What happens when thousands of scientists do decades of research and taxpayers spend spend $15 billion on a scientifically validated site for nuclear waste storage but those science conclusions conflict with the anti-science beliefs of a president and his key ally in the Senate?

Two Asian charities have joined forces with the U.S. National Funeral Directors' Association (NFDA) to get people to start thinking about deathcare rather than healthcare.

No, deathcare is not another tine in Britain's expanding Liverpool Death Pathway fork, it is a chance to think about the way your final exit is made, assuming you were told you are on the NHS' mandatory road to demise in time to plan. 

Medical research is both derided and essential.  The public complains that a new experimental drug is not available due to the FDA being too conservative while also complaining that drugs have too many side effects and companies should be sued over the lack of proper testing before release. In popular television, every show that has a character who enrolls in a medical research trial develops giant boils and body tics, it is a humor standby to show that medical research is only done by the economically desperate. In research itself, scientists trust other scientists little and they trust researchers not under the government umbrella even less. Corporations are bad and pharmaceutical companies worst of all.

Professor Steven Chu, who was appointed Energy Secretary under as much optimism as can be imagined in late 2008, has officially resigned, a move everyone knew was coming.

Except for his irrational CO2 fanaticism - an energy Nobel laureate who takes a job in the cabinet has to know we can't just cut off CO2, the way an academic working at a national lab can talk about it - Chu was a much safer choice than the UFO believers and Doomsday prophets the Obama administration was determined to hire after his victory in November of that year.

It's no shock to know there is no anthropology without beer. No history either. Really, it took alcohol to get someone to write down mundane events in longhand.  And beer-making equipment was prized above all else, that is why many of our earliest finds from ancient civilizations have been related to it.