Imagine you're playing a game of basketball--running down the length of the court, your shoes squeaking and you're fingers bouncing the ball about every 2 strides. You're darting left and right, about to sneak under the goal, leap over defenders, and slam it in for 2 points.

The fans cheer in a wave of pure elation. (Admittedly, a creative imagination.)

What to do when you get the sore, swollen throat of strep throat or the painful, yellow oozing of an infected cut? Take an antibiotic.

What to do when you get the pesky coughing and sneezing of the common cold/flu or the itchy spots of chicken pox? Take an antiviral?

Not always.

The trouble with antiviral medications is that, unlike their widely used counterpart the antibiotic, they tend to damage human cells as well as nasty virus particles. Antibiotics (which kill bacteria not viruses) do minimal damage (relatively) to our own nearby cells.

Researchers at the Université de Lyon in France, have discovered what appears to be an unexpected new form of ultrahard diamond and a new ultrahard form that was previously predicted, both harder then commonly found diamond. These forms were found in the Havero meteorite, which fell to earth in Finland in 1971. The meteorite was split up and spread around research facilities around the world, with the Université de Lyon conducting research on the 30µm thick, 4mm by 4mm square piece of meteorite they were given.

If you ignore for a second the constant forward-looking attention Internet news demands and stretch your mind back to the Mad Cow Disease scare of 2004, you might remember thinking "how strange that proteins can act as pathogens in the mammalian body!"

Mad Cow scares us because it's an enigma--a protein disease that acts like it has DNA. But now it's looking more familiar, as researchers prove it mutates very much like a DNA or RNA virus or bacteria.

The paper that initiated the great MMR hoax has been thoroughly discredited and retracted by the journal that published it, but the anti-vaxxers still claim -- and hoodwink some parents -- that more research is required to establish whether or not vaccines cause autism. I thought therefore that it was time to repost my comments on a rather more surprising source that happily promoted the bogus claim that "more research is necessary".

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Somewhere in the interior of PARLIAMENT. A darkened room with a very conspiratorial atmosphere. MANDELSON and BROWN are seated at a table at one end of the room. DARLING, dressed in Activist gear — black robes and a red sash around his head — is standing by a plan on the wall. He is addressing a committee of about eight Masked Activists. Their faces are partially hidden.

Darling:
We get in through the underground cooling system here... up through to the hadron collider chamber here... and the collider itself is in this big ring here. Having grabbed the collider, we inform Cox that it's in our custody and forthwith issue our demands. Any questions?

Harris:

Many of us wish that we'd live in a meritocracy, where the experts have the last say and help the society take the right choices. After all, that's part of the reason we love the internet, and the biggest reason why we would like the media to present information and science accurately, and not dumbed down. But believing the data is different than by reason of them being authority.

Brian Cox was not faced with the toughest audiences at the Old Monk in Westminster last night. His talk was delivered to Westminster Skeptics; an assorted rabble of scientists, sceptics, bloggers and journalists led by legal blogger Jack of Kent, who meet once a month to discuss issues dear to rationalists. Brian's message - that science funding must be protected and ideally increased - was not a particularly hard one to sell to such an audience.

Continuing reading here or, read an edited version at New Scientist

There has been widespread media coverage of the abuse of children by Catholic priests and few people are now unaware of it.

There has been almost no publicity about the abuse of women by male members of the clergy and, despite the evidence, the Church appears to have done nothing.

Some women do have fully consensual relationships with male clergy but they are a small minority. When their stories make the media, they are usually of the more lurid 'priest has mistress and secret children' variety.

There is some abuse of adult men but a 2008 survey in America found that 96% of the victims were female.

Abuse falls into two categories, congregants and nuns.