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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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One thing I see a lot of, given the kind of community we are and so the kinds of people I read to see what's happening in the rest of the world, is how things have to change.  I wrote a piece earlier on Open science and the march of history where I discuss the efforts of companies like Mendeley to shift the thinking of researchers toward open access and open science.
Jason Hoyt, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist and VP of R&D at Mendeley, and asks researchers which side they want to be on in the march of history - legacy toll access to results or open access of both science and publication.
Junk food will make your waistline bigger, which is bad for you, and candy is no exception.   But candy that makes your intelligence bigger?   Garth Sundem's Brain Candy is here to satisfy your intellectual sweet tooth.
Should you happen to be in Washington, D.C. in October and at House of Sweden, the Swedish Embassy, you will get a chance to see a fireball red colored car that delighted Europeans who like tiny red cars earlier this year.

It's called the Baldos II and it is a hybrid auto built by engineering students at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden.    So what?

The fuel tests show it can run 152.2 kilometers on a liter of fuel, whatever that means - in Sweden, they use some primitive system invented during the French Revolution to stick it to the English, so I am not certain but that sounds like 357 MPG.   Or approximately 12X my tiny convertible's mileage!
It's been a good decade for "The Wizard of Oz" - much better than the Oz books merit but in that one story there is the kernel of something terrific that has resonated with people for decades.   There was a time when it was less cool - anyone watching "The Wiz" had to wonder what they were thinking but re-tellings of the story in more recent years have been terrific.

"Wicked", for example, tells the story of the Wicked Witch and she ends up being a lot more sympathetic.   The core storyline of "The Wizard of Oz" pops in and out but it is her story - and the musical is terrific. 
I took a moment to look at Ray Kurzweil's response to PZ Myers' second-hand dissection of his talk at the Singularity Summit(1) I attended last weekend (see The Singularity Stole My ATM Card) because Andrea Kuszewki is on the case and trying to keep things on track (like, can we reverse engineer the brain?