Imagine if a journalist sent their story to former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney to 'check the facts' - what would the outcry sound like from other journalists and the public?

Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr., better known as Connie Mack, once said that pitching is 75 percent of baseball.  He was speaking from experience, not data, and looks can be deceiving, as people who think a curve ball move two feet can attest, but science is about understanding the world according to data, and that includes baseball.   The data say he is wrong, according to a new analysis by a University of Delaware professor. Pitching is just 25 percent of a team's success.

The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children.  Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn from the social environment at schools and, if you are a parent with a school age child, you might even worry about it more than be relieved.

Single-sex schools would seem to relieve some of that pressure, just like some women or some men feel better at a single-sex exercise facility. Advocates of single-sex schools contend that there may be brain differences between girls and boys that benefit from different teaching styles, though neuroscientists have found no brain differences linked to different learning styles.

 A poll on Mashable, unscientific but a talking point anyway, found nearly 75-percent saying they "hate" the Facebook news feed changes.

It isn't often I will agree with Club Sierra...I mean Sierra Club - if you have ever been to their offices you will know how easy it is to confuse the terms.

They spend so much time latching onto whatever cause will generate donations it's hard to know if they believe in anything, much less science, and it can make you nuts.  Like Greenpeace, their baffling 'trust scientists when it comes to global warming but scientists are out to kill you with GMOs' stance is, in a nutshell, why progressives (not liberals, not Democrats, progressives) are so goofy in their anti-science beliefs. 

In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue.  It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I thought, but evolutionary and not revolutionary.  We had covered a Lancet paper on much the same thing in 2008.  But in the course of a correspondence with a media rep she noted something important; not only was this not a traditional transplant, this was not even one where an organ was decellularized and recellularized with the patient's stem cells, it was created for the patient and in just two days.

That meant no immunosuppressive drugs, at $20,000 per year, and no morbidities due to their side effects.