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Vermont Should Stop Showing Leadership In Overruling Scientists On Farming

Despite Vermont's Agricultural  Innovation Board (AIB), created to inform regulatory recommendations...

Evolutionary Psychology: Your Parents Income During Pregnancy Made You Gay

Evolutionary psychology, the discipline that claimed we're being manipulated by flowers and evolved...

Oil Kept Congo From Starving - Western Academics Don't Seem To Like That

If even a wealthy like Germany has to lie about emissions to placate government-funded environmentalists...

China Sells Western Progressives Solar Panels While Switching To Nuclear Power

China has quietly overtaken France to become the world's second-largest producer of nuclear energy. ...

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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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ITER fusion: Governments taking a hard look at budget overruns and delays

ITER fusion: Governments taking a hard look at budget overruns and delays

Dec 16 2010 | comment(s)

It's become so commonplace for large science endeavors to be over budget and long-delayed that both budgets and time frames seem almost meaningless.   The James Webb Space Telescope might as well just be issued blank checks and, in Europe, the ITER nuclear fusion reactor project is making the overruns and delays of even the LHC look modest.
HIV-Positive Patient Cured by Adult Stem Cell Transplant

HIV-Positive Patient Cured by Adult Stem Cell Transplant

Dec 15 2010 | comment(s)

Writing in Blood, a group says that a 2007 adult stem cell transplant cured a patient of both his HIV and his leukemia.   Up to 33 million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS.

How did it work and what does it mean?  It was a perfect storm of good fortune for the patient so it's an interesting medical starting point but not really a cure-all just yet.   Timothy Brown, an HIV-positive man in Germany, also had leukemia and was undergoing chemotherapy but he got a bone marrow transplant  from a donor who carried an inherited CCR5 gene mutation that seems to make carriers immune to HIV.
Ancient Chinese Secret - Soup From 400 B.C.

Ancient Chinese Secret - Soup From 400 B.C.

Dec 14 2010 | comment(s)

If you think people in your family can't cook, imagine how bad the soup must have been to bury it and leave it untouched for 2,400 years.   

Chinese archaeologists say a bronze cooking pot dug up near the former capital Xian (for 1,100 years - go see the terracotta army at the burial site of Qin Shihuang, the first emperor, there) contains bone soup.   They found it while excavating a tomb because they need an extension of the airport - nothing new, China is sort of like a "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" opening when it comes to history getting in the way of Progress.
Choose Your Own Adventure - But For Movies, In Real Time

Choose Your Own Adventure - But For Movies, In Real Time

Dec 13 2010 | comment(s)

When I was a lad, a fellow named Edward Packard came up with the Choose Your Own Adventure series, books where you read until an action point and you had to make a decision - your decision determined the plot of the book from there on out by sending you to a specific page where things continued.

Using real-time video coding procedures, a group of researchers have created a similar approach that is interactive for movie watchers, so if you're one of those annoying French nihilists and like movies that end with a crying clown or whatever, okay, it can happen, but if you're an outrageously optimistic American and like happy endings, that could be possible also.
In the 'Medicine needs to be more evidence-based' department, we have brachytherapy

In the 'Medicine needs to be more evidence-based' department, we have brachytherapy

Dec 11 2010 | comment(s)

The National Cancer Institute says 200,000 American women will get breast cancer this year and 20% will die from the disease.

A lumpectomy is a common treatment but up to 40 percent of women see the cancer return, a number that is reduced to about 10 percent with radiation of the (whole) breast.

But between 2001 and 2006 partial-breast treatments, brachytherapy, went up 1000% - despite real evidence it works.
Ancient ruins under the Persian Gulf?

Ancient ruins under the Persian Gulf?

Dec 09 2010 | comment(s)

Less than 8,000 years ago, evidence shows modern people suddenly appeared en masse outside Africa, on the shores of the Persian Gulf.  An odd event, to be sure.  

Jeffrey Rose, writing in Current Anthroplogy, now says the reason is that the land that brought them there more gradually is now under the Gulf itself.

It makes sense as a hypothesis - you don't just go from sporadic hunting camps to dozens of archaeological sites without a trail, unless the trail is underwater.  Rose believes the that humans may have inhabited a fertile land mass where the Gulf now is for up to 100,000 years and it gradually became flooded by the Indian Ocean.