While America has drastically reduced its greenhouse gas emissions - CO2 from energy is back at early 1990s levels and emissions from coal are back at early 1980s levels - that isn't good enough for many environmentalists. Meanwhile, China is setting the stage to offset all of the greenhouse emissions cuts by the rest of the world while claiming they lead in clean energy.

It is often the case that I get yelled at for being both too liberal and too conservative in the same week. It happens because the science under discussion violates the motivated reasoning of someone's political beliefs.  No conservative ever complains that the policy implication of a science issue is a conservative one, obviously, but you can bet left-wing people will, and vice-versa.

A year ago I noted an alarming increase in celiac disease patients - it seemed to be afflicting a lot of rich, white, American women.

Outrage and scorn were delivered to my door; dozens of comments vilified me for saying it was not a real disease - which would have been fine, had I actually said that. Yet dwarfing those comments by hundreds were the anecdotal claims of people who had self-diagnosed themselves as celiac, at least until they discovered that since it was an actual life-threatening disease, they couldn't claim they had it, so they had reverted to being gluten sensitive, or even intolerant - vague and non-descriptive and requiring no pesky diagnosis.

Athletes are competitive, they are always looking for that extra edge. And the line of right versus wrong can get a little blurry - even in the case of sporting events held for impaired communities.

The Deaflympics, held between 26 July and 4 August this summer, had that concern. Do deaf people have a disadvantage in events like running? And if deaf people have a disadvantage, couldn't someone fake deafness to win a medal, the same way a guy could claim to be a girl inside and compete in a women's event? 

What about cochlear implants? Are those cheating?

The circular stone enclosures known as the temple at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey remain the oldest of its kind, dating back to around the 10th millennium B.C. 

But Göbekli Tepe may also be the world's oldest science building.

Giulio Magli of the Polytechnic University of Milan hypothesizes it may have been built due to the “birth” of a “new” star; the brightest star and fourth brightest object of the sky, what we call Sirius (Greek for "glowing").