Science comedian Brian Malow ties much of science to growing up in a happily dysfunctional family. He asks:

What if the driving force behind the evolutionary patterns of homo erectus was moms telling their kids to “Stand Up Straight?”

Once when I was 10, he tells us, I asked my dad why the sky was blue. He said go ask your mom. She said, “Because I said so.” I never asked her a science question again. 



Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, here insights into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. I started with the language barrier, and there were points that need to be explained further.

My first point was that if you usually speak German or some such language, learning Spanish is just one more language while Mandarin equals learning three new languages: Written characters, spoken Mandarin, and Pinyin Romanization.

NPR, National Public Radio, is in a tough spot - they are constantly accused of liberal bias (and, let's be honest, they have never done a story on how taxes hurt poor people or how much better the environment is than 40 years ago, so there is something to that perception (1)) and no one who gets taxpayer money likes being a political football and having people in government asking what they do with the money but that is the price of taking government money.
New research by archaeologists from the University of York says that Neanderthals were a lot more compassionate than their reputation as brutish cavemen.

How do you chart the 'compassion' of early humans?