The article Neutrinos CAN go Faster than Light has triggered large interest and is at present widely discussed, for example here and here on my favorite (for variety and reliability) German science column Here There Be Dragons and somewhat

Women who increase consumption of caffeinated coffee have lower risk of depression, according to a report in Archives of Internal Medicine.

If health care is free, more people will go to the doctor and that means longer waiting for people who truly need it. An overburdened health care system would then have to hire less-qualified people to meet the needs, and that is bad.  If the president suddenly says every family will get a three star-chef, for example, they won't actually get a three-star chef, they'll get a McDonald's fry cook dressed like a chef.

Yet we spend a lot for great care.  Some contend Americans get too much health care under the current system, meaning rationing under a nationalized system would not really hurt anyone.  Who is making that claim?  Economists in favor of government health care, mostly.

Are students inspired to go into physics because of a television show like "The Big Bang Theory"?  Probably not, or else 60% of America would be cops and lawyers.

But chemistry has a bad reputation, argues a recent editorial in Nature Chemistry, and "Breaking Bad" gets some of the blame for keeping its reputation bad.   It's a cable show on AMC, so not exactly on the minds of all that many people, but it chronicles the transformation of Walter White from suburban high school chemistry teacher to crystal meth dealer and criminal mastermind who uses his chemistry expertise (poisons, noxious gases, and acid) to eliminate rival meth dealers. 

The organizers of TEDx Flanders did produce in a very timely manner very professional videos of the event, so you can follow offline the talks, including mine. However, what I said is not exactly what I had planned to say. Further, you might not want to spend your time looking at a recording. So for the record, I am pasting here my unamended script. Later on I will also post here the slides I showed while talking, which cannot be seen in the video.

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Thousands of physicists, engineers, computer scientists, modern-age seers have worked at it for the last twenty years.

Researchers have created a protein 'switch' that instructs cancer cells to produce their own anti-cancer medication and lab tests showed it can activate a powerful cell-killing drug when the device detects a marker linked to cancer.

The goal in cancer treatment is to some day cause cancer cells to self-destruct  and spare healthy tissue, damage to all tissue being the downside to current treatments like chemotherapy.

The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children.  Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn from the social environment at schools and, if you are a parent with a school age child, you might even worry about it more than be relieved.

Single-sex schools would seem to relieve some of that pressure, just like some women or some men feel better at a single-sex exercise facility. Advocates of single-sex schools contend that there may be brain differences between girls and boys that benefit from different teaching styles, though neuroscientists have found no brain differences linked to different learning styles.

In Doomsday Comet Elenin Goes Out With A Whimper we dismissed concerns from prophets of doom that a tiny comet 22 million miles away would make any difference in our lives - but we never said anything at all about a sunspot and what it might due to your wireless PS3 connection at a crucial moment in "Gears of War".

Behemoth sunspot 1302 unleashed another strong flare on Saturday morning, an X1.9-category blast at 5:40 am EDT. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash.

While concern about water is always real, scare tactics like virtual water do more harm than good for rational policy making. Objective analyses show we don't have a food issue looming that science and technology can't address.

A new study in Nature shows that genetic parasites invaded the mammalian genome more than 100 million years ago and dramatically changed the way mammals reproduce.

The molecular changes allowed mammals to carry their developing young within the womb rather than laying them in nests or carrying them around in pouches - the uterus was transformed. 

The findings published online Sept. 25 in the journal Nature Genetics describe in unprecedented detail the molecular changes that allowed mammals to carry their developing young within the safety of the womb rather than laying them in nests or carrying them around in pouches.