Working as an experimental particle physicist in a large scientific collaboration, such as the 3000-strong CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, is a (not too uncommon) privilege, for several reasons. 
One of those reasons is of purely numerical kind: the number of publications that bear your name grows by the day, and may reach four-figure values in the course of a couple of decades (I am about to cross that point with my publication list, in fact). But what value do those thousand articles have for the sake of assessing your value as a scientist ? Very little, indeed, and in fact all the selection to which I have participated in my career required one to specify one's specific contribution to all the papers one wished to boast about.

It must be nice to have a job with so much free time on your hands that you can do just about anything, regardless of merit, and not only get away with it, but, rather, be rewarded for it.

Our dear friends, the Environmental Working Group (EWG), perhaps the most scientifically flawed organization out there (and this is no small accomplishment) have decided to take on the (all of a sudden) life and death issue of children drawing with crayons.

Hope you were sitting down when you heard about this.

This non-issue arises from a report, entitled “EWG Tests Find Asbestos in Kids’ crayons, Crime Scene Kits— Even trace exposures to lethal asbestos fibers can cause cancer, other diseases.”

Any discussion of carbohydrates in the diet must deal with the Atkins conception of weight loss, because it is so commonly used and it rests in the middle of the debate about the causes of weight gain. Anyone trying to figure out why we've become obese needs to decide, at some point, whether Atkins had the cause and effect of obesity and diabetes correct.

It's easy to dismiss Dr. Atkins. His books are self-promoting (he named the diet, which pre-existed him by 150 years, after himself) and full of hyperbole:

Climate change models predict that sea temperatures will rise significantly, including in the tropics. In these areas, rainfall is also predicted to increase, reducing the salt concentration of the surface layer of the sea. Together, these changes would dramatically affect the microscopic communities of bacteria and plankton that inhabit the oceans, impacting species higher up the food chain. Worryingly, future conditions may favour disease-causing bacteria and plankton species which produce toxins, such as the lethal PST (paralytic shellfish toxin). These can accumulate in shellfish such as mussels and oysters, putting human consumers at risk.

Though pesticides are getting all of the attention from environmental groups when it comes to concern about bees, the science community instead knows it is mites and climate - were it as simple as pesticides, places like Australia and the United States, where the neonicotinoids often blamed by activists are common, would show losses, but instead they were limited to one section of Europe. 

Using gene therapy, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School have restored hearing in mice with a genetic form of deafness. Their work, published online July 8 by the journal Science Translational Medicine, could pave the way for gene therapy in people with hearing loss caused by genetic mutations.

"Our gene therapy protocol is not yet ready for clinical trials--we need to tweak it a bit more--but in the not-too-distant future we think it could be developed for therapeutic use in humans," says Jeffrey Holt, PhD, a scientist in the Department of Otolaryngology and F.M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children's and an associate professor of Otolaryngology at Harvard Medical School.

Science 2.0 family, it is with great pride that I announce I have been named the president of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH). 

They may be viewed by some as an invasive species or a commonplace pest of public parks, but a new study from the University of Exeter has shown that grey squirrels are actually quick learners capable of adapting tactics to improve efficiency and reap the best rewards.

To test the animals' intelligence and mental flexibility researchers invented a task involving a box with 12 sunken wells, four of which were hollow. Of the four, two contained hidden hazelnuts.

The five squirrels observed in the study (named Simon, Arnold, Sarah, Leonard and Suzy) were all given training prior to the task so they were proficient at using their paws or teeth to peel back the layer of paper hiding a nut inside the wells.

There may be far fewer galaxies further out in the Universe then might be expected, suggests a new study based on simulations and published this week in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The simulations show the first results from the Renaissance Simulations, a suite of extremely high-resolution adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) calculations of high redshift galaxy formation and hundreds of well-resolved galaxies. 

"Most critically, we show that the ultraviolet luminosity function of our simulated galaxies is consistent with observations of redshift galaxy populations at the bright end of the luminosity function, but at lower luminosities is essentially flat rather than rising steeply," wrote researchers in their paper. 

Television commercials assure us that probiotic products are good for our health, with claims ranging from improved digestion to managing allergies and colds,

If so, why wouldn't plants also benefit from certain microbes?