Not all of Adolph Hitler's family were homicidal megalomaniacs - his sister Paula was quite nice.British spies at one point hatched a plan to feminize Hitler a little by doping up his food with estrogen. Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University discovered that, and other ingenious plans in old unclassified documents, and outlines them in Secret Weapons: Technology, Science And The Race To...
read moreBy now you'll be familiar with publication bias: the phenomenon where studies with boring, negative results are less likely to get written up or published. You can estimate this using a tool such as, say, a funnel plot. The principle is simple: expensive landmark studies are harder to brush under the carpet, but small ones can disappear more easily. So split your studies into "big ones" and...
read moreOver time, a variety of people have asked me where they should get the word out that they are writing on Science 2.0 and I am happy to tell them - but they are surprised by the answer. Social media darlings like Twitter and Facebook will accomplish very little beyond being another place to follow comments. Old technology is what matters in getting eyeballs to read your work, and that...
read moreFingerprints? We don't need no stinking fingerprints.Police have used dentures to nab Milton Cesar de Jesus for a purse snatching in Severini, Brazil. A hobo found them after the robbery and turned them over to cops, along with a description of the assailant so police picked up de Jesus based on that. de Jesus denied the crime but the cops put the dentures in his partially...
read moreThey've won the final battle but stand a chance of losing the peace if they're not careful. Harry Potter and his friends did their part but, like Sam Adams after the American Revolution was over, need to step aside now and let foreign policy experts take over.
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