In a closely watched trial, prosecutors who argued that a group of Italian scientists is accountable for not adequately warning residents about the risks of an earthquake in the town of L'Aquila have succeeded. 

The Italian scientific community has naturally been concerned; how can you penalize people for not doing the impossible? Nevertheless, legal minds have found that the seven scientists charged with manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake and alerting residents to evacuate their homes are to blame. The court in L'Aquila Monday evening handed down six-year-prison sentences to the defendants, members of a national "Great Risks Commission."

Dr. Oz, the famous television doctor/celebrity, has never found a bit of scare journalism or a miracle vegetable he didn't promote. He is infamous among public health professionals for exaggerating the origins of autism, vaccines, dangers of BPA and chemical additives, arsenic in foods. His latest misadventure in questionable pop science was an October 12 program titled “GMO Foods: Are They Dangerous to Your Health?”

in his “investigation,” Oz provided uncritical time for Jeffrey Smith, an activist with no scientific or medical background, and Dr. Robin Bernhoft, a leading proponent of unconventional medical interventions and a belief, unsupported by mainstream science, that most chronic medical problems are caused by “toxic environmental exposures.”

Some physicists are looking to do for elections what they have done for economics - try and prove that people can behave rationally.  Here is hoping it goes better this time.

Unfortunately, the biggest believers in the idea that humans might, on occasion, obey rules that yield predictable collective patterns, have been non-scientists, like political philosopher John Stuart Mill and social scientists Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet.

Gilles-Eric Séralini, the University of Caen biologist and anti-GMO activist, is under intense pressure to report the full data behind his team’s claim that rats fed for two years with Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumors and died earlier than controls.

Sometimes when I add a cool link, I want to make it funnier, or more prescient.  Sometimes the weird vibe of a writer straining for edgy legitimacy just stands on its own.  So, Science 2.0 audience, I present to you a sample of a site you may never need to bother with again, OpEdNews - because even its name is in conflict with itself and insecure, kind of like calling a site Belt And Suspenders:

Russian feminist punk-rock (and, if we are being honest with each other, not very good) band Pussy Riot's 15 minutes of anti-religion fame may be about up.  Russia has turned its social authoritarianism on something new; PepsiCo.

There is an obvious demographic thread that connects anti-science groups in food, in medicine, in research and pharmacy too, but most science media pundits are incapable of seeing it or flat out deny it.

Yet it is hard to deny.  Meanwhile, every science media outlet publishes articles claiming the entire Republican party must be anti-science because more of them deny global warming and slightly more Republicans than Democrats deny evolution.

The anti-biology movement among the left, Jon Entine notes, is "enabled by advocacy NGOs and campaigning journalists who, ironically, took the lead in debunking the pseudo-science of the right."

How do you turn political science, economics or surveys of college undergraduates into science?  You claim scientists are mean to people and not liberal and tolerant at all unless they agree with what you say next and then set out to redefine science so that just about anything can qualify.

Anyone thinking on this for a moment can deduce there are going to get two reasons to do so, and they apply to almost anything: money and politics.

Writing in USA Today, Dr. Alex Berezow and I dissect the recent efforts to insist the social sciences and the humanities are part of the science continuum, and therefore should have the same legitimacy conferred on them, despite the fact that we all know society is not a laboratory,

A parasite that caused bees to lurch around like, well, zombies, and fly at night until they die has been found in Washington State.
 
Colony Collapse Disorder, in which all the adult honey bees in a colony suddenly die, has already been causing bee populations to drop. Such zombies were first discovered in California in 2008 by San Francisco State University biologist John Hafernik who now runs a website ZombeeWatch.org that is aided by a network of citizen scientists to help determine how widespread the parasite is and whether it is contributing to the demise of bee colonies across the country.