Scientists take a great deal of pride in the Scientific Method, and not just because it’s a method named after them. The Method is the basis for their authority. It is the universally accepted tool for finding all facts about the universe, the unbiased straight-and-narrow path that we wish all of the world’s irrational people would find more often.

Oh, you think that’s condescending? How do you know? What are your controls?

Did the flood waters from melting of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the last major cold episode on Earth about 12,900 years ago flow northwest into the Arctic firs, or east via the Gulf of St. Lawrence to weaken ocean thermohaline circulation and have a frigid effect on global climate?

It's a debate that has gone on for decades but new, high-resolution global ocean circulation models claim to have an answer/  The researchers report that the flood must have flowed north into the Arctic first down the Mackenzie River valley. They also say that if it had flowed east into the St. Lawrence River valley, Earth's climate would have remained relatively unchanged.

What does “Well” mean? Or, more specifically, what does ‘Well’ mean when it’s used as the first word in response to so-called ‘Wh-questions’ (which, what, who, whom, whose, where, whence, whither, when, why, whynot, wherefore, whatever etc. etc.)? Professor Gene H. Lerner and Professor Emanuel A. Schegloff offer an explanation in the April 2009 issue of the journal Research on Language&Social Interaction.

“We show that these well-prefaces operate as general alerts that indicate nonstraightforwardness in responding …”

At the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012, a study showed that genetically engineered tomato plants produced a peptide that mimics the actions of good cholesterol when eaten 

In the study, mice that ate the freeze-dried, ground tomatoes had less inflammation and reduced atherosclerosis, plaque build-up in the arteries. 

How a fish ‘broke’ a law of physics

... says a press release from Bristol University.

A recent article about lie detectors brought up a related topic; drug/bomb sniffing dogs or the more general use of police service dogs.  Let me begin by acknowledging a bias; I love dogs.  There seems little doubt regarding the utility of these animals in search and rescue, body recovery, and even sniffing contraband and explosives.  I want to be clear that this is not an attempt to diminish the importance and the role of these dogs in many of the activities they engage in.  Regardless of their error rates or even false positives, the assistance provided by these animals can be invaluable.

So what's the issue?

Nate Silver, a sports statistician, made waves when he accurately projected the results of the presidential election in 2008.  So a few days go when he predicted that President Obama was 75% likely to win when polls only showed the candidates were about even, it set atwitter those people who think statistical models of polls are meaningful.  They were vindicated, the age of scientific projections had arrived, in a baseball cap.

They thought that because they don't understands polls or statistical models.

An experimental device converts kinetic energy from beating hearts into electricity than can power a pacemaker, meaning the chance for no more batteries in the future, according to a talk at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2012.

The study is preliminary but a piezoelectric approach is promising for pacemakers because they require only small amounts of power to operate. Batteries must be replaced every five to seven years, which is costly and inconvenient.  Piezoelectricity might also power other implantable cardiac devices like defibrillators, which also have minimal energy needs.

Alan Guth, the discoverer of cosmic inflation, gave a talk at MIT on November 1, which convinced me, a natural skeptic about these issues, that the multiverse may very well exist. Two routes to the multiverse were never to my liking.

One is "Many Worlds," Hugh Everett IIIs idea that quantum events whose wave functions seem to "collapse" in our world to yield specific measurements actually never collapse but realize all other characteristics implicit in their wave functions in "other universes." Every time something happens here--of all the very large number of possibilities--all the rest of them happen in other universes.