French women are quite giving - after all, they let their husbands have a girlfriend, a mistress and a whore.  It only makes sense that generous nature would translate into parenting as well.  Even if that sometimes means a laissez faire approach to childrearing.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter and current Paris ex-pat Pamela Druckerman was intrigued by the manners of French children - in a country famous for being rude - so she set out to study what they were doing and then wrote a book on it.  It's not an Asian "tiger mom" approach, by any means, but Druckerman says it is less coddling than the American way.  

A social psychologist who doesn't spend his days finding ways to rationalize being progressive? University of Virginia Prof. Jonathan Haidt certainly was a partisan liberal, he says, but researching John Kerry's failure to connect with voters in 2004 made him see things a little different, and now he is a moderate - which is still right wing in the social sciences, so a bold step not without risk.

If you want cool stuff that no one else will believe, look to Russia.(1)  It isn't just the home of rampant piracy and corruption (and trademark infringement, in the case of their ridiculous theft of "Science 2.0" for a terrible television show) it is also the place to find kooky confirmation of odd beliefs.
 
Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences says he analyzed photographs from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982 and found...aliens. Well, he found a black dot that may have not been the same as another black dot.

For being progressives, California has a states-right belief that really hasn't been seen in America since the South in 1860.  If it isn't in the US Constitution they think they can do it.

More rational people have believed that the Obama administration was not going to like any state circumventing U.S. law so when medical marijuana dispensaries were 'legalized' in California (medical marijuana itself was sort of legalized in the 1990s), the DEA busts began. Some municipalities defer to federal law and ban marijuana 'dispensaries' even while California claims they are legal.

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.