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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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In 1752 in the British city of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin did something that horrified the superstitious people of the day - he captured a lightning storm in a jar with nothing but a piece of string controlled by some dry silk.
Imagine a site where the lead developer supported the Discovery Institute, the Tea Party, the Mitt Romney campaign, Greenpeace, Joe Mercola, Just Label It, and various other political activist and anti-science groups.

Would you believe it was really neutral about science?

Perhaps. It depends on how many other people are involved in the project, but it would certainly bring a higher level of scrutiny.
If you lived in Hilazon Tachtit, near  the Hilazon river of Israel 12,000 years ago, you might have borne witness to a world first; the earliest known religious ceremony.
Underneath the ancient royal buried ground of Saqqara in the Egyptian desert lies something even creepier than mummies that might come back to life - mummies that might come back to life and be adorable.

The Sacred Animal Necropolis, as it was called after being discovered by archaeologists last century, was dedicated to Anubis - that is the one with the head of a dog/jackal - and is believed to contain up to 8 million animals, most of them small dogs. It's hard to be sure because the animals were not mummified the way royal members were so they have just basically decomposed into heaps of DNA. Most were placed there in the Late Dynastic (747-332 B.C.) and Ptolemaic (332-30 B.C.) Periods.

You may not have realized it, but women's voices are a big topic. For women, at least. 

I suppose it may be true. If someone asks me to describe the characters in television comedy "The Big Bang Theory", my natural response would be 'the guy that matches the stereotype of how people think physicists are, the actual physicist, the engineer, the psychologist, the girl who looked a lot better with longer hair and the girl with the squeaky voice.'

See? 16% of my responses were related to female voice. She did better than the Indian guy, I forgot him completely, but whatever her science degree is was completely left out, the voice sticks out.


Right now, the police can't do much to help you until after a crime has been committed. In a science-fiction tale about free will and psychological determinism, Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" detailed a world where PreCrime officers stop acts before they happen. They know who is going to do it.

But psychic mutants are a simplistic convention, criminologists have instead been trying to do it in the real world.