The End of the World seems to roll around every decade or so.   The last time it got a lot of press was the year 2000 A.D., a millennial event in the Gregorian calendar.   COBOL programmers were the convenient catalyst for all that, since banks would shut down due to legacy software, but the end of the world needs vassals, the more unwitting the better, so it made sense that COBOL folks would take the fall.

Next up is 2012, this time due to one Meso-American calendar, and some speculation has been that the LHC will cause it, unleashing an army of Strangelets led by ancient Mayan overlords.

You know you've lost a lot of intellectual capital when ridiculous parodies of your work generate hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube - and threatening to sue is just making the whole thing sillier.

Michael Mann of Penn State isn't happy.   Everyone who had any sort of a clue knew his hockey stick regarding global warming wasn't literal but it also wasn't unethical.  An internal investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing despite the unfortunate use of the word "trick" by researchers referencing his methods and "hide the decline" has become something of a rallying cry for detractors.  But he is getting made fun of just the same and he doesn't like it.

I get asked a lot about Science 2.0® and why I chose to start something like ScientificBlogging.com, because science is such a niche.   Is it?  65 million people respond to surveys that they are interested in science. Since there are just over 300 million people in the US and 10% of those can't read due to age or infirmity, that means almost 25% of America alone considers themselves science fans.

3 NASA employees out of the 22,000 people about to lose their jobs sat in a room full of loyal Democrats and listened to President Barack Obama talk about how much he loved NASA.  Then he talked about how he was gutting it.

Not everyone is buying hope in this instance.  Buzz Aldrin agrees with Pres. Obama that the Moon has been done but Neil Armstrong, first man on the Moon, and Gene Cernan, the last, think it is a  big step backwards to instead go to an asteroid.   I am probably not the first to say it but it seems we will now boldly go where no one really wants to go.