How could anyone seriously think critters as large as mammoths could still roam Siberia and not leave, well, mammoth amounts of evidence? There comes a point where absence of evidence IS evidence of absence, and that happens when the phenomenon could be expected to leave abundant and widespread evidence, and it's not…

The "lost Apollo" myth ignores the fact that there are two extant Saturn V's - At the Kennedy Space Center and Marhall in Huntsville.

I have seen so much crap written about this topic, I salute you for actually digging up the facts. And citing sources, too!

Wow, chock full of neologisms. Looking through the paper, there's not a single proof that his model explains anything. There are lots of assertions that it does, but nowhere does he make a testable prediction. Nowhere does he show rigorously that the gyre property of everything (or anything) leads to some new…

Never say "forever" to a geologist. It does not mean the same thing to us that it means to you. You have about one chance in 3000 of dying in an accident annually, and no gene therapy will fix that. At 1/3000 chance of dying annually, you have a 3% chance of dying in 100 years, 28% in 1000 years, 50% in 2100 years,…

Picture a rogue nation putting a big object into retrograde equatorial orbit at geosynchronous altitude, then blasting it to smithereens. Oh, and it's full of ten tons of buckshot. It would not only take out all the communications, weather and intel satellites up there, but make it impossible to launch new ones until…

Does this mean the Bell Curve is scientific?

The list leaves out two:

Water is far from unique on Earth. Comets and icy moons would be far better sources. Of course, if you want a water-rich world to live on, it might be another matter.

A reporter found the German pilot who shot down St. Exupery. When told who it was, the German burst into tears and said he'd never have shot if he'd known who it was. St. Exupery was his favorite author.

I feel that overall, science is too conservative. The USGS totally missed the plate tectonics revolution because they had too narrow a view of their mission. Nevertheless, NASA lately shows what happens when publication standards get too open.

Why should philosophy explain what happened before the Big Bang? It can't explain anything else. "Philosophy of Science" isn't even merely vacuous, it's outright pseudoscience.

How about just not using them? Real contacts can e-mail. I don't have Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. Well, actually, I have LinkedIn but it won't accept my password. So screw it. I Don't need it.

The worst intellectual property thieves in America are the RIAA and MPAA. Ban their phony accounting practices and make them pay every penny of royalties they've stolen, all the way back to Edison's wax cylinders.

Hey kids, you do something to get on the list above, and you can do ALL the drugs you like.

Considering that our mitochondria are essentially bacteria, by your definition, we blur the line between animals and plants. The critter is an animal with plant symbionts.

There are (almost) no religious wars. Certainly none today. Every "religious" war today is really about ethnic, clan or tribal rivalry, tricked out with religious trappings. Blasting religion as a cause of violence is a cheap and easy solution, like the drunk who drops his keys in a dark alley and looks under the…

The economics of Pinocchio bothered me, too. But Hercules had one great line: Herc is getting a bit big for his britches, and brags to his daddy Zeus: "Look, I'm an action figure!" Did Peter Pan and Tinkerbell have anything going?

Sorry, but every chemistry and crystallography text talks about the three-dimensional geometry of atomic structures. You take two very long paragraphs to reveal you have no idea of the tetrahedral bonding of carbon or silicon.

While these are plot devices that are universal because they're rich sources of story ideas, you missed the hack elements that have made me pretty much stop reading SF.