Jared Diamond is not impressed by modern social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, because of the need to try and make claims about human nature by doing surveys or visiting a place and then framing the results through their own - not to invoke the most overused cliché of 2012 but just this once it fits - motivated reasoning.

The reaction from the social sciences and the mainstream media elites who need the social sciences to seem science-y was about what you would expect to him making his case yet again: 'shallow' and that he doesn't understand what it means 'to study human diversity' - in other words, he is a geography teacher trying to invade the big pants super-scientific world of anthropology.  

You can stop laughing now.

The rumor mill has it that Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Science 2.0 fave Mendeley, a platform academics use to collate PDFS and share research and collaborate via a social network (and a terrific company all the way around, in my opinion). 

TechCrunch says that the sale might close by the end of February and could be in the region of $100 million. But they also say Mendeley has closed a recent round of funding for ~<$10 million. The company has only publicly disclosed raising $2 million.