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Happy Twelfth Night - Or Divorce Day, Depending On How Your 2026 Is Going

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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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Kopi Luwak, coffee made from berries extracted the feces of Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), is all the rage. At our neighborhood Labor Day party we had not only that in attendance, but moonshine too (1), so you know it is trendy. We're thought leaders when it comes to drinks.
When I first saw a new article about cow tipping, I bristled just a little. The last thing American culture needs is another flatlander telling real farmers whether or not cows fall over. But Jake Swearingen, Digital director at Modern Farmer, does a good job dealing with a sensitive topic. Sensitive may be the wrong word. Cow tipping brings out the passion in cows.

And people too. You think the neo-cons in the White House and peaceniks in the public are going at each other over Syria? Tell someone in the city a hillbilly can't tip a cow. Everyone knows of someone who did it. Heck, I do too.

I've just never seen someone do it. 
The FDA is planning Experimental Studies on Consumer Responses to Nutrient Content Claims on Fortified Food - that means they want to find out whether fortifying snack foods with vitamins and noting its nutritional content on labels would convince people to swap out regular old junk food with a slightly less unhealthy form of junk food.

Your 'federal family' at work, supposedly to protect you, again?
It's easy to forget that there was once a time when a lot of hype resulted from claims that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed biological differences between political brains - it was open season on the opposition by people who understand biology even less than psychology. 

With increased regulation, the overwhelming chance of failure and lawsuits looming for each new treatment, it's little surprise that the private sector is abandoning medical research - or at least wanting to share the costs.

One of the four founding tenets of Science 2.0 since its inception, along with publication, communication and public participation, has been collaboration. In medicine, for example, the Science 2.0 vision for collaboration would drug companies and government regulators from an early stage.

Okay Daredevil, this will take some time and some work, but so does playing a guitar - a group of biologists have determined that humans can learn to echolocate the way bats do.

It's well known that blind people develop keener hearing and they even learn to help navigate using echoes of sounds, but that ability to determine locations spatially is suppressed by the 'precedence effect' - which occurs when a second sound arrives rapidly and becomes fused with the first so that the first is dominant.