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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...

No Danger, How A Stranger Can Be A Game Changer - A New Book About Making 'Small' Talk

The future career arc for my house is a library bed-and-breakfast. It will be just like it sounds...

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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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Jan Hendrik Schön, if you have heard the name, will either fascinate or enrage you.   His ability to progress from ridiculous fibs to world-class deception as a 31-year-old physicist working at Bell Labs in New Jersey is certainly impressive.

How did fellow scientists let him get away with possibly the worst case of physics research fraud known?  It deserves a whole book, and Eugenie Samuel Reich is here to help.   If you can't sit through a whole book like Plastic Fantastic (out next week), her short version is in Physics World.
I never get tired of talking about the problems with both deficit thinking and framing - and misguided people never get tired of doing both regardless.

Worried about how to protect yourself from swine flu (oops, Influenza A H1N1 - stop persecuting pigs!) ? Wondering what you can do to prevent spreading swine flu?  Need an up-to-the-moment break out of where the latest outbreaks have occurred, just in case deaths from swine flu exceed 1/1,000th the deaths of regular flu or 1/10,000th the deaths of malaria?

If only an internet company would capitalize on this hysteria to generate traffic!

Oh wait, here's one.   Internet News Distribution Channel "Feedzilla", which updates news and information around the clock, says they can help you get the latest info while the pandemic panic lasts - namely until the next kid gets kidnapped or Nancy Grace convicts someone of murder on her TV show.  

As long-time readers know, we like to celebrate various holidays and events by making subtle changes to the site.    Sure, sometimes it involve ninjas taking over and writing our science but mostly it is more like sneaking in a logo and seeing who notices.

That doesn't mean all of them get used.    Our first logo, for example, was just something thrown together as a mockup so we knew where it would have to go.   It looked like something a programmer/me would put together:


Then we had a few revisions, by someone who knows what they are doing, and arrived at the one that eventually remained on the home page for some 18 months:
Houston, Texas, hometown of both Roger Clemens and Walter Cronkite (and, errr, David Khoresh if we're being comprehensive) is a bellweather city for the US, says a researcher who happens to live in Houston - in that it is now more Democrats than Republicans and minorities are the majority.    According to the data, if this trend continues and it's really indicative of a nationwide trend as claimed, Houston (and therefore all of America) could be hispanic gay men by 2030.