The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children.  Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn from the social environment at schools and, if you are a parent with a school age child, you might even worry about it more than be relieved.

Single-sex schools would seem to relieve some of that pressure, just like some women or some men feel better at a single-sex exercise facility. Advocates of single-sex schools contend that there may be brain differences between girls and boys that benefit from different teaching styles, though neuroscientists have found no brain differences linked to different learning styles.

 A poll on Mashable, unscientific but a talking point anyway, found nearly 75-percent saying they "hate" the Facebook news feed changes.

It isn't often I will agree with Club Sierra...I mean Sierra Club - if you have ever been to their offices you will know how easy it is to confuse the terms.

They spend so much time latching onto whatever cause will generate donations it's hard to know if they believe in anything, much less science, and it can make you nuts.  Like Greenpeace, their baffling 'trust scientists when it comes to global warming but scientists are out to kill you with GMOs' stance is, in a nutshell, why progressives (not liberals, not Democrats, progressives) are so goofy in their anti-science beliefs. 

In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue.  It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I thought, but evolutionary and not revolutionary.  We had covered a Lancet paper on much the same thing in 2008.  But in the course of a correspondence with a media rep she noted something important; not only was this not a traditional transplant, this was not even one where an organ was decellularized and recellularized with the patient's stem cells, it was created for the patient and in just two days.

That meant no immunosuppressive drugs, at $20,000 per year, and no morbidities due to their side effects.

People may complain about tax breaks for successful energy companies but the one thing worse is spending real money on lousy ones.   Yet it has happened because advocacy is taking precedence over science.

The recent Solyndra LLC collapse is not the first time this has happened, nor can it be blamed solely on the Obama administration simply due to his zeal for alternative energy - the Department of Energy began the loan guarantee program in 2006 when there was a Republican Congress and a Republican senate and in 2005 the wasteful ethanol subsidies and mandates were put into law.