Heh... could be on to something there.

"CERN's research director promises we will know the truth about the Higgs boson by the end of 2012."

"It's sometimes difficult to get those two points across without sounding anti-tech. "

It's a nice plan.

"melted these in the microwave"

"What would you need to know about the figure in order to decide it's okay to kill?"

Yes, I concur.

Art quality is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Lots of things could happen in 1000 years.

"as I said above, if smoking causes cancer, then is it really "scaring people" if you tell them to stop smoking or they could die?"

On the bright side, secret evil government experiments are still a lot less likely to kill you than cheeseburgers.

Nice toy, but not exactly revolutionary. Super-excitement is not in the house, for me.

Yes, I would be frustrated that they tried to scare people in the public media. In fact, that's exactly what I am complaining about. The public media is the only interface that the general public has with science, they don't read journals much. Nobody tries to scare people with peer-reviewed literature.

That doesn't mean you can make people want just anything. Otherwise, products would never flop.

What you are describing is people all deciding that they want to do something and then doing it. That is relatively easy.

Nope, but for a very long time people have presented climate change in an overly melodramatic manner. This does not help the reputation of scientific inquiry, because "exaggeration" is the cousin of "lying".

Right. Because governments are so awesome at implementing behavioral, lifestyle, and social changes. Even mass murder and high levels of tyranny couldn't really make most of them stick in the Soviet Union and PRC. Prohibition was an enormous success here in the States, and the War on Drugs, and Absinence as Birth…

Guys stick their wieners in much more ridiculous things than slightly-different-women all the damn time.

"Google already most likely controls your email, your personal calendar and your web searches,"

Because behavioral, lifestyle, and social changes are almost impossible to implement across any sort of broad populace.