Expect to hear a lot about the Mayans until December 22, 2012. End of the world conspiracies happen pretty much five times a year but it's still going to get its attention because a lot of older people now read books in the 1970s, when they were young, about aliens populating Earth. "Chariots of the Gods" and all that.

But Americans hate to be left out.  Want people to watch The Olympics?  Americans had better be winning gold medals.

Despite the claims of Department of Energy experts interns that they are all completely qualified to pick winners and losers among technology companies and rationalization by the New York Times that the Solyndra failure was just healthy capitalism, it isn't being washed over in the broad media as easily.

CBS News' Sharyl Attkisson, one of the original reporters that uncovered the Solyndra scandal, has outlined 11 more companies that are part of Obama's Energy program and have floundered despite an outrageous $6.5 billion in taxpayer money. Five have already filed for bankruptcy: Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES' subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.   Only $30 billion more in losses to go.

A ceramic stamp has been found in Acre, northern Israel, during excavations at Horbat Uza - but and it dates to the Byzantine Era.

The tiny seal has the image of a seven-branch menorah and was used to stamp the kosher sign on bread 1,500 years ago. It has Greek letters that spell out what the researchers believe to be the name of the baker, Launtius.

"The presence of a Jewish settlement so close to Akko -- a region that was definitely Christian at this time -- constitutes an innovation in archaeological research," said Danny Syon, director of the excavation.

Is science just lacking a bumper sticker slogan?  Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, seems to think so.  Aside from being in New Scientist, you can see a problem with the piece in his first sentence:

SCIENCE is under assault.

Existing methods for removing carbon dioxide from smokestacks and other sources, including the atmosphere, are energy intensive, don't work well and have other drawbacks but solid materials based on polyethylenimine, a readily available and inexpensive polymeric material, have led to a process which achieves some of the highest carbon dioxide removal capacity ever reported for real-world conditions where the air contains moisture.

After capturing carbon dioxide, the materials give it up easily so that the CO2 can be used in making other substances, or permanently isolated from the environment. The capture material then can be recycled and reused many times over without losing efficiency. 

National Institute of Standards and Technology theoretical physicist James Baker-Jarvis died in a Colorado hospital after a 3-foot tree branch came through his auto windshield and impaled him during a windstorm.

But even after the 3-inch diameter branch went through his chest, he still held on long enough to pull the Subaru Outback to the side of the road, saving his wife from injury.

If you have to go, saving the life of someone you love is the way to do it right.

R.I.P.

NIST scientist killed after winds send branch his windshield north of Boulder by Mitchell Byars, Daily Camera

Vincent Dammai, a researcher at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, S.C., has been arrested by the FBI for supplying stem cells for use in unapproved stem cell therapies in violation of federal US Food and Drug Administration laws.

The upside to being a communist dictatorship is you can just ban cars for the common folk to lessen pollution when important events are in town, like the Olympics, which makes progressive environmentalists coo with delight but isn't that great for people who have to get to work. The downside is no one really care what happens to people when government is the most important thing, and that means corruption - and therefore yet another food scandal due to indifferent oversight.

A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal province. Wadley found the bed, about the size of a modern twin bed, buried over nine feet deep in sediments inside a rock shelter on a cliff face on the banks of the Thongathi river, 20 north of Durban. Wadley has been working there since 1998. The bed was covered with a layer of aromatic leaves from a plant called the river wild quince. No other tree leaves were found on the bedding, so the leaves were not there as a result of random leaf fall, the report said.