It's the weekend, which means it is time for scientists, science journalists, book authors and intellectually curious readers to think about microbiology.  And that means beer. Beer is actually safer to drink than water. You didn't know that?  Let's talk some biology.

The master ingredient in beer is yeast. That's a microbe! So if you do experiments with beer this weekend, you are advancing the world of science.  If you make beer, you are a microbiologist.  If you drink beer, you are a microbiologist. Microbiologists understand beer and bacteria and stuff, which is why they drink beer more than water.

President Obama recently got some ridicule for hastily claiming he loved skeet shooting and therefore was not against sportsmen when he wanted to tell Americans they couldn't be trusted to decide how many bullets to buy for their guns.

That he was simultaneously offering bombs and fighter jets to terrorists in Egypt while he didn't trust his own citizens with small arms ammunition was not lost on his critics.

What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate?

Two Asian charities have joined forces with the U.S. National Funeral Directors' Association (NFDA) to get people to start thinking about deathcare rather than healthcare.

No, deathcare is not another tine in Britain's expanding Liverpool Death Pathway fork, it is a chance to think about the way your final exit is made, assuming you were told you are on the NHS' mandatory road to demise in time to plan. 

Medical research is both derided and essential.  The public complains that a new experimental drug is not available due to the FDA being too conservative while also complaining that drugs have too many side effects and companies should be sued over the lack of proper testing before release. In popular television, every show that has a character who enrolls in a medical research trial develops giant boils and body tics, it is a humor standby to show that medical research is only done by the economically desperate. In research itself, scientists trust other scientists little and they trust researchers not under the government umbrella even less. Corporations are bad and pharmaceutical companies worst of all.