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In the 1990s I had the opportunity to dine with the late musician Isaac Hayes, whose career fortunes had just made a stunning turnabout upward, which he attributed to Scientology. It was a glowing testimonial by a sincere follower of the Church, but is it evidence that Scientology works? Two recently published books argue that there is no science in Scientology, only quasireligious doctrines wrapped in New Age flapdoodle masquerading as science.

Since the space age began, the orbital realm has become increasingly littered with the detritus of skyward human striving--spent rocket boosters, dead satellites, stray pieces of hardware. Debris is piling up with such speed that it has become a threat to the kind of spacefaring endeavors that spawned it in the first place. A September report by the National Research Council found that the debris field is so dense that collisions between objects in orbit will create additional debris faster than space junk falls out of orbit.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - A team from Japan won a world solar car race through Australia's outback on Thursday, after battling more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) of remote highways, dodging kangaroos and other wildlife and avoiding a bushfire. Race officials said the team from Tokai University, near Tokyo, finished the race from the northern city of Darwin to the southern city of Adelaide at about noon on Thursday. [More]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--What does it take to pick a winner in the slowly unfolding field of renewable energy ? For starters, alternatives to oil must be able to stand up on their own at some point, without a need for permanent government subsidies, said Bill Joy, once a heavy hitter in the information technology industry and now a partner in investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s greentech practice.

* Partners in Health to start vaccinating in January * Move follows months of debate over vaccine option [More]

Humans have mostly abandoned the grooming strategies of our chimp cousins. So there's a good chance your scalp and the back of your head go largely unexamined. But this inattention can leave skin cancers undetected

If the question posed in the title of the post seems to you to have an obvious answer, sit tight while I offer a situation in which it might be less obvious. We recently discussed philosopher Karl Popper’s efforts to find the line of demarcation between science and pseudo-science .

“How do you know the moon is not made of green cheese?” Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll at the ScienceWriters2011 conference in Flagstaff on October 17th. [More]

Never happen. But maybe they should be

Back in the dark, old ages of the earliest science blogging, many of the most prominent science bloggers focused their efforts on debunking pseudoscience and battling the politicized anti-science forces. Others specialized in critiquing mainstream media coverage of science

In October 2009, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when a graduate student came to her with a slightly heretical question.

ROCKVILLE, Md.--A new experiment aimed at achieving actor Christopher Reeve's dream of finding an effective treatment for spinal paralysis was announced this week at an international meeting of scientists and people with spinal cord injury sponsored by the United 2 Fight Paralysis Foundation. The approach, which already is shown to be promising in animals and avoids the need for patients to take immunosuppressive drugs, has not yet been proved effective in humans. Nonetheless, patients are excited to see this advance as they have been frustrated waiting for the first human trials of the new approach

This video demonstrating the power of superconductivity has been making the rounds this week and is an example of how video is really the best way to capture and share with thousands of viewers the amazing power of science! You will notice that the video is a demonstration without the science explained live.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's wind power generating capacity, already the world's largest, could reach 1,000 gigawatts by 2050, a study prepared by a think tank of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) showed on Wednesday. China had more than 41 GW of wind power capacity at the end of 2010

BEIJING, Oct 19 (Reuters) - A blast at a coal mine insouthwestern China has killed 13, state news agency Xinhua said [More]