You may recognize the title most recently as a humorous jab at people who want to teach religion in science classes and, failing that, at least teach why they think there is a controversy.    Of course there isn't any controversy at all.    Biology is as imperfect as every science in existence and explaining the world we live in according to natural laws is tough because there are always new things to learn.

The only place where rock solid 'proof' exists is in mathematics, which some people think is science.    Yet even in mathematics there are disputes and one of them has long been Pi - or π, if you prefer.   That's right, someone once may have insisted we teach the controversy about Pi, which is a delightful sort of irony.

In the early parts of the decade, German and British intelligence said that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction and were on their way to nuclear capability.    The American CIA agreed.    Saddam Hussein, in maybe the stupidest bluff of this century (there's still a long way to go), refused to let UN inspectors investigate thoroughly, perhaps thinking if the world believed he had nuclear capability, they would lift sanctions.    His mistakes cost him a wealthy dictatorship (though gold painted fixtures remain a puzzle to anyone who visits his many palaces) and, eventually, his life.

Sharks are among the most popular animals featured in television and cinema. And today among sharks, the undisputed king is the great white, a giant predator that can exceed 20 feet in length. Despite the popularity of great whites, relatively little is known about their biology, and even less is known about their evolutionary origins. A new 4-million-year-old fossil from Peru described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology provides important evidence suggesting the shark’s origins may be more humble than previously believed.

Show Me The Science Month Day 25 Installment 25



In nature, there is a sucker born every day. We humans may think that we're clever, but evolution has produced con games that would put Bernie Madoff to shame. One common natural swindle is mimicry, when one species tries to pass itself off as another. Orchids and cuckoos are classic examples of nature's swindlers, but mimicry isn't limited to plants and animals. A recent study has looked at how a fungus outsmarts a termite by dressing up as a termite egg.

The increasing frequency of bacterial resistance to antibiotics is alarming.  Researchers from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University believe they may have found a solution to this seemingly losing battle.  Professor Vern L. Schramm and team have developed antibiotic compounds that do not lead to microbial resistance over time.

A preliminary study on the application of thermo-microbiology and its relation to time of death has been released by Professor Isabel Corcobado and colleagues at the University of Granada.  The ultimate goal of this project is to use a microbiological indicator along with existing forensic techniques in order to determine time of death in forensics cases more accurately.

If the Higgs boson, whatever that will turn out to be, is hiding, wherever it may be found continues to shrink.

The latest analysis of data from the CDF and DZero collider experiments at Fermilab has now excluded a significant fraction of the allowed Higgs mass range established by earlier measurements. Those experiments predict that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. Now the CDF and DZero results carve out a section in the middle of this range and establish that it cannot have a mass in between 160 and 170 GeV/c2.

It seems obvious; even in a noble profession like education, if you pay people more who are better at it, better people are incentivized to do it. Obviously a number of people do it despite the money, just like science and academia, and the overall quality of education has improved a lot this decade but America has a way to go if we are going to keep at the forefront of science and technology in the face of huge populations in China and India.

But there has been resistance to that from educational lobbyists and a hardline union that only votes Democrat, which has unfortunately made education a political football.

Nyiragongo, an active African volcano, possesses lava unlike any other in the world, which may point toward its source being a new mantle plume says a University of Rochester geochemist.

The lava composition indicates that a mantle plume—an upwelling of intense heat from near the core of the Earth—may be bubbling to life beneath the soil of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The findings are presented in the current issue of the journal Chemical Geology.

Women with certain gene variations appear to be protected against cervical cancer, according to a study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and reported in Clinical Cancer Research. Knowing whether or not women have these genetic variants could help physicians to better tailor treatment strategies.

Virtually all cases of cervical cancer are caused by persistent infections from several of the human papillomaviruses (HPV) — a family of viruses that also cause common skin warts and genital warts. HPV is the most commonly sexually transmitted infection in young adults, yet only a small subset of these infections lead to cervical cancer.