"Cars" is the Pixar movie where I thought they would finally take a fall.  I didn't like the art in previews but my kids wanted to see and away we went.   Like everyone else, I thought the finished product was terrific.

For "Cars 2", unlike (the also terrific) "Toy Story 3", John Lasseter is back directing.   Basically, I am sold that these guys can do no wrong after fifteen solid years of doing no wrong.

The basic premise is that Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) go overseas to compete in the first-ever World Grand Prix to determine the world’s fastest car.  I don't need to know anything else, just take my 8 bucks.

Do more boys get autism or is it under-diagnosed in girls?  Or over-diagnosed in boys?

Leaving aside that the autism spectrum has been extruded out so far that virtually every personality type is labeled some form of autism, the fact remains that real autism, the kind with severe symptoms, exists.

Researchers at the universities of Exeter and Bristol say that even when symptoms are equally severe, boys received autism diagnoses more often.

Most in science knew this - exaggeration tends to whittle away at the trust level of the public - and a UC Berkeley study set out to determine which worked better, data or dire, in changing hearts and minds about global warming.

The result; they found if scientists and advocates communicate their findings regarding climate change in less apocalyptic ways, and present solutions to global warming, even skeptics can get past their skepticism.

During the collision of India with the Eurasian continent, the Indian plate was pushed about 500 kilometers under Tibet, reaching a depth of 250 kilometers. The result of the world's largest collision was the world's highest mountain range but that isn't the end of the story. 

Cut to 2004 and a tsunami that made world headlines ...

A year ago, you probably did not know what a vuvuzela was but, if you read this site during the World Cup, you know it now.

Turns out so do a lot of other people.  The Global Language Monitor, which analyzes trends in word usage (read: English) says Vuvuzela was among the top new terms of the year, along with Tea Party and others, while last year Twitter and H1N1 were big winners.

Are you willing to switch to an @Facebook.com e-mail address?

Email wars, which have been dormant since the 1990s, appear to be back and social-networking behemoth Facebook is leading the charge.  But it isn't just mail, said CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and it's more than just chat.   It has messaging across a variety of platforms, including SMS and texting conversation history across those platforms and a "social in-box", so people can parse messages from friends and family before the inbox.

At Oddee, Gracie Murano has compiled 10 Bizarre Medical Discoveries, among them items like "asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride" and coffee drinkers are more likely to have hallucinations.

Will kids be inspired by a talking proton?   A filmmaker is betting on it.   Using as a plot an effort to destroy the Cassini-Huygens antenna, writer/director Harry Kloor in Quantum Quest has a photon, a neutrino and two protons setting out to save the project - and the whole universe.

New Scientist has an interview with Kloor, including the struggles involved in getting actors like William Shatner, Chris Pine (so, two Captain Kirks!), Samuel L. Jackson and Amanda Peet  for small(ish) budget films and criticisms from some scientists, like 'protons can't talk'.

Philip K. Dick wrote over a hundred short stories, none better than "The Minority Report", where police were able to anticipate crimes rather than arrest people after the fact - leading to arrests before the fact for crimes people hadn't committed yet and a 1950s science-fiction discourse on the nature of free will.

In "The Minority Report" three unaccountable mutants sit in a room mumbling gibberish until a computer sifts through it and makes projections about parallel futures created by actions; when two predictions agree it is a majority report.  When a police commissioner finds out he is going to be arrested for a future murder, he goes out to find the minority report where he commits no crime.