Cannabis and THC, its main psychoactive compound, have been endorsed by people suffering from anxiety...

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...

Hank Campbell

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 »

17 Years Ago, Jane Poynter And 7 Others Entered Biosphere 2

Sep 26 2008 | comment(s)

17 years ago, September 26, 1991, 8 brave souls locked themselves inside a sealed dome to simulate what it would be like to live in an artificial closed ecological system.

It was called Biosphere 2 (the original 'biosphere' being Ma Earth here) and was made in Oracle, Arizona by Space Biosphere Ventures.

The idea was to learn about ecology but it ended up being about anthropology as well - as fellow Scientific Blogging scribe Jane Poynter says, they discovered that even in tiny groups, and much as they might have protested the notion in advance, they broke into factions.

Jurassic Beer - How Long Does It Take To Get A Good Brew?

Sep 24 2008 | comment(s)

Fossil Fuels Brewing Company of Manteca, California is convinced that beer, like wine, takes time to get right. In this case, 45 million years. It's truly a beer no one else can claim to have.

Manteca is a short drive from here so you can bet this story is just beginning. It's for science, after all.

Raul Cano, Cal Poly microbiologist and director of Cal Poly’s Environmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI) caused quite a brew-ha ha(1) with the announcement that beer made from living bacteria extracted from a bee entombed in amber 25-45 million years ago was really, really good.

Culture Vultures Pounce - Banning Betting Would Help The Economy, Says Professor

Sep 23 2008 | comment(s)

You've probably heard that saying, 'if your only tool is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail.' So it goes with culture too. People who have an agenda jump on every opportunity to advance it in every exploitative way - they are culture vultures. Obviously it's easy to be jaded because I live in California and California is home to cultural fundamentalists in a way that people in actual religious areas of the US can only dream about - because they aren't pushed off to the fringes, they have center stage. John W. Kindt is a University of Illinois professor in Business Administration and a fundamentalist about gambling in a way that would work well in California. I don't gamble, I am too good at math to think I am going to win when casinos hire people a lot better at it than me to make sure I don't, but I don't tell people they are too stupid to be good at it. Why? Because I don't have the fundamentalist mentality it takes to think everyone is too stupid to think for themselves.

Why We Love Evolutionary Psychology - People Assign Personalities To Cars, Says Study

Sep 22 2008 | comment(s)

Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna say that people make lots of assumptions about sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at human faces - and we do it with cars as well.

They're not the first ones to come up with this idea; five year olds have been finding personalities in inanimate objects for thousands of years and my kid has been saying "Ka-chow!" ever since he saw Cars, but they are the first ones to tackle it in a systematic fashion.

How did they do it? They asked people to describe car grills anthropomorphically. Then they used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information, whatever that means. One-third of the respondents associated a human or animal face with over 90 percent of the cars and everyone noted eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grill), and a nose in 50 percent of the cars. Yep, that means people think cars have a personality.

Why Do Democrats Want To Get Rid Of The NIH Public Access Policy?

Sep 17 2008 | comment(s)

Public access for studies paid for by taxpayer money seems like a no-brainer. There's no reason peer-reviewed journals should get to charge researchers (paid for again by taxpayers) and then have a copyright on the work. Last year the government approved a bill that would require government-funded (NIH) researchers to submit their studies to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. It was a real win for open access advocates, many of whom wrote here about it.

Anglican Church Sends Darwin An Apology, Promotes Him On Their Website, In Honor Of His Bicentenary

Sep 14 2008 | comment(s)

The only thing I get tired of more than crazy people invoking Galileo as their defense against criticism of whatever bizarre science 'theory' they are foisting on the world are people on the other side who paint legitimate skeptics as 'Holocaust deniers' - in both cases the comparisons are done by people who have no knowledge at all about the analogy they are using. But sometimes the Galileo comparison is apt and no one got more religious criticism that turned out to be misplaced than Charles Darwin. The church in his native land thinks so as well, and some 150 years too late will concede that it was tough on Chuck.