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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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What draws people to communal rituals has long been a topic of interest to sociologists and anthropologists.  What draws people to a communal ritual like walking on hot coals is a topic of interest for, well, everyone.   We all are fascinated by it but few want to do it, yet it has been going on (that we know of) since 1200 B.C.
With Osama Bin Laden dead, conspiracy theorists will find a way to say it isn't him at all.   Sure, a 6'4" thin guy can be replaced by decoys rather easily but science has come a long way since the September 11th, 2001 attacks that took Bin Laden from being a famous terrorist to being infamous - though given recent developments in the middle East and Africa, Bin Laden has ironically done more to promote democracy in the region than anyone, since the establishment of two democracies in retaliation for regional support for Bin Laden has had a domino effect.

Visual identification by a SEAL team (not seeing his face but actual facial recognition technology), and confirmation by a local is good, but not always enough to satisfy everyone.  
In 2008, when concerns about the birth place of future nominee and then campaign winner Barack Obama first surfaced, most felt like he should just show a birth certificate.   He didn't want to 'dignify' it then, to a point where it has dogged him for years and finally he showed the document, laying the issue to rest for all but the kookiest on the right.  
David Crotty at the scholarly kitchen says that Science 2.0 is a failure.   Like many who use it off-the-cuff, I don't know how he is using the term - I usually do a global replace of 'Smurf' for Science 2.0 in these instances because Science 2.0, like Smurfs(1), seems to be whatever people want it to be.   If you are not old enough to remember the mythology of Smurfs, it makes less sense, but you can more topically replace Science 2.0 with "jobs created or saved" in the stimulus package last year and get an idea what I mean about definitions tailored to suit the environment that exists at any given moment.
Science 2.0 Featured Author Greg Critser isn't satisfied being a respected journalist for the LA Times, the Times of London and the New York Times along with selling a lot of books, so he has branched out into the world of being a celebrity chef.

Yes, I said celebrity chef.   In television, actors and managers generally tell the talent it is a bad idea to be in a show with kids and dogs.   I suspect celebrity chefs have a similar rule, namely that you don't try to make pasta live.
Citing a lack of revenue, the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California has shut down the Allen Telescope Array of radio dishes that have been scanning the skies for signals from extraterrestrial life for decades.

And that's the problem, isn't it?   As optimistic as it sounds to laypeople, the success metric was that a civilization more than 400 years away - because we know there are none closer - would have to have sent low-tech radio signals to a planet that lacked the technology to receive radio signals when they sent them.   The aliens basically would have needed to know the future, which means they didn't need radio waves.