Extinction is nothing new; more than 99% of all species that have ever lived we will never know about.  Extinction is entirely natural and, if you've ever watched someone's car weaving on the highway while they talk on the phone and drink a coffee, you have probably hoped it will remain a fundamental process of evolution.

But survival of the fitter(1) can be a fickle mistress.  Why, after 800,000 years of successful survival did the Hundsheim rhino (Stephanorhinus hundsheimensis) suddenly and irrecoverably disappear?

It's no secret social media is big - every marketing group latches on to the latest fad (even us - we gots the Tweetypages, we gots the Faceyspaceys) and people are using it more and more.   But in the recent past, for many the Internet was just another way to get 'traditional' news, preferably for free.

Advocates of good science breathed a sigh of relief when Andrew Wakefield was finally lambasted for questionable methods and shoddy science, basically eliminating the validity of the fundamental text of the 'anti-vaccination' movement outside science circles.

What about another fundamental text inside science circles?  Namely Nepotism and sexism in peer-review, by Christine Wennerås&Agnes Wold (Nature 387, 341-343, 22 May 1997,  doi:10.1038/387341a0 ), who claimed they did not receive Swedish postdoctoral fellowships because of male chauvinism.

Is David Beckham a keen physicist?   Though he wouldn't know how to do the equations on a chalkboard, he certainly does it in his head and then with his feet - so perhaps he is an experimental physicist at heart.

I've often used baseball to talk about concepts such as drag, the Bernoulli principle, Reynolds number and the Magnus effect but Beckham's ability to curve the football so much can teach the same things.

The Bernoulli effect tells us faster moving air reduces pressure and a pressure difference is on either side of the ball  creates a net force called the Magnus effect:

   Velocity      Drag