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Alan Turing, the computer science legend best known for his part in breaking the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park in World War II, may have died of an accident rather than suicide, according to a new claim.

Accidental cyanide poisoning?  Do go on.

Professor Jack Copeland, director of the The Turing Archive for the History of Computing, claims in a new book that Turing may have died due to inhalation in amateur experiments rather than in a deliberate attempt to kill himself. 
The Utopian vision society has always dreamed about was a world where people could eat so much for so little money, that it wasn't just rich people who could afford to be fat; anyone could.

Well, we have that. America is more self-loathing about its obesity issues than most countries but Italian kids are fat, everyone in Britain is fat, and even the French are closing in on a weight crisis.
Two of the great feel-good fallacies promoted by vegetarians and vegans today is that eating less meat will stop climate change and that ancient man did it their way.

In reality, ancient man loved meat, it was just hard to kill.  So ancient scientists domesticated livestock - and then they found more uses for it, like milk, butter and cheese. It wasn't just Europeans, researchers have identified the chemical signature of dairy fats inside the surfaces of pottery from 7,200 years ago in North Africa.
A few days away from a Supreme Court ruling on the the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act(Obamacare to detractors) comes some sobering claims from Britain, which already has nationalized health care.

Professor Patrick Pullicino, a consulting neurologist for East Kent Hospitals and Professor of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Kent, says National Health Service (NHS) doctors in the UK are prematurely ending the lives of thousands of elderly hospital patients because they are difficult to manage or to free up beds.
Things are not great in America but Spain may have the USA beat - even cherries are being stolen.

Last year, more than 20,000 thefts were reported at Spanish farms.  Is that more or less than in previous years?  No one is sure, it was never a problem before so they have few records.  Now, thieves steal food from farmers and resell them in ad hoc markets.  Welcome to the 14th century. All those people who think the past was better get to see it first hand.
Joan Gonzalvo of the Ionian Dolphin Project, who studies dolphins off western Greece for the Tethys Research Institute, captured an incredible sequence of images showing a leaping bottlenose dolphin with a large octopus clinging to its belly.

Well, more specifically the dolphin's genital slit. Yikes.

Advances in medical and surgical care are hard-won, requiring rigorous, carefully interpreted research and development. There is painstaking clinical work to translate basic discoveries into useful diagnostics, drugs, and devices. Despite the obastacles, the achievements made in the past half century are unmistakable: a 50 percent reduction in cardiovascular mortality despite an epidemic of obesity; a dramatically decreased cancer mortality rate; and the conversion of AIDS from a death sentence to survival with good life quality.
It's a nightmare for Whole Foods shoppers; what if genetically modified crops produced by evil scientists who only care about profits for their employers (i.e., the same as every employee of Whole Foods and its organic Mega-Farm suppliers) are actually good for the ecosystem?

We already know that genetically modified foods are as good for people as organic foods - or better if you'd prefer not to get E. coli from your food. We also know that, despite the silly claims, organic food is incapable of feeding poor people while genetically modified foods have brought prosperity and nutrition to a billion people worldwide in the last decade, and they have done it without using more land and with less harmful pesticides.
Chimpanzees, you are not alone.  The distinction of being our closest living relative in the animal kingdom is now a tie with the bonobo.

An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA (about 99.6%) with us as chimps do.
Bank of America was recently so crushed by its risky derivatives investments it needed $45 billion in bailout money from taxpayers - and then proceeded to engage in questionable practices to cover its losses, much like it engaged in questionable practices to acquire the losses.  

Things are so much better now they can afford to fix global warming and are devoting $50 billion to the cause. 
Archaeologists have discovered the remains of the Elizabethan theatre where some of William Shakespeare’s plays were first performed. The Curtain Theatre was the venue immortalized as “this wooden O” in the prologue to “Henry V.”

The remains of the polygonal structure, typical of 16th-century theatres were found behind a pub on a site marked for redevelopment.  They 
uncovered part of the gravel yard and gallery walls of the 435-year-old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch, just east of London’s business district.

The Curtain opened in 1577 and was home to Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, from 1597 until the Globe Theatre was built across the river two years later.

If we want to start cutting budgets, Republicans are not wrong for noting that the Education Department and the Department of Energy could disappear without any consequence at all to America beyond the government union employees working there.

But one darling of the right, the military, could do some cutting as well.  America has 16 different intelligence agencies and one of them you likely never heard of, the National Reconnaissance Office, has donated not one but two Hubble-sized military telescopes to NASA because, darn it, they just don't need them after all.
Every two years an international standardized test is given and a lot more often than that we get treated to mainstream media claims about how bad science education is.  

They never want to say students are dumb - it is just the ammunition in their culture war against...someone.  Mostly taxpayers, it seems, since they are buying into propaganda by well-funded education lobbyists that hiring more teachers or spending more money will solve the problem.
Count on economics, the dismal science, to claim that the one economy not crippled in 2012, is in peril.

Change it must, argues political scientist Victor Shih of Northwestern University in Financial Times, because its net exports to GDP is falling rapidly. Since its trade surplus, the cheap engine of its financial machine, has shrunk, they must consider
Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate, Science Education advocate and general shining light of reason in the Obama administration is stepping down as associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Three years in politics is a long time if you are not a career politician and Prof. Wieman has likely accomplished all he can at a high level and may simply want to get back to direct involvement.  The OSTP communications director told Nature he was leaving for 'personal reasons'.
Conservatives and more taxes are kind of an oxymoron in the same sentence but pretend for a minute that more taxes are going to happen.   Because they are.  Do you want a bad one or a really terrible one?

America has been trying to get a really terrible one but even President Obama couldn't pull that one off - he gave us terrible health care law instead.  But he had limits even on what he could do with a bulletproof majority.  When it came to higher taxes in the form of cap and trade for emissions, his own party's Senators were airing commercials shooting the bill with an assault rifle.
Hey, if the California Air Resources Board can create an entire cap and trade industry just by inventing emissions 340% higher than any actual evidence, it can go the other way.  Science is all postmodern and relative that way - once you let people you agree with make stuff up, anyone can do it.
Sorry economists, you don't do science, no matter how much envy you have.  Nor you, mathematicians, and social psychologists surveying undergraduates are disqualified too. 

In order to be a science you have to be scientifically rigorous - that doesn't mean just using some statistics. Obviously, even getting funding from the National Science Foundation doesn't qualify as science, though it should.
Be careful when ordering things through the mail - especially chicks.

Apparently, 50 million live poultry are sold through the mail each year in the United States.  Business has been booming because wanna-be farmers regard backyard chickens as a great way to raise their own food. So they buy chicks, for their kids or themselves.

I imagine they only think that chickens are a great way to raise their own food until the little eco-terrorists ruin the yard and smell up the place - or give their kids salmonella. 316 cases have been reported in 43 states since 2004.
Take that, Sir Isaac Newton.  16-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories, which will help scientists calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and predict how it will strike and bounce off a wall, a tough problem for hundreds of years.

Ray attributes his success to  "Schuele generic naivety" - schoolboy naiveté - but good math should not be discounted.  His engineer father started teaching him calculus at age 6.  Newton basically had to invent fluxions at age 24 so Ray had a bit of an advantage there.