Just supposing, what if you landed on a planet a lot like Earth and, bereft of modern technology, had to try and rebuild something that looks like home?   You could survive, sure, a little trial and error would get you food and shelter. Creating fire can be a little more challenging but it is just a learning curve. 

There are logistical aspects to rebuilding all of civilization, of course.  One person can't build a skyscraper (and why would you, since there would be no one else to live in it?) but what about something small, like a toaster?

In academia, the many, many advancements of women are not enough and so they are increasingly forced to massage statistics to make it look like they are oppressed, underpaid, blocked out of the hard sciences, etc.

In reality, women have it pretty good. Maybe even great. Men, as a special interest group, basically stink at being a special interest group because they were historically always the interest group, no 'special' needed.

This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel.  Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and since statistics show 97% of Internet readers never finish an article, if you are not a regular Science 2.0 reader I am okay endorsing this and telling you in the first paragraph you will enjoy it, so you can set your DVR and move on to reading about the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor.   

I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that goes is a policy matter and it's for civilian leadership to decide.

Researchers won't like being compared to the military but it's a lot like that; there is a job to do, a mission to accomplish, and the scope and limitations of that mission are determined by the public through their politicians but once that framework is established, it is up to the soldiers on the ground to decide how to get there.

The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for astronomers.

A lack of light pollution and anti-science hippies filing lawsuits has made Chile a new favorite spot for space science and the first image we got after ALMA opened its eyes is darn spectacular.  What we can't see with visible-light or infrared telescopes, ALMA can see just fine.  And the image below is with only 12 of its final 66 radio antennas.  It's fitting that the first image was of the Antenna Galaxies.