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Happy Twelfth Night - Or Divorce Day, Depending On How Your 2026 Is Going

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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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Sydney Morning Herald columnist Richard Glover jokes it is time to put a special mark on global warming skeptics - I assume he is joking, since he recognizes that is a little too Nazi creepy even for a progressive.

But he doesn't like their intransigence and outright denial.   He doesn't like the climate change fetishists all that much other - the ones hoping the world will be ruined so they can be right.  
Not that the other side isn't frustrating. There's a type of green zealot who appears to relish climate change. Every rise in sea levels is noted excitedly. Every cyclone is applauded and claimed as a noisy, deadly witness for their side.
Americans spend what I consider a long time getting breakfast, though nutritionists say it is "the most important meal of the day" - 13 minutes a day, it turns out.   I say a long time because mine takes 30 seconds; during the week I eat Raisin Brain or some wheat things or whatever else my wife purchased that doesn't have hearts, moons or diamonds.(1)
Government work is usually a thankless job - yes, thanks to guaranteed pay raises and a union that can shut down the government, government employees make more money than the private sector and have better benefits and retirement, so it is not exactly thankless, but there are few instances where we can say 'government gets it right'.
What's ailing biology?

Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS, a science publication in Australia, was attending a lecture by Freeman Dyson lecture at the Perimeter Institute in Canada when Dyson said, "It's sad but true that most discoveries in biology are made by physicists."
Just after Satoshi Kanazawa once again trashed the reputation of fringe field evolutionary psychology, independent psychology researcher Darrel Ray wants to tank clinical psychology.

His method for its destruction?  An online survey of people with a 'religious background' who left religion, of course.   14,500 people responded and, not surprisingly, the results skewed toward exactly what an atheist-who-was-raised-fundamentalist-Christian wants them to skew toward; that atheists have better sex lives.
While Europeans trade blame about the E. coli contamination that has killed 14 people and made hundreds sick, one factoid is left out of most news stories - you're far more likely to get E. coli from food in organic supermarkets, where European governments are now sending inspectors to try and contain the risk.