It's Fascination of Plants Day! 39 countries are celebrating plant scientists and they work they are doing to feed the world, improve health and develop sustainable energy supplies.

But it isn't just serious 'save the planet' stuff - scientists have given themselves a bad rap by adopting the stoic Mr. Spock logic role.  They are having fun too.

For example, James Meredith and company at Warwick University are trying to use hemp fiber in place of carbon for automobile bodywork. A material called Kestrel has already been created and is looking for people willing to try it - don't get pulled over by the DEA, though.  It will be tough to explain unless the traffic enforcement officer has a PhD in chemistry.

Barbarians don't get a lot of respect but a previously unknown ancient language buried in the ruins of a 2,800-year-old Middle Eastern palace may get them some.

Evidence of the long-lost language, probably spoken by a hitherto unknown people from the Zagros Mountains of western Ira, was translated to reveal the names of 60 women – probably prisoners-of-war or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer program. But when the Cambridge archaeologist – Dr. John MacGinnis - began to examine the names in detail, he realized that 45 of them bore no resemblance to any of the thousands of ancient Middle Eastern names already known to scholars.

North Dakota pumped 17.8 million barrels of oil in March, with a daily average of 575,490 barrels, and has passed Alaska to become the second-leading oil-producing state in the nation, trailing only Texas.

North Dakota owes its quick rise from the number nine spot just six years to improved horizontal drilling techniques in the rich Bakken shale and Three Forks formations in the western part of the state.

Texas is not worried just yet. It produced 1.1 million barrels daily in February and 32.9 million barrels for the whole month and oil production has increased more than 8.2 million barrels from February 2011 to February 2012, records show.

The Diamond Sutra is a 16-foot scroll of Buddhist texts dealing with the practice of non-abidance. A dated colophon is included, making it the first known block-printed text to carry an explicit date.

Translated, the date of printing was May 11, 868 but that isn't the most fascinating part of the colophon. It reads...

Reverently made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie on behalf of his two parents on the 15th of the 4th moon of the 9th year of Xiantong.

In 1888, someone killed five prostitutes in London's Whitechapel district and came to be called "Jack The Ripper" - since then, everyone from Sherlock Holmes to officers on "Star Trek" have weighed in on who the killer might be.  The suspects are a Who's Who of people from the period because, apparently, it could just not have been some crazy, unknown sociopath, it had to be a member of Parliament or a famous writer.

It's always a little irksome to see or hear 'X causes Y% of cancer' because, really, it is the kind of culturally partisan gibberish that has made it possible for disreputable genetics testing companies to make all kinds of ridiculous claims.  

Yes, you are more likely to get lung cancer if you smoke than if you don't, but lots of people get lung cancer who do not smoke and were never asbestos workers.

Writing on Discover, science journalist Ed Yong makes sense of those population attributable fractions (PAFs) - like what percentage of cases of a disease would be avoided if a risk factor was avoided. 

Smug supposedly 'pro-science' people who seem to embrace science primarily to ridicule religious people don't have all that much science understanding.  Instead, they believe science, including evolution.  Most of them know very little about adaptive radiation or any mechanism of evolution.

Fundamentalism does not just happen among religious types. But most people are not fundamentalists for or against anything, we accept science because a world made up of natural laws makes more sense than one made up of arbitrary (and conflicting) supernatural ones.

A surprising number of scientists defy the 'liberal' stereotype and are more libertarian than they are given credit for (including by conservatives and liberals) - no surprise there, liberal and libertarian derive from the same root word for freedom and freedom is essential to quality science.

Writing on PolicyMic.com, Cameron English interviews RealClearScience editor Dr. Alex Berezow, who argues that scientists and Ron Paul have a lot in common.  Not a shock, Paul had a good showing among academics.  

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Wyoming Outdoor Council, Sierra Club and the Oil and Gas Accountability Project commissioned hydrologist Dr. Tom Myers to review the EPA’s draft statement on well contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming, and are submitting his work to the EPA as technical comments. 

The EPA draft is available for public comment through October 2012 and then the data and conclusions will undergo the peer-review process with a panel of independent scientists.