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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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There's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.

When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony and belonging are supposedly valued, people are more modest.
Complexity theorists have some bad news for people who insist that unless it carries an organic label, food is evil; a group from the New England Complex Systems Institute says they've discovered what will trigger riots around the world in under two years.   It's the price of food and when it rises above the threshold they list for instability, social unrest will sweep the planet.
Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research.   It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.

How so? They estimated,  in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history.   Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier to chew and digest and as a result we got more caloric benefit and a smaller digestive tract.
 
Science 2.0 fave Dan Vergano at USA Today wrote an article based on the arXiv preprint written by Panagiota Kanti, Burkhard Kleihaus and Jutta Kunz called "Wormholes in Dilatonic Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet Theory".
National Geographic, which nows runs Scienceblogs.com, has put the hammer down on anonymous blogs.

Really, that whole thing was always a little sketchy.  Supposedly the rationale was that these people were going to be edgy insiders revealing things too explosive for mainstream media and maybe damaging to their careers but it mostly ended up being a way to rant about politics without accountability.  
What constitutes racism?  

If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism?  

A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded.   This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%.