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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...

AI And The Poetry Problem

Artificial Intelligence is artificial, but it is not intelligence. That could change some day but...

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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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SETI Participant Claims He Found A Signal From Near Gliese 581 Already

SETI Participant Claims He Found A Signal From Near Gliese 581 Already

Oct 11 2010 | comment(s)

Astronomers are certainly not strangers to manipulating public relations through mass media - they write reasonable papers and then encourage the press to go nuts with it.   Witness the recent arXiv paper by Vogt, Butler, et al on Gliese 581g, should it even exist, which reads
The best typo you will read today

The best typo you will read today

Oct 11 2010 | comment(s)

An article at TBD.com by Amanda Hess is about HIV-positive black gay men.  Okay, so far so good.   But it had an important typo, namely a key letter left out of a word, and the correction at the top now reads:

one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive

If you can't read it ...
Baseball, Vision And Alcohol: Analyzing The Zito Curve

Baseball, Vision And Alcohol: Analyzing The Zito Curve

Oct 10 2010 | comment(s)

This article has basically nothing to do with baseball or Barry Zito's curveball so you can stop reading if that is your interest - or check out  

The Science Of Baseball: What Is The Fastest A Pitcher Can Throw?

The Science Of Baseball: What Is The Farthest Home Run (And Did Mickey Mantle Hit It)?

Does A Curveball In Baseball Really Break?
Welcome to 42

Welcome to 42

Oct 10 2010 | comment(s)

Welcome to October 10th, 2010, 10/10/10, unless you are in Europe, where they will write it 10/10/10 just to be different.  If you are a fan of binary counting, 101010 translated to decimal is...42.   If you are a fan of Douglas Adams, you know that the "answer to life, the universe, and everything" arrived at by the Deep Thought supercomputer was "42" ... after 7+ million years of analysis(1).
Exobiology and Mars - extensive carbonate minerals found

Exobiology and Mars - extensive carbonate minerals found

Oct 10 2010 | comment(s)

A new report in Nature Geoscience says there may be large deposits of carbonate sedimentary rocks a few miles beneath the surface of Mars.

If substantial carbonate minerals exist it might indicate a past surface environment with carbon dioxide, in contrast to its current acidic (and inhospitable) state.  

Researchers Joseph Michalski and Paul B. Niles found evidence for carbonate bedrock deep under the Martian crust and believe the ancient sediments were linked to a volcanic eruption by the Syrtis Major volcano.
Conspiracy Theory - NASA Hiding Alien Life?

Conspiracy Theory - NASA Hiding Alien Life?

Oct 08 2010 | comment(s)

Conspiracy theorists love photo effects.   If you want to see a man on Mars, you will eventually find it.  But if NASA cleans up an image and then posts it, and then a high-contrast photo makes the rather weak lighting look like some anthropomorphized UFO, well, it's a conspiracy.

Face on Mars. Viking mission 1976