As many of you know, I spent a fair amount of time last month engaged in debates about the wisdom of California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated the labeling of genetically modified foods. While many of these discussions were civil, one particularly energetic fellow accused me of having been brainwashed by the “cult of the NIH” into believing that anything science does must be good.

At the time I just giggled. But his Tweet stuck in my head. After the election I looked back on my twenty years as a scientist in the “NIH system” and I began to see the signs. So I read about cults – about what differentiates them from normal, run-of-the-mill organization. And I started keeping score (on a 1-9 scale, of course, with 1 being the most cult-ish).

Feel heavier after the holidays?

Newcastle University says you are not alone. Their Theta-probe XPS machine, the only one of its kind in the world, has shown that the original kilogram is also heavier - at least compared to when it became the metric standard in 1875.

Researchers have identified four new regions on the human genome associated with Behcet's disease, a painful and potentially dangerous condition which
causes inflammation of blood vessels in various parts of the body
- the work was aided because the disease is found predominantly in people with ancestors along the Silk Road.

Named for the Turkish physician who described it in 1937, Behcet's disease has no specific genetic or environmental cause but common symptoms include painful mouth and genital sores, and eye inflammation that can lead to blindness. In some cases, it can affect blood vessels in the brain, lungs, and other vital organs. 

It's statistical polling...for science. 

A paper in Nature Climate Change uses structured expert elicitation and mathematically pools experts' opinions to forecast future sea level rises from melting ice sheets. Soliciting and pooling expert judgments is used in eruption forecasting and the spread of vector borne diseases - with questionable accuracy - and in their paper Professor Jonathan Bamber and Professor Willy Aspinall from the University of Bristol try to model the uncertainties in the future response of the ice sheets. 

Planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them, according to a new paper.

While diet and exercise are guaranteed to eliminate obesity, there can sometimes be a biological issue that arises, making it harder to lose fat. 

Pop culture diet doctors selling books have done a lot of damage by recommending people not just diet because they claim the metabolism 'slows down' and stores more fat and burns less energy. It happens, but not enough for most people to not simply diet.  

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.

Boxing has been in the news lately, what with this young lady (Nicola Adams) becoming the world’s first female Olympic boxing champion.  So when I saw claws like the ones in the next picture two days ago, I immediately thought they might be used for combat, like the outsize claw of the male fiddler crab. 

On the Kelvin Scale, the absolute temperature used by physicists, it is not possible to get colder than zero degrees kelvin. The physical meaning of the temperature of a gas is determined by chaos, the disordered movement of its particles. The colder the gas, the slower the particles and at zero kelvin (-459.67 F,  -273 C) the particles stop moving and all disorder disappears. That is why it is called absolute zero.