Phosphorus is a critical ingredient in fertilizers, pesticides, detergents and various industrial and household chemicals but once phosphorus is mined from rocks, getting it into products is hazardous and expensive, so chemists have been trying to streamline the process for decades.

While the public has a great respect for scientists, they don't trust scientists, at least when it comes to issues that also overlap with politics, like the environment.

When it comes to policy-related topics, scientists have a limited effect on the public, perhaps not because people are stupid but because some in science have moved away from being trusted guides and into being advocates, which damages the credibility of science overall.   And once those beliefs are locked in, they are difficult to change.

So while oil drilling is safe, scientists who say so now will go unheard because some in science have gone out of their way to say it isn't due to a cultural agenda.  

Behold true tales of procrastination!  Learn whether to get a PhD!  Or just kick back and enjoy fall.  Enjoy another science webcomics interlude!  The first two are 'long form', so follow their links to get the full story.  The last, a poetic commentary on the new Fall season, stands on its own.

First, an overlap of Science and Comic-Con-- the full comic has the entire tale.

OAuth — a proposed Open Authentication standard — fills a significant gap in cross-application authentication. It’s common in a world of myriad web-based services for one service you use to want to access another service you use, in order to make things better or easier for you.

For example, you might keep contacts in your mail service, and you might want your photo service to see if people you’re in contact with have photos that you might share. We’ve generally done that sort of thing in one of two ways:

Presenting measurement values together with some educated guess on accuracy or precision is scientific standard. It is very important to any good scientist, so much so that it is basically my religion. Delta (Δ) is my god! Those statisticians who serve sigma (σ) and teach the primacy of it do not understand that delta is the larger one after all (sorry - the pun here is strictly for the geeks among you).

A video posted on A Blog Around the Clock a few days ago discusses the mechanisms behind hydrogen bonding. The first half of the video is visually basic -- simple diagrams to illustrate the points in the narrator's lesson -- and includes things like different colors for different atoms, and star shapes that appear where a bond forms.

End-stage renal disease, or chronic kidney failure, affects more than 500,000 people per year in the United States alone and is only fully treated with a kidney transplant. 

Yet there were only 17,000 donated kidneys for transplants last year and the number of patients on the transplant waiting list currently exceeds 85,000, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network. 

Do social networks which features many distant connections, or "long ties," produce large-scale changes most quickly, as social media lore claims?    No, says a new study by Damon Centola,  assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.  Instead, individuals are more likely to acquire new health practices while living in networks with dense clusters of connections — that is, when in close contact with people they already know well. 

If you're a print magazine, or in marketing consumer goods, you care about packaging.

The general science magazine "New Scientist" approached neuroscience marketing firm NeuroFocus to test three different cover designs for an August issue of the magazine.

Applying their EEG-based full brain measurements of test subjects' subconscious responses to the three covers, NeuroFocus identified one as clearly superior in terms of its overall neurological effectiveness, saying it scored exceptionally well in emotional engagement, one of their primary metrics, the others being attention and memory retention. 

This neuromarketing research was the first time that the publishing industry used EEG technology to determine the appeal of cover designs. 

Fish oil has been used as an anti-inflammatory (and a lot of other things) but scientists haven't been sure how the omega-3 fatty acids in fish oil work in that capacity but a new report in Cell shows how omega-3 fatty acids both shut down inflammation and reverse diabetes in obese mice.   The report says omega-3s alleviate inflammation by acting on a receptor (GPR120) found in fat tissue and on inflammatory immune cells called macrophages, studies in mice show.

GPR120 is a G protein-coupled receptor (GPCRs), a group involved in many important cell functions and that includes the targets of many drugs. Other researchers had recently shown that five orphan GPCRs, GPR120 included, respond to free fatty acids.