The news media are flush with stories this week claiming global warming is crushing global crop production. According to the media, global warming is putting the hurt on two of our favorite indulgences – coffee and beer.   A look at facts...shows global warming is strongly benefiting nearly all global crops, including coffee, beer barley, and African corn.

The great thing about being a dictator is you can make any ridiculous claim and no one in your country can dispute you -so if Kim Jong Il wants to claim he is Batman, well, okay.

Venezuela's socialist President Hugo Chavez has declared himself a science expert recently, further asserting capitalism is so awful it killed life on Mars.  Yes, he is scientifically asserting that Mars once had water and "it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet."

Happy World Water Day!

With the world gripped by fear that the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants may turn into “another Chernobyl,” perhaps it’s worth examining just how bad Chernobyl actually was.

Putting Chernobyl in Perspective By Josh Gilder

Is Fukushima now more serious than the 1979 Three Mile Island incident in the U.S.A., as US Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently claimed?     Hard to say yet.  But a mysterious rise in radiation Wednesday is certainly cause for concern.   It seems to have been big enough to force technicians to leave the plant, according to the BBC.  Over the days of the Fukushima crisis, attention has switched from reactor building 1 to 3, to 2, back to 3 - and now, to 4.

In a 24-hour news cycle, it's hard to know what is real and what is not.  In a situation like Japan, all there is left for outsiders is concern.   And some groups with an anti-science agenda want to capitalize on that concern.

Not an hour has gone by that a spokesperson for Greenpeace hasn't hinted that a magnitude 9 earthquake(!) is an indictment of nuclear power.  It's just too darn risky.   Well, what isn't risky if Mother Nature can never be involved?  Greenpeace and other anti-science activists also claim oil is bad, coal is bad, natural gas is bad - everything is bad except for solar which, given today's technology, actually is really bad.

In science, Democrats and Republicans agree on very little, or at least the things they value in science debates are different.   Republicans don't think stunting the economy today is a good fix for climate change and Democrats don't agree vaccines are a good fix for keeping healthy kids.

One thing both sides to seem to agree on today is Google: Reps. Edward Markey and Joe Barton, co-chairmen of the Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, are making Google a target after the online giant was caught acquiring social security numbers of kids in its doodling contest.  It is one thing for Barton, a Republican, to criticize them but Google is a financial and cultural darling of Democrats so Markey looks bad for them.

It sounds great - teach ambiguity by introducing complex questions that do not have easy answers.    The problem is that a lot of students aren't going to get what they need out of classes that way, notes Chad Orzel of Scienceblogs.com.   

I quickly run up against two major problems: first, that we have certain material that we need to cover for our own courses, and second that we have certain material that other people expect us to cover when their students take our classes.

Biodegradable sneakers?   Anything with 'green' slapped on it is going to sell to a certain audience but, as science always knew and the public discovered about ethanol, just because activists and a politician or two talks a lot about it doesn't make it better for the environment.

Plastics are essential in modern life and a biodegradable version that uses less petroleum would be terrific, but are they a net gain for the environment?   The iameco, billed as the world's first biodegradable computer, had a frame made from wood pulp and its panels contained seeds so that when thrown away it would eventually grow new trees.   

It's not going to be a big secret to any of you over the age of 25 that court cases are often not about right versus wrong but about convincing a jury.    And if you want to convince a jury, it helps to make sure you have the right one so choosing members is an art.