New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s rumored retreat on fracking shows just how powerful an anti-science, fear-based campaign can be. If reports are correct, Cuomo will restrict fracking to a few counties in which gas shale is far below the water table, and allow a veto to localities that are dominated by anti-fracking radicals. It's all in the name of ensuring the safety of drinking water, he purportedly believes--or protecting his political base.

Cuomo's decision validates the anti-frackers’ “study it to death” strategy. Their goal is to create the illusion that horizontal fracturing pollutes drinking water — even though the Environmental Protection Agency has publicly (if reluctantly) acknowledged that there is not one documented case of such pollution.

A Mojave rocket company, an asteroid hunter, and a web pundit walk into a conference.  The badge person says, "what is this some kind of joke?"

Okay, we gotta get to space somehow.  Here's what's new in the private space race industry.  What ties these 4 newsbits together is it's all about having fun.

SatMagazine (March 2012) reports

It sounds like a child’s question: can you generate solar power underwater? The answer, according to Phillip Jenkins and his team at the US Naval Research Laboratory, is yes. The researchers recently demonstrated a method for harvesting solar power underwater at depths of 30 feet.

Currently, the only option for underwater energy is batteries, which shortens the amount of time an underwater system can be powered. Having a source of renewable energy underwater opens up the possibility for long-term installations of autonomous systems, including systems for communication, environmental monitoring and networks of sensors.

In the giant 'Europeans are far more anti-science than Americans' file, we can now add another section on racism.

Science can use genetic testing to understand risk factors - some groups have a greater risk than others - but that means interested groups can also do other things with the results.  Europe is terrifically racist, you will never hear a racial slur, much less a stadium-wide chant, at an American sporting event but you are guaranteed to have them at the EURO CUP 2012 tournament. Western Europe is at least trying to drive it out and all those 'end racism' banners are a puzzle to western football viewers but at least they care.

Yet now racists have a new weapon; genetics.

I'm here today to talk about a very strange paper: Penetration of the oral mucosa by parasite-like sperm bags of squid: a case report in a Korean woman.

This study, published in February in the Journal of Parasitology (?!), presents the tale of a woman eating squid who experienced "severe pain" and a "pricking, foreign-body sensation" in her mouth. A doctor found and removed "twelve small, white spindle-shaped, bug-like organisms" from her tongue, cheek, and gums.

So a young earth creationist museum put some dinosaurs in its advertising.  Ho-hum.

While the atheist panic machine lumbers into action once again - after all, kids like dinosaurs, what if they go and learn not to steal and stuff while they are there? - there really isn't much to worry about if you are not in the panic business.

Two days ago I discussed at ICFP 2012 the most recent results of the CMS experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. In the allotted time of my talk I could only cover few analyses, and I obviously chose some of the most interesting ones, so that was already a summary. Here I am bringing the information collapse one step further, by giving a itemized summary of some of the points I made, just in case you are interested. If you want to, you can also download the original slides of my talk from here (but be careful, it's a 8Mb file).

Think it takes James Webb Space Telescope money-pit type funding to do (or someday do) astronomy these days?

Not so, some astronomers get it done with a lens equivalent to a digital camera. As the saying goes, it's not the size of your aperture, it's the vigor of your numerical analysis that counts.

The KELT North telescope in southern Arizona has a tiny lens - really tiny.  But it has revealed the existence of two very unusual faraway planets in a big way, according to Ohio State University doctoral student Thomas Beatty and Vanderbilt University research scientist Robert Siverd, who detailed their discoveries for the KELT-North team at the American Astronomical Society national meeting in Anchorage.

ArQule, Inc. and Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd. announced final results from a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, phase 2 clinical trial with the selective MET inhibitor tivantinib 

as a single-agent, investigational, second-line treatment in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The data was presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) (abstract number 4006).

Do you want to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana?  Did you cheer when a judge in one state broke the law regarding the Ten Commandments and hissed when a judge in another state broke the law regarding gay marriage?

Freedom is a moving target, as is social authoritarianism, and how people seem to come down on one issue often shows how they think on a whole raft of other ones.