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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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9-year-old Carissa Yip is probably better at chess than you. She is certainly better than me and already better than 93 percent of the 51,000 plus players registered with the U.S. Chess Federation.

She has set a goal to reach 2,100 this year; an Expert is anyone ranked over 2,000 while at 2,200 you are considered a Master. She also wants to one day become the first female to win the overall championship — not just in the female category, her father told The Boston Globe.
"Those among us who are anthropologically inclined tend to view a can or bottle of soda as an instantly recognizable symbol of everything that is wrong with Western civilization as we know it" is the first sign indication that you have left planet Earth and officially joined the alternative universe of Woo.

And your tour guide is the features director at Martha Stewart Living. Now, when it comes to celebrity criminals, I like Martha Stewart, mostly because Steve Madden never really bounced back after his prison sentence while Stewart became more popular than ever after her conviction. And I appreciate people who can win against adversity.
You know what happens to women when they watch Katherine Heigl movies or episodes of "The Bachelor"? 

Well, it happens to men also - when they think there might be beer nearby.

Really, it is almost Pavlovian, except the saliva is mental too. A PET scan study found that even when no alcohol was involved, the flavor of beer caused striatal dopamine release in men.(1) 

The striatum in men (and women - and all primates - but this particular study is about men, so, let's stay on message) consists of the caudate nucleus and the putamen and it gets input from the cerebral cortex and structures like the amygdala and hippocampus.

I've long said that energy is the biggest issue we face in the 21st century - with energy, I can solve the problems of food and water and that helps solve poverty too. I can even turn lead into gold.

When most people think 'green' in America, they think of liberal Democrats. It's a carefully crafted image. Conservatives who deny global warming conserve energy just as much as liberals who accept it but that gets little attention. Sociologists in a new paper instead found that the idea of the 'green' Christian is the environmental trope they need to spend their time debunking.

Some people are worried that unthinking, uncaring robots will be part of our future.  They are concerned about a Cylon uprising or maybe a Terminator, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon; there hasn't been a true advancement in artificial intelligence since the early 1990s, all we know is that the brain is a lot more complicated than making faster CPUs, regardless of what Ray Kurzweil sells to the public in books (and now from a nice gig at Google also).