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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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If you do not have your 11-year-old child in a car seat while driving and in a bicycle helmet while playing, you are putting them at severe risk.  We have to protect them.  Or not. While we expose kids to all kinds of harmful cultural stuff at earlier and earlier ages (sex, violence, political debates) we don't trust their physical competence or their judgment.

Heck, the people behind the government health care plan think 25 should be the earliest age for adulthood.
If you're an anti-science hippie obsessed with the notion that 'natural' is always superior to whatever 'inorganic' means to people who know nothing about science or medicine or food or generally what carbon-based life means, I have good news for you; you may soon be able to determine if that caffeine in your Organic, Free-Range Red Bull is really natural.

What? Organic, Free-Range Red Bull doesn't exist?  Well, it should. Farmer's Market shoppers will dutifully line up for that, I can just feel it.
With the hundredth anniversary of the maiden voyage, and subsequent sinking, of the RMS Titanic (covering April 14th-April 15th, 2012) fast approaching, you probably expect someone in the world of 2012 to implicate global warming.

Donald Olson, a physics professor at Texas State University, has a more interesting idea. Along with fellow TSU member Russell Doescher and Roger Sinnott they lay out the hypothesis in Sky&Telescope that the Moon was involved. And the Sun too.
One of our popular topics last year was earthquakes.  That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan.  It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.

If you dispute that, you get meaningless gibberish responses like 'you can't prove the earthquakes did not come from fracking', which is true, in the same way you can't prove I am not the disembodied brain of Adolf Hitler writing this piece from my Antarctic Fortress where I am plotting the Fourth Reich - but it's sort of silly to live your life believing it.
In 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, it began a new era in the Cold War.  The Race to Space. Senator Lyndon Johnson worried the commies could rain nuclear bombs down on us from the high ground, making him the perfect guy to run NASA and because it was a military concern it got funded.  Only later it became a human exploration issue and much later became a science one.
Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University have developed a portable SpeechJammer gun that can silence people from a hundred feet away.

Their claim of a benefit?  It may bring world peace.  Sometimes conflicts can't be resolved peacefully because the other person just won't shut up. France, we mean you.

The cultural implications go beyond the geopolitical. The number one cause for relationship violence, according to wife abusers?  "The bitch just wouldn't shut up".  Now, with the SpeechJammer, domestic discord disappears.

SpeechJammer