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Environmentalists, What Are You Asking From Dedmoroz Lenin For Earth Day This Year?

Tomorrow is Earth Day. It is also Lenin's birthday. That's not coincidence. The leader of...

How Ancel Keys Went From MAHA Hero To MAHA Villain

If a lot of the food and health claims you read and hear today seem like things left over from...

Are Baseball Pitchers Faster Today?

On September 7, 1974, pitching for the California Angels, Nolan Ryan, known for his velocity, became...

Ground-Nesting Bee Populations Don't Get Publicity But They're Everywhere

Honeybees get attention in environmental fundraising campaigns because people don't understand...

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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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If you lived in Hilazon Tachtit, near  the Hilazon river of Israel 12,000 years ago, you might have borne witness to a world first; the earliest known religious ceremony.
Underneath the ancient royal buried ground of Saqqara in the Egyptian desert lies something even creepier than mummies that might come back to life - mummies that might come back to life and be adorable.

The Sacred Animal Necropolis, as it was called after being discovered by archaeologists last century, was dedicated to Anubis - that is the one with the head of a dog/jackal - and is believed to contain up to 8 million animals, most of them small dogs. It's hard to be sure because the animals were not mummified the way royal members were so they have just basically decomposed into heaps of DNA. Most were placed there in the Late Dynastic (747-332 B.C.) and Ptolemaic (332-30 B.C.) Periods.

You may not have realized it, but women's voices are a big topic. For women, at least. 

I suppose it may be true. If someone asks me to describe the characters in television comedy "The Big Bang Theory", my natural response would be 'the guy that matches the stereotype of how people think physicists are, the actual physicist, the engineer, the psychologist, the girl who looked a lot better with longer hair and the girl with the squeaky voice.'

See? 16% of my responses were related to female voice. She did better than the Indian guy, I forgot him completely, but whatever her science degree is was completely left out, the voice sticks out.


Right now, the police can't do much to help you until after a crime has been committed. In a science-fiction tale about free will and psychological determinism, Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" detailed a world where PreCrime officers stop acts before they happen. They know who is going to do it.

But psychic mutants are a simplistic convention, criminologists have instead been trying to do it in the real world.

Psychology has endured a lot of black eyes in recent years. Numerous papers have used arbitrary interpretations of brain scans, surveys of college students and unreal levels of social priming, implicit association and motivated reasoning. It has become woo central, embracing everything from the idea that voting Republican is an adaptive function to claims that people can predict the future
Voodoo Dolls, Gambling Monkeys and Zombies in Love sounds like a 1980s B-movie title, along the lines of "Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town", but it's actually part of the latest Wastebook from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).

If you didn't know that NASA built a $350 million launch pad tower even after the the rockets it was designed to test were scrapped, well, Coburn is here to help. They also spent $390,000 on a cartoon about global warming and $3,000,000 to try and figure out how Congress works.

Those and 97 other funny or outrageous bits of spending waste are documented.