Julian Assange has never liked having to abide by the same conditions he demands of the rest of the world (read: American government and military, since he long ago stopped leaking documents from anywhere else) - he didn't want his address disclosed in a British court because it put him at risk, he claimed, though the many he put at risk by disclosing them in secret documents had 'no proof' they were in peril, he said, and he certainly did not want any details about his sex changes(errr, charges, as noted in a comment below - anything else is his own business) released without careful editing.

German anaesthesiologist Joachim Boldt was fired last autumn from his job as head of anesthesia at the Klinikum Ludwigshafen after concerns about a 2009 paper surfaced - namely that the study was completely made up.   Boldt has published numerous articles about the safety of a type of surgical fluid replacement called hydroxyethyl starch and now concerns about his research may may mean up to 90 retractions.

See Retraction Watch.

If you're a Steampunk fan, you are not used to seeing hot girls.   Oh, and you think it's 1995.

Just kidding, there is no better time than going to a local coffee house and seeing a Steampunk club meeting.   It's creative stuff.   But the girls do need work.  So this month at Antarctic Press, Ben Dunn, teaming up with fellow illustrators Fred Perry and David Hutchison, release "Victorian Secret: Girls Of Steampunk" - to maybe teach Steampunk girls how to look.    The site is designed for true Steampunk fans, in that the first page is a useless shockwave Enter button that serves no purpose and after that no modern human could actually figure out how to order anything.

It wasn't easy to like "Superman Returns".   Certainly, it was designed to reboot the franchise after "Superman II" but it ended up needing a reboot of its own.    There were a few good sequences but overall it fell flat.

Movies from comic books are big.  Really big.   Too big to let the most recognizable superhero in the world sit on the shelf for too long so, like Batman after the George Clooney fiasco, or even Hulk, which Marvel tried to reboot, with limited success (yet another actor will play him in the Avengers movie) after Ang Lee's flop, Superman is getting another makeover.

David Weisman separates himself from the too-prevalent Psychology Today quackfest by noting that the thing we take as our unified mind doesn't really exist, "it is easily fractured into separate parts, in which the subject maintains subjective unity through the use of confabulation" something Buddhism has long contend.

But, as we all know, "When science supports a particular religious teaching, you can expect members of that religion to become strict empiricists, telling themselves and the world that their belief is grounded in reality."

Yes, the humanities get a free pass today because California State University, Northridge math professor Tihomir Petrov was arrested for peeing on another professor's door.   So math professors are not above being ridiculous either.    

43-year-old Petrov apparently had a squabble with a colleague, whose named has been withheld to protect the ridiculous.   

Homeopathy is under fire because, in a modern world where evidence is easy to find, people can easily learn that duck liver diluted in trillions and trillions of gallons of water will not actually cure the flu.

In the Valley of the Moon, high in the Andes, a team of paleontologists and geologists have announced the discovery of a dinosaur ' at the root of the dinosaur family tree'  which roamed South America as the age of dinosaurs began approximately 230 million years ago.

It had a long neck and tail and weighed only 10 to 15 pounds.  They have aptly named the new dinosaur Eodromaeus - the "dawn runner."

Here's an interesting one, short and sweet - apparently Russians are able to perceive between slightly-different hues of the colour blue because their language contains more words for it.

Researchers are still trying to figure out how it works - is it that language influences perception, or does physiology influence language? No definitive proof either way as far as I can tell, but it's an interesting effect nonetheless.

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html