I occasionally get questions about usage of Science 2.0 that go beyond the FAQ so I decided I would write up a short article on using the site for non-beginners.   The FAQ covers the basics - what Science 2.0® is, the experimental nature of this open writing site for science, etc. along with the basic functionality, like the dashboard - but due to the way the site has grown some other features may not be evident for newer members.

How to find good stuff to write about?

There was a time a few years ago when the music industry was in the doldrums.   They blamed MP3 piracy, though it made no sense unless you were the kind of person who believes 'jobs saved or created' is also a valid metric for beneficial impact of government stimulus plans - basically, claiming that every pirated piece of music was a lost sale was unrealistically hopeful.   Most pirates may download something, but they weren't going to buy it anyway.

Yet capitalism began to reshape the music industry even when they couldn't figure out how themselves.  iTunes made it elegant for people to buy songs, and so they did, and now capitalism is at work in the music itself.    

It's been a mantra that more money has to be spent on outreach for women in academia, or even quotas implemented.  Why?   Women PhDs are now the majority, at least in the US.   This was an obvious trend since there were more underclass and graduate program females (60%).

But like any sort of cultural agenda, it is perpetual, so now it will be the case that not enough department heads are female.  This was the same in the NBA, where after it became 70% black there were no calls to recruit more whites or latinos, but rather calls to have 70% of the coaches be black.

Does expertise make the difference?   It depends.   When it comes to climate change, having a Ph.D. and a faculty position does not mean as much to the public as it does for researchers in other fields.

The difference?  Climate change researchers are perceived as being part of the cultural discourse rather than part of the objective science one, so if the scientist is taking a position different from yours, he is not an expert, he is just in the mud with politicians and environmental or industrial corporations trying to get money. Unfortunately, the same is true for both sides in the global warming discussion, and that is bad for science all the way around.

Even though Halley's Comet has a regular orbit it's not an easy task to map its appearances throughout history - and it may be that one of those appearances matches an ancient Greek testimony and has only now been realized, write Daniel W. Graham and Eric Hintz in the Journal of Cosmology, which would make it the first scientific claim about the famous extraterrestrial event.

In 1705, Edmond Halley used Newtonian theory and predicted the return of a comet seen in 1682.  It did return as predicted, in 1758, putting Halley on the stellar map and driving a stake into the evil hearts of competing theories to Newton.