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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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Morale has plummeted at the National Science Foundation, it seems, due to governmental oversight and interference from above.    The Senate Finance Committee didn't like a report they got from the NSF and are going to do something about it.

What, that sum'bitch Bush came back to haunt scientists and personally rewrite reports and ask why employees aren't doing their jobs instead of doing talk show appearances about how much he stinks?
Name it and the milk will come, say scientists at Newcastle University.  It's not "Field of Dreams" it's Milk of Dreams.   Or whatever analogy you want to use for a correlation-causation fantasy that leads to a conclusion that a cow with a name produces more milk than one without.

Drs Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson say they have shown in their study in Anthrozoos ("A Multidisciplinary Journal of The Interactions of People and Animals"!!) that by giving a cow a name and treating her as an individual farmers can increase their annual milk yield  - by over 60 gallons.
Do you know the name of the first computer game?   I confess I didn't and I learned programming on a Univac 1100/62 so I am a lot closer to the origination date of computer games than most people who will read this.

I assumed it was a kind of punchcard-loaded word game, like a 1960s Leather Goddesses of Phobos only without the divine genius of Dostoevsky that game possessed, but the history of video games is much more elaborate than that.
As a science site, we can continually be baffled that both the left and the right can find something to be critical about.   Some on the right are critical of stem cell research or climate science (Republicans) while some on the left are critical of genetically modified foods or vaccines (Democrats) - to science, it doesn't make much sense.
If you're a reader of geography or a student of eastern philosophy, you may have seen the name K'un Lun.  It is the name of a mountain range in western China and borders the northern edge of Tibet (1) and is also a name for 'paradise' in Taoism.    Whoever can climb to the top of K'un Lun gains access to the heavens, the ancients said.  

There's  a city there now and if you visit  K'un Lun City and drink the yellow water in the lakes of its parks known as cinnabar (tan), they also say you will become immortal.(2)

That last part is scientifically undocumented.   Drinking yellow water is generally a bad idea.
In the good old days, when I lived in Florida, if you had a completely ridiculous idea but convinced someone else who had some authority, you could get it implemented.   There being no Internet, it didn't have to be a great idea, if it went bad you could just make it go away.   

But in the Internet Age, every dumb thing you do is permanent, so we can laugh at the idea of using 2 million tires to make an artificial coral reef today but in the Florida of my youth, this made complete sense to environmentalists - and they found data to back it up.  The clean-up would be left to future generations.