It's the biggest news in fast food - Starbucks Frappuccinos have bugs.  On purpose.

The company has started using cochineal extract to supply its Frappuccinos’ strawberry color - hey, that beats using strawberries.  The extract is derived by exploiting developing nation insects, namely grinding up the dried bodies of cochineal bugs found primarily in Mexico and South America. They aren't the first to do so.  European colonialists began using cochineal dye as a coloring agent in the 15th century.

Huffington Post is right up there with Psychology Today in its willingness to post absolute nonsensical woo.  But they seemed to have been trying to get better (HuffPo, that is.  Psych Today, whatever), even going so far as to create an actual science section.

It has to be science in a science section, right?  Well, no.  If you get some humanities pseudoscience crank determining what science is, its easy to lose sight of what a science site is.

When I did my recap of the Being Human conference held this past weekend in San Francisco, I intentionally did not go into a lot of the content - for two reason.  First, I went knowing I would be free to just relax and enjoy the conversations and demonstrations and interaction on stage and in the audience and not find a larger meaning. I was there as a media partner, not a journalist.

Some schools, and some psychologists, are concerned about the emotional trauma kids might endure if they have a falling out with a close friend. Solution: Ban kids from having best friends. Kids have to only play in groups.

Educational psychologist Gaynor Sbuttoni said the policy has been used at schools in Kingston, South West London, and Surrey. "They are doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend."

A light-emitting diode (LED) that emits more energy than it consumes has been published by researchers from MIT.

That violates the second law of thermodynamics, right? Isn't that specifically listed as a no-no in the Science 2.0 FAQ? Not the violating, you are welcome to go ahead and do that, but claiming to do so in an article, that is.

A number of conservatives hold strange anti-science positions and the same number of progressives do.  The non-social-authoritarians of the political spectrum, mostly those with that liber root word, mostly only deny science when it really bugs them.

No wonder that liberal science academics seem to like libertarian Ron Paul.  Paul — and libertarian philosophy in general — tackles government policy the same way a researcher tackles an experiment.

From Science Codex we get word of a new instruction manual for the coming apocalypse. They write:

Yes, the world is coming to an end! At least that's what we should believe based on what we hear from the History Channel during sweeps week. But it's worse than that! Now it is the History Channel, The Learning Channel, and you'll not be surprised, every channel because it's popular. 

We are suffering from an overflow of doom and gloom from everywhere we go

Harold Camping has apologized to his followers for being wrong on the Rapture - twice - and essentially costing them a lot of money. "Come now, let us reason together," said the Lord in Isaiah 1:18 and so we cannot be too harsh on him for doing the flawed, worldview-focused math I dissected in So The Rapture Is Saturday - Luckily The Grey's Anatomy Season Finale Was Last Night.  Paul Krugman does the same thing every week in the New York Times and still hasn't repented and he bilks Americans out of a lot more money than Camping did.

Some old people don't understand why you would pay $10 to 'license' a book rather than $10 to own one. E-Book readers are certainly convenient, you can have a lot of books in your carry-on bag instead of one, and people are happy to pay for convenience. In my case, it is practical. I have a lot of old books so if I want to read them, I risk damaging them or I have to buy 'reader' copies and then take up twice as much space for the same book. And books in the public domain are often free.

Kindles, iPads, Nooks, they are all successful for their corporate sales departments so clearly people like the convenience, even if the price for a book with no media seems rather high. The U.S. Justice Department thinks there is something more sinister; collusion.