Supper" can tell us about their diets, how kitchen spoons could be poisoning children and why we all think vegetarians are sissies.(1)
Being on a UN committee to discuss climate change must be a lot of fun; you get to fly to exotic locations and no one ever expects you to get anything done.  I guess that applies to the UN overall.

Bangkok held the latest meeting that accomplished nothing and everyone is gearing up now for the annual UN summit in Doha later this year, where the exciting news will be that they will take no further action on climate change this decade. Countries of the world, witness your tax dollars at work.