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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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Food so cheap that poor people can be fat is a miracle only dreamed about by philosophers ad economists throughout history. It was previously believed that the labor force needed to produce enough food would outstrip the food they could produce, something like how trying to exceed the speed of light adds too much mass.

Alzheimer's research is always big news. The reason is simple: people are living longer and they also want to be living better. While progress in general health issues for seniors marches on, the brain remains trickier stuff. Instead of less Alzheimer's than in the past, we have more, thanks to better diagnosis and greater longevity. Once you reach a certain age, you are almost certain to have someone in your family with it. 
fMRI has always been a little misused, to people who know what they are talking about. 20 years after it was first done, the promise seems to have been overrun by agenda-based cultural mapping.
Sometimes there is a story with no winner and a bunch of losers.  In this case, first among the losers are wind energy subsidies squandered on companies that aren't doing much good at all to bridge us to a clean energy future. California likes to brag about both its clean energy subsidies and all the patents it is getting for products that remain not very good, but without government funding they are a non-starter; it is the definition of a fake industry propped up by taxpayers. 
Since today is a celebration of St. Patrick, the religious figure who 'drove the snakes out of Ireland' (meaning Paganism), a whole lot of people got drunk last night.  

Yeah, Protestants getting drunk the night before before a Catholic religious festival makes as much sense as anything else about St. Patrick's Day. In addition, kids in California get something magical in their shoes, which puzzles me too. I never heard of that when I was a kid but the rural area I grew up in was a delightful mix of people descended from residents of Scotland and Eastern Europe so there weren't a lot of magical pots of gold lying around - if an Irishman came along asking about our shoes the reply was going to be sent at muzzle velocity. 

Being Pope may mean good things in the afterlife but here on Earth, it doesn't count for a lot on the Internet. On the day Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, over 600 domain names were registered by cybersquatters. They must be evangelicals.

Even mistaken names like Francis I were taken.

So Popefrancis.org is not available to the Roman Pontiff, along with most of the country-specific domains, like popefrancis.fr. Even popefrancisi.com was scooped by someone.

Oddly, at the time of this writing, his Argentina country-specific domain was still available - so if you want to grab Popefrancis.ar.com, you still can. Look for domain company GoDaddy to have scantily-clad nuns stripping in the enclave advertising that one real soon.