Professor Steven Chu, who was appointed Energy Secretary under as much optimism as can be imagined in late 2008, has officially resigned, a move everyone knew was coming.

Except for his irrational CO2 fanaticism - an energy Nobel laureate who takes a job in the cabinet has to know we can't just cut off CO2, the way an academic working at a national lab can talk about it - Chu was a much safer choice than the UFO believers and Doomsday prophets the Obama administration was determined to hire after his victory in November of that year.

It's no shock to know there is no anthropology without beer. No history either. Really, it took alcohol to get someone to write down mundane events in longhand.  And beer-making equipment was prized above all else, that is why many of our earliest finds from ancient civilizations have been related to it.

During the short time that Roy Thomas took over as writer of the Fantastic Four from Stan Lee, the original writer, it got a lot better.  I know, I know, that is blasphemy.(1) There is a reason Stan Lee gets a cameo in every movie about every Marvel superhero - he co-created them all, he made them all famous. He is a bigger legend than the guys behind Batman or Superman, his economic impact rivals the GDP of many small nations.

Still, when is the last time you read a good Stan Lee comic? Eventually, people are just phoning it in. And that had happened on the Fantastic Four by 1972.

In the United States, billions of dollars have been spent on marketing to convince people to go into science careers, despite the difficulty many PhDs will have finding jobs in academia. That, coupled with the fact that efforts are on to make funding more 'equal' and establish quotas for young researchers, minorities and female grant applicants means a finite funding pool could be even more limited. The best and brightest, regardless of demographics, could end up leaving to other countries where science is more of a meritocracy.