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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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Money does not buy happiness, it is said, and apparently it does not factor much into optimism either.   20 percent of humanity hoards 83 percent of the world's wealth but the vast majority of people, including the 60 percent of the world possessing just 6 percent of world wealth, think the next 5 years will be better for them.

Yes, despite an economic recession, famine, thousands of years without a single day bereft of war somewhere in the world and media reports about a flu epidemic afflicting the Earth, a new study from the University of Kansas and Gallup indicates that humans are optimistic.  Apparently it is just our nature.
70% of you, man or woman, will have an HPV infection at some point in your life.   There is no cure for HPV, just as there is no cure for the common cold and in most people, an HPV infection will clear up on its own, like the common cold.  It can also be passed on to other people during the infection period, like the common cold. 
What happens when a guy married to an art historian who dislikes religion writes a book using science?   "Angels&Demons", that's what.   It's the book Dan Brown wrote that made even less sense than "The DaVinci Code", because it was written before that blockbuster hit, even though the new movie seems like a sequel.  

Because it was written three years earlier, he had yet to refine his craft of jumbling vaguely non-specific pop social science with revisionist history - though he still knows he dislikes Catholics enough - and basically works in the expected conspiracy theory with some science as the weapon.
Scott Altman is a pretty cool guy.   He's the commander of the Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope (and, as noted previously, astronaut John Grunsfeld is also carrying along Edwin Hubble's basketball, another level of awesome) and being commander of a space shuttle mission is nice, though I generally think NASA has lost both its way and the imagination of the public by manning a fleet of delivery trucks instead of doing actual space exploration.

   No, Altman is cool because he was one of the stunt pilots in "Top Gun."
I have a confesson to make; I'm probably smarter than you.
I'm in New York City for a variety of meetings and, of course, I brought along Bloggy, the Scientific Blogging mascot.   I know how popularity works.  People don't concern themselves much with what I write but Bloggy is popular.  Heck, there is fan fiction written about him.

He's a pretty easy travelling companion, he mostly just sits in my bag but at key moments I avail myself of his wisdom.

I took a few pictures of him in our various adventures and am posting them up here.   Off on a trip of your own?  Need a mascot to accompany you and criticize your every decision?   We'll ship him out.  Just be sure to take a swanky picture.