The Indiana Jones movies are good when they have some basis in real stuff - like Nazis and the Ark of the Covenant in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark" and Templars and...well, Nazis again...in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade".

When Steven Spielberg ventured into fake temples and 1950s alien hokum, we got movies better left to AFI members to have to endure.  So for Indiana Jones 5, he should throw out whatever bad idea he is working on and read about Qin Shi Huang's tomb. The first emperor of China created a  courtyard-style palace tomb inside a 22-square-mile mortuary compound guarded by more than 6,000 full-size statues of warriors, musicians and acrobats.

It's not biology versus physics but in many ways it is science versus culture: Peter Higgs, he of the Higgs Boson, colloquially called 'the God particle', doesn't think much of Richard Dawkins, the biologist not famous for biology but rather for hating religion.

Why does Dawkins, and by extension a number of biologists, hate religion so much and why don't more physicists give a crap?  Don't physicists see that religion is solely responsible for all of the evils of the world, as Dawkins and his acolytes do? 

If we were to tell Jimmy Wales that the Science 2.0 entry is an unmitigated pile of garbage written by someone who either knows nothing about Science 2.0 that he didn't Google in 5 seconds (I say 'he' because the place is legendarily hostile to women so it unlikely to be a 'she') he would simply respond that we should fix it.  

Well, his own site does not work that way. The person who knows nothing about Science 2.0 other than to declare it a subset of the meaninginless 'open science' generic term and deny its actual history simply reverts any edits and then gets together and tries to ban people who do fix it.

Organic food is a $29 billion industry, clearly Big Ag, but they have managed to convince believers that they are small farms that use no pesticides and are nutritionally, structurally and morally better for humanity.

But the glow has been fading. Framing organic food ethically now creates a backlash, according to surveys by Cornell University and the University of Michigan, which asked 371 test persons about their perceptions of food products with and without an organic label.  

Geneticist A.J. Bateman did an experiment in 1948 which showed that, in mating fruitflies, the male insects' strategy was to mate with many females, whereas the females' strategy was to be discriminating in their choice of partners. Male reproductive success, in other words, correlated positively with number of mates, but female reproductive success did not.

A NASA photo error showed just how many sheep in science media are blindly regurgitating anything about space they read.  

NASA got a snapshot from Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko on the International Space Station, 230 miles above Earth, wrong, saying a summit in India was Mount Everest rather than what it really was, Saser Muztagh in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India. It could have been worse, they could have put Mt. McKinley in Europe or something.

You have to love this story by Dr. Vicky Forster of the Northern Institute for Cancer Research in honor of Childhood Cancer Awareness month.

"On Christmas day in 1994, whilst the rest of my family were playing games in the lounge, I was asleep in bed upstairs feeling absolutely exhausted, despite the fact that I had only woken up a few hours previously. I had been ill for a few weeks with what the doctor thought was a chest infection. Later that week, when I still wasn’t better, my mum took me to the doctor again who sent me for a blood test.

"On New Year’s Eve 1994, I was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia and admitted to St. Bartholomew’s hospital in London for a two and a half year program of treatment..."

Read the uplifting details at:

Owen Paterson, Environment Secretary, says genetically modified food should be grown and sold widely in Britain and opponents of the technology are talking "humbug". Paterson made the remarks amid speculation that ministers are ready to relax controls on the cultivation of GM crops.

What?  Use science to grow food?  Can we get more Brits to re-colonize America, this time in batty anti-science states like California?  Or maybe put a few in the federal government?

Sales of specialty, craft, and small-market beers have improved dramatically in sales, many of the traditional, full-calorie beers that were once the staples of most breweries have fallen behind. In the five years ending in 2011, sales of Budweiser, which was once the top-selling beer in the country for years, have fallen by 7 million barrels.

Sales of Michelob are down more than 70%. Based on data provided by Beer Marketer’s INSIGHTS, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the nine large — or once-large — beer brands with a five-year decline in sales of 30% or more.

What are people drinking instead? Light beer and microbrews.