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Hank CampbellRSS Feed of this column.

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

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At insect size, miniature superheroes Ant-Man and The Wasp should be dead in minutes. Since they did not train on the top of Mt. Everest, they would be unable to overcome the atmospheric density they would have to face at tiny size, and that's without getting into the metabolism issues.

Ant-Man clearly didn't have a lot of scientific thought that went into him when he was created by a combination of Stan Lee and his brother Larry Lieber, plus artist Jack Kirby. But superheroes are big science business now. Billions and billions of dollars in box office will do that. They even have their own science publication, the Journal of Superhero Science.
Adélies penguin species may disagree that we're the apex species on earth; they don't spend a lot of time analyzing our poop after all.

But using Landsat satellite images, a team of scholars hope to use poop to sound another warning about clmate change. Unlike "Mission Impossible" movies, not every satellite can see individual creatures, but it can gauge changes by their traces; in this case, pink poo. 
Does the world need another sweetener? With debates raging over cane sugar, corn sugar, beet sugar, raw sugar, and numerous zero-calorie alternatives to sugar, new products would seem to be just another thing for Center for Science in the Public Interest to manufacture lawsuits about.

The debate may be why Brazzein, from the fruit of the West African Pentadiplandra brazzeana plant, never got any commercial traction despite being 2,000 times sweeter than sucrose but with zero calories. It's not a sugar at all, it's a protein. For 25 years it's remained a novelty. (1)

Modified bacteria may be the key
Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors may not be certain (1) man landed on the moon but if photos and broadcasts of that are not enough, he won't be fooled by this picture of an Elf On The Shelf (Jingle, my wife calls him; Kegel the Christmas Elf, as fans of The League deem him) on the International Space Station.
If you are reading media claims about President Trump and the Waters of the United States, they are using terms like "unprecedented" and "sabotage" regarding rollback of some 2015 Obama restrictions that environmentalists had lobbied for and won. 

Yet these new regulations never took effect, so how can it be sabotaging us?

Were we really in danger and only a set of regulations never enacted would save us? Are close-ups of frogs in pea-soup-looking water (obviously to evoke images of chemical sludge for readers who may have never seen a frog in a pond) real or fake news?

Non-profit, non-ideological science media can help un-muddy the waters.
NASA's InSight experiment landed on Mars November 26th after traveling 300 million miles over seven months. Though it is there to analyze seismic activity. its seismometer and air pressure sensor and picked up different vibrations on Dec. 1st. 

The slight hum turned out to be 10-15 mph winds as they blew across Mars’ Elysium Planitia.

We can now hear sound on another planet.

"Capturing this audio was an unplanned treat," said Bruce Banerdt of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in their press release.  

For you and me both.

There's not a lot I can add to that so I will just be awed.