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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...

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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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Ancient Graphic Design Unearthed In Peru?

Ancient Graphic Design Unearthed In Peru?

Oct 14 2010 | comment(s)

Amelia Carolina Sparavigna in the department of physics of  Politecnico di Torino says she has discovered geoglyphs, essentially earthwork graphic designs carved into the landscape, near Lake Titicaca is in the Andes Mountains on the border of Peru and Bolivia.

And she did it using Google.

You may not be able to see it so clearly but time and wear would certainly have made geoglyphs less obvious, though how and why anyone would have made them is also not obvious - unless they were insuring some deity or another could see something more interesting than farmers when they looked down.
Computational science: Scientific programming does not always compute

Computational science: Scientific programming does not always compute

Oct 13 2010 | comment(s)

When thousands of e-mails were obtained from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, last year, global warming skeptics jumped all over the documents for signs that researchers had manipulated data.

They hadn't (though their efforts to prevent anyone from obtaining the data, and the blowback from that, were as much cause for concern as the way in which hackers obtained them) but some of the e-mails discussed a different problem:
a CRU employee named "Harry", who often wrote of his wrestling matches with wonky computer software.
ScienceURLs gets some new additions

ScienceURLs gets some new additions

Oct 13 2010 | comment(s)

People sometimes ask me how I have access to so much great stuff.   Well, I am somewhat plugged in to other people who find good stuff, like Andrea Kuszewski and Guy Kawasaki on Twitter for things I might otherwise never notice, but for science I have always used ScienceURLs.com
Told ya -

Told ya - "Goldilocks" planet Gliese 581g with "100%" chance of life may not even exist

Oct 12 2010 | comment(s)

Two weeks ago we posted a story on Gliese 581g - a planet that was discovered and said to be in the habitable zone of a star.   Our comment was that reduced chi-squared statistics may mean that, if there was an error, it would not even exist.
Russia's military of the future looks like the USSR one of the past

Russia's military of the future looks like the USSR one of the past

Oct 12 2010 | comment(s)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and, with it, Soviet communism, one of the great joys for this former US Army Signal Corps officer was getting to talk with a former East German officer who came to work for our company a few years later.
SETI Participant Claims He Found A Signal From Near Gliese 581 Already

SETI Participant Claims He Found A Signal From Near Gliese 581 Already

Oct 11 2010 | comment(s)

Astronomers are certainly not strangers to manipulating public relations through mass media - they write reasonable papers and then encourage the press to go nuts with it.   Witness the recent arXiv paper by Vogt, Butler, et al on Gliese 581g, should it even exist, which reads