Fake Banner
Environmental Groups Back In Court To Help Fellow Rich White People

The Usual Suspects of the anti-science movement, Center for Biological Diversity(1), Environmental...

Batteries Are Stuck In The 1990s Because Solid-State Batteries Keep Short-Circuiting

The electric car industry is held back by reliance on conventional energy. Despite spending trillions...

Dogs Have Been 'Man's Best Friend' For 14,000 Years

The bond between humans and dogs is one of the oldest stories in anthropology. It may also be a...

Is This The D'Artagnan Made Famous In 'The Three Musketeers' By Dumas?

“I have lost D’Artagnan, in whom I had every confidence,” wrote King Louis XIV to his Queen...

User picture.
picture for Tommaso Dorigopicture for Fred Phillipspicture for picture for Hontas Farmerpicture for Atreyee Bhattacharyapicture for Patrick Lockerby
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 »

Blogroll
The fair trade movement  is in its seventh decade but has an internal problem.  Fair trade, as a concept, sought originally to make sure small people got a fair deal - a Mennonite visiting Puerto Rico saw the poverty levels of people there and decided to help them make more money, rather than advocating to give them government handouts (I know, I know, zany religious types).  
Ancient sunken ships are generally found in shallow water 100 or so, but two Roman-era shipwrecks have been found almost a mile deep in waters off the islands of Corfu and Paxoi, the Ionian Sea between western Greece and Italy.

The wrecks are from the third century A.D. and lend more evidence to the idea that bolder ancient shipmasters did not just stick to coastal routes and ventured into the open sea. Of course, since they are wrecks it also explains why more cautious trade captains absolutely did stick to coastal routes when they could.  Smaller vessels such as this, 80 feet long and usually loaded with cargo and not built for open water navigation, liked to be closer to land to save the crew if things went wrong.
June 5, 2012 you get to share a communal experience with scientists from hundreds of years ago.  No, I don't mean Calculus, I mean one of the rarest and more interesting recurring events science has been able to witness since the invention of the telescope - a transit of Venus.

You may not have heard of it but you know of it if you ever wondered how astronomers were able to calculate how far away the Sun is from Earth - the basis of the Astronomical Unit (AU) that is eponymous today.
The Square Kilometre Array telescope will be the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, but it had a bit of a problem most big science projects do not have; multiple countries wanted to host it.
Is it cheaper to privatize deliveries?  Sure is, that is why UPS and FedEx are doing well and the US Post Office is now advertising that companies should send more junk mail and waste natural resources.(1)
There is one thing men know about women; they are willing to believe anything about you if you just put forth the effort to fool them a little. A tuxedo in the eyes of a woman, for example, adds $10,000 to your income and knocks 10 lbs. off your weight.

Now, it doesn't really do any of those things, even social psychologists would not believe something so silly, but women are willing to give you credit for trying; namely spending 50 bucks on an ill-fitting suit and enduring patent leather shoes for an evening.