Researchers at Imperial College have released a video game that was written in part by what they call an Artificial Intelligence (AI) "machine" named Angelina, which is a clever acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat I've Named Angelina".

Their latest effort, released last month, is called "A Puzzling Present" (download it here). Players have to help Santa collect gifts on 30 Christmas levels with holly and other things getting in the way.

Since 2007, on too many occasions to count, I have noted that by being overwhelmingly partisan scientists in academia are putting themselves at risk.

Not financially. If funding mattered, all scientists would vote Republican - when it comes to funding, Republicans have spent more than Democrats on science even in the period when science, and all academia, lurched far to the left. Republicans do not cut funding because scientists vote Democrat.

"Cash for clunkers", President Obama's 2009 Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), was hailed as a huge success by the administration and environmentalists - but it was really just another government boondoggle. Not as expensive as $72 billion wasted in pet energy projects but still a high-profile case of an administration engaged in the Scientization of Politics - prettying up a world view by pretending it is reality-based.

In the New York Times, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman 

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One.