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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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fMRI has always been a little misused, to people who know what they are talking about. 20 years after it was first done, the promise seems to have been overrun by agenda-based cultural mapping.
Sometimes there is a story with no winner and a bunch of losers.  In this case, first among the losers are wind energy subsidies squandered on companies that aren't doing much good at all to bridge us to a clean energy future. California likes to brag about both its clean energy subsidies and all the patents it is getting for products that remain not very good, but without government funding they are a non-starter; it is the definition of a fake industry propped up by taxpayers. 
Since today is a celebration of St. Patrick, the religious figure who 'drove the snakes out of Ireland' (meaning Paganism), a whole lot of people got drunk last night.  

Yeah, Protestants getting drunk the night before before a Catholic religious festival makes as much sense as anything else about St. Patrick's Day. In addition, kids in California get something magical in their shoes, which puzzles me too. I never heard of that when I was a kid but the rural area I grew up in was a delightful mix of people descended from residents of Scotland and Eastern Europe so there weren't a lot of magical pots of gold lying around - if an Irishman came along asking about our shoes the reply was going to be sent at muzzle velocity. 

Being Pope may mean good things in the afterlife but here on Earth, it doesn't count for a lot on the Internet. On the day Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis, over 600 domain names were registered by cybersquatters. They must be evangelicals.

Even mistaken names like Francis I were taken.

So Popefrancis.org is not available to the Roman Pontiff, along with most of the country-specific domains, like popefrancis.fr. Even popefrancisi.com was scooped by someone.

Oddly, at the time of this writing, his Argentina country-specific domain was still available - so if you want to grab Popefrancis.ar.com, you still can. Look for domain company GoDaddy to have scantily-clad nuns stripping in the enclave advertising that one real soon.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been chosen as Pope Francis, leader of the Holy See in Rome. That's all well and good, it's nice that heavily-Catholic South America is getting its due and I found it interesting that a Jesuit chose to name himself after a Franciscan.

While many inside the Catholic church (and always those outside) will find plenty to criticize - he is against both abortion and euthanasia and preaches tolerance for homosexuality but does not endorse it - we have one of the most cosmopolitan Pope's ever.


President Obama may have a thing for northeast academics but he at least stepped out of Harvard and Yale this time, tapping MIT Professor Ernie Moniz Monday to run the Department of Energy. Moniz, a theoretical physicist and simulation expert, was in politics during the Clinton years, as Associate Director for Science in the Office of Science and Technology Policy from 1995 to 1997 and Under Secretary of the Department of Energy from 1997 until January 2001.