It took years of mismanagement, printing Monopoly money by the federal government, and runaway unemployment to get groups claiming to represent 99% of Americans protesting progressive fiscal policy on Wall Street and in other cities.

You may disagree on the purity of that movement, since the Teamsters and the education unions are funding this stuff and are not exactly friends of the little guy (try to get a job in NYC without being in their union) but one thing no one will disagree with; if you take away coffee, 100% of Americans will riot.

Males of many species guard the females they have mated with, a behavior generally interpreted as a tactic to reduce the likelihood that rival males will mate with the female. This, of course, can lead to a conflict between the sexes: where females might want to mate with other males, males will try to prevent this. In this case, the male-female association is based on conflict.

A new study on crickets (Gryllus campestris, see figure 1), however, suggests that the foundation of the couple’s association might be based on cooperation. By continuously monitoring natural cricket populations with marked individuals, the researchers were able to observe behaviors and predation. 

    

I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that goes is a policy matter and it's for civilian leadership to decide.

Researchers won't like being compared to the military but it's a lot like that; there is a job to do, a mission to accomplish, and the scope and limitations of that mission are determined by the public through their politicians but once that framework is established, it is up to the soldiers on the ground to decide how to get there.

The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for astronomers.

A lack of light pollution and anti-science hippies filing lawsuits has made Chile a new favorite spot for space science and the first image we got after ALMA opened its eyes is darn spectacular.  What we can't see with visible-light or infrared telescopes, ALMA can see just fine.  And the image below is with only 12 of its final 66 radio antennas.  It's fitting that the first image was of the Antenna Galaxies.

Hypothetically, if someone told you that a hypothetical question can influence your judgments or behavior, would you believe them?

In which context did life arise? A problem yet unsolved. Several plausible ideas and hypotheses have been put forward: shallow seas, meteorites (see DNA, Made In Space?), and even much more extreme habitats, such as hydrothermal vents. Perhaps pumice should be added to the list?

Pumice (see figure 1), a volcanic rock formed by solidified frothy lava, is known to be porous and, once upon a time in its history, gas-rich. Now, a new study, published in Astrobiology, poses that extensive rafts of pumice have four properties that would actually make them a suitable candidate for the location where life arose.

One of the issues that emerged in the discussion of whether researchers should be bloggers is the fact that it is always dangerous to wear multiple "hats", i.e. carrying multiple responsibilities which may sometimes come in conflict with one another.

Wearing two hats

Of course this is a very common and old problem. I am indebted to Jim S.M., who sent me a few excerpts from Churchill's autobiography, which are very relevant to the issue besides being quite amusing:

Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer?  Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern.  Fortunately, the precautionary principle isn't overused by everyone (though when it is, the politically like-minded dismiss it as policy disagreement and not being anti-science) but any time you have an anti-science hotbed, it will get trotted out.

It's "Second Life"...for monkeys.  And a lot more real.   Scientists have demonstrated a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body - they learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and even identify the texture of virtual objects. 

Did comets deliver a significant portion of the Earth's oceans millions of years after the Earth formed?  Some new evidence in Nature lends weight to the idea.

Using HiFi, the Heterodyne Instrument for the Infrared on the Hershel Space Observatory, researchers found that the ice on a comet called Hartley 2 has the same chemical composition as our oceans. Both have similar D/H ratios - the proportion of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the water. A deuterium atom is a hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus. 

This was the first time ocean-like water was detected in a comet.