Among the more zealous atheists in the science community, religious people are one big jumble of intellectual immaturity, if not outright stupidity, bent on replacing science classes with the New Testament.(1)

Hey, that's nicer than what they say about Republicans.

But, whether you are religious or not, The Bible is likely part of your cultural lexicon.   So whereas if kookier science pundits want to send a negative message, they compare all who disagree with them to Holocaust deniers (calling opponents Nazis is too cliché) because they can't bring themselves to use Biblical comparisons, moderate folks use liturgical imagery in more positive ways.

Avian influenza, bird flu, causes the unnecessary deaths of millions of chickens each year, preventing them from instead being killed for my dinner.

Luckily, science is on the case, though irrational left-wing anti-science types won't like the solution; breeding chickens resistant to it.

Obviously the meat and eggs from these chickens cannot in any conceivable way be different from any other egg but the same mentality that leads people to believe the world will end because of a Mayan calendar can allow people to believe these eggs can be different, so look for the usual protests.

The super chicken was created by researchers from Cambridge and Edinburgh.

I'm not sure how many of you out there have Facebook - quite a few, I assume, given their huge participation numbers - but on a frequent basis they introduce changes designed to help us.   

I can't argue with Mark Zuckerberg's instincts, since the valuation on Facebook is 10,000 times that of Science 2.0, but it doesn't always seem like the changes are good.   I used to have a Home feed that gave me a cross section of new things from people on my friend list but now I can't figure out how it works - I get meaningless stuff from people I don't really know so I rarely use it these days.

Sociologists love when people get shot; it gives them a chance to make correlation/causation arrows go in all kinds of crazy directions.

So when people jumped on the gun rage by Jared Loughner as a product of the Tea Party or a climate of hate or whatever they wanted to call it, they easily found someone in sociology to back them up on it.   

It must be extremism or something else that he got from listening to Rush Limbaugh or watching Fox News, right?   Unless it is just some crazy guy shooting people.    Mapping events to a cultural topology or a social agenda is not science - not even social science - it is plain old superstition.