When the traditional American mafia was at its apex, they would 'launder' their money through legitimate businesses. If a mafia drug lord wanted to have anything approaching a worthwhile life, cars and rings and goomahs, but did not want to go the route of Al Capone and be busted for tax evasion, he had to find a way to make enough money appear to be legitimate that the illegal money can be used. So they would invest in businesses that provided them with income that could be taxed and explain their lifestyles, allowing them to use the much greater illegal money.

Though we once got a promise to restore science to its rightful place, instead it looks more and more of the same anti-science mentality we got from President Clinton in the 1990s: Catering to environmental fringe groups - even going to far as declaring a small oyster farm "heavy industry" in order to shut them down.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, as staunch a liberal as we can get, tried to take a stand for science and small business but was unable to prevent the Department of the Interior from "using scientifically unsound, and at times bizarre, tactics to prove the oyster farm had to go."

Spores on the conidiophores of the fungus Penicillium notatum. Dr. Fred Hossler/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

We used to recycle patient urine - to get penicillin.

Why? Because in 1940, during a World War, it was an intensive process. Getting usable penicillin from Penicillium notatum mold was no easy feat, says PBS: “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”

The Food Babe, Vani Hari, recently got renewed attention for a post she wrote in 2011 about the perils of air travel. Like much of what she says, it was unmitigated nonsense except for obvious stuff, like 'drink water' and move around every 30 minutes. Those are fine, though 150 people getting up in a tiny walkway every 30 minutes because they drank all that water is going to be nothing short of hilarious.

Do you have a hypothesis but think replication is a waste of time? Do you have no underlying theoretical basis for your field but feel like your particular study is well-controlled?

You may not be as scientific as you think you are.

The precautionary principle has been around in all countries and for centuries, it seems. 

The ancient temple of Perperion, south-east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, contains a vampire burial site containing skeletons which all have an iron rod impaled through their bodies where their heart would have been - further evidence that people really did believe that vampires could rise from the dead if they were not buried properly.

Professor Nikolai Ovcharov, called Bulgaria's Indiana Jones, has also found 700-year-old corpses ‘nailed to the ground with iron staples driven into the limbs’.  There have been two vampire burials found around there in the last two years.

20 years ago President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry, currently Secretary of State, satisfied election pledges to voters and killed off nuclear energy in America. They insisted any nuclear power meant nuclear bombs, which was a public relations campaign of anti-science groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace but squarely in defiance of the evidence.

Nuclear power had already been on hiatus and America dramatically increased its use of coal. The resulting increased on CO2 emissions led to escalating concern about global warming but rather than accept their role in greenhouse gases, environmental corporations instead continued to lament affordable energy and demand more bans, taxes and regulations.

Over 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon authorized a War On Cancer, with the goal that cancer could be conquered with the right amount of money and ingenuity.

In 2008, during the economic glory days of the Bush years, Californians did a number of crazy things - spending $3 billion for human embryonic stem cell research, which no corporation thought was even close to being ready - comes to mind. And they bought into an animal 'liberation' agenda, which had been talking about the minimum size of cages and passed Proposition 2, which mandated the size of chicken cages.