This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel.  Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and since statistics show 97% of Internet readers never finish an article, if you are not a regular Science 2.0 reader I am okay endorsing this and telling you in the first paragraph you will enjoy it, so you can set your DVR and move on to reading about the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor.   

I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that goes is a policy matter and it's for civilian leadership to decide.

Researchers won't like being compared to the military but it's a lot like that; there is a job to do, a mission to accomplish, and the scope and limitations of that mission are determined by the public through their politicians but once that framework is established, it is up to the soldiers on the ground to decide how to get there.

The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for astronomers.

A lack of light pollution and anti-science hippies filing lawsuits has made Chile a new favorite spot for space science and the first image we got after ALMA opened its eyes is darn spectacular.  What we can't see with visible-light or infrared telescopes, ALMA can see just fine.  And the image below is with only 12 of its final 66 radio antennas.  It's fitting that the first image was of the Antenna Galaxies.

Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer?  Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern.  Fortunately, the precautionary principle isn't overused by everyone (though when it is, the politically like-minded dismiss it as policy disagreement and not being anti-science) but any time you have an anti-science hotbed, it will get trotted out.

It makes environmental activists crazy, in that 'believe scientists when science agrees with us but scientists are out to kill us when science doesn't agree' kind of way, but a large study of U.S. adults found that the more science they knew and the more independent they were, the less they were worried about climate change.