Take that, Sir Isaac Newton.  16-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories, which will help scientists calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and predict how it will strike and bounce off a wall, a tough problem for hundreds of years.

Ray attributes his success to  "Schuele generic naivety" - schoolboy naiveté - but good math should not be discounted.  His engineer father started teaching him calculus at age 6.  Newton basically had to invent fluxions at age 24 so Ray had a bit of an advantage there.

What do you do when the project you did is complete but your entry badge still works for the AOL Palo Alto campus and you have no place to live?

You sleep on couches there.

Eric Simons, age 19, managed to pull it off for two months before being caught by a security guard - he ate the free food, drank the free drink, worked out in the gym when he wasn't working, and took showers there.

And built his company.

Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL by Daniel Terdiman, CNET

Some cultural wars that throw science out the window - anti-DDT, anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-evolution  - are baffling. Others at least have some science basis - smoking, for example - but sometimes bandwagon charlatans use the obvious to make all kinds of exaggerated, silly claims.  Where smoking harm was once clearly denied by Big Tobacco companies, exaggerated claims of all the ills smoking may cause are now so commonplace people assume that everyone with lung cancer got it from smoking.  And when that isn't true, they get even crazier ideas.  Donna Summer, the disco singer, never smoked but got lung cancer.  She believed the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001 'caused' it.

Physicist George "Jay" Keyworth was not invited to join a panel at the National Academy of Sciences despite having a set of qualifications very few others - among them, just John Holdren, Frank Press, John Gibbons and Neal Lane - have.

Psychologists contend there is a 'health halo' adopted toward foods thought to be 'healthy', whether or not they actually are (granola, low fat yogurt, etc). There is also a health halo around foods that are organic. Some people even think organic foods are nutritionally superior and are even lower in fat and lower in calorie than foods without that organic label - which only required paying a fee and filling out a form.

As with young hipsters who like a band until they become popular, organic food eaters also seem to have adopted a 'moral halo' about their belief system - they think they are better than other people for buying organic pineapples. 

In a fit of Keynesian pique sure to make wackier economists like Paul Krugman proud, Tom Mulcair of the New Democratic Party of Canada has claimed that the robust economy in Canada, during a worldwide recession, is a disease.

Mulcair claims because the economic gains are boosting the value of the Canadian dollar, it is  hurting Canada's manufacturing sector — a phenomenon dubbed the "Dutch disease."  Yes, if poor people can buy more stuff but the boom is coming from energy, it must be killed.

While the word 'consensus' is commonly used in science, it isn't a great one.  Consensus means basically voting and the public does not want to think science is like the United Nations where everyone, no matter how right or wrong, gets to insure nothing ever gets accomplished because some remote dictatorship can cancel out the US.

So a vote on the existence of Dark Matter isn't legally binding but it is still sounds like fun.  

Last year, fiscal hawk Senator Tom Coburn stuck his economic talons into waste at the National Science Foundation. Scientists, alarmed at the prospect of losing funding, circled the wagons while the usual kooky progressive suspects claimed because Coburn had an 'R' in his political party, he must be anti-science.

Jonah Goldberg, writing a guest piece in USA Today, tackles what he calls 'the new conservative phrenology' - basically, pseudosciencing up why Democrats are super-smart just for registering to be Democrats and Republicans are not part of the reality-based science community:

"They were born that way."