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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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A giant crococile versus a giant snake in a Colombian coal mine? It sounds even more awesome than "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus", except the real life version does not have Debbie Gibson.

An ancient crocodile relative, a dyrosaurid now named Acherontisuchus guajiraensis, likely gave the world's largest snake a tussle or two. In Palaeontology, University of Florida researchers describe the new 20-foot extinct species which was discovered in the same Colombian coal mine as Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the world's largest snake.
The highest paid player in baseball has the last name "Rodriguez" and 3 of the top 10 highest paid players in major league baseball are black - but major league umpires are racist, argues Johan Sulaeman, a financial economist at Southern Methodist University.

They looked at 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008 and found that minority pitchers are so convinced white MLB umpires call strikes more often for white pitchers than for minority pitchers that they throw 'safe' pitches and therefore hurt their own performance.
One long-standing myth is that any law claiming to be good for the environment is actually good for the environment.   Anyone living along levees in the South who watched environmental lawsuits block improvements in the 1990s and then heard the Army Corps of Engineers criticized after Hurricane Katrina for not previously making improvements had to wonder why the media didn't cover one obvious source of blame for the entire region not being more resistant to floods.

No, instead we got treated to Sean Penn carrying a shotgun, apparently to mow down the zombies the media claimed were floating in New Orleans and everyone blamed Pres. George Bush because the tropical storm turned into a hurricane.
I don't like SpongeBob SquarePants.  I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or whatever city that show is down to now.

So when I see an article claiming SpongeBob is bad for kids and I may have a reason to ban that porifera from the house, it has a certain truthiness to it and so I let my confirmation bias run free.

A group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the world.

What does that even mean?  The 9/11 Intention Experiment is the latest of 23 Web-based experiments carried out by author Lynne McTaggart to try and test the power of thought to change the physical world.

Yes, you read that right - telekinesis. Or mind control.  I'm not sure.  She doesn't look like that lady in "V" but it sounds like kind of the same approach - make the world a better place by controlling what people do. Except in a nicer way, we hope.

Once upon a time, journals were horribly expensive to produce and to read.  Your research might only be read by 200 people but those 200 people knew the work was vetted by reviewers.   It had a quality standard.

Open access publishing is a blessing and a curse in some ways.   Some very popular journals are not peer-reviewed, they are instead looked over by an editor who may or may not be qualified to determined its technical validity - but since they are taking money from scientists to publish the article, rather than relying on subscriptions, the concern is that the researcher is now the customer rather than the science.