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I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

I'm in the same boat. My first degree is physics, but now I'm doing my PhD is computer science. My particular interests are in particle physics, dark matter and astronomy/cosmology. The best place to scratch my itch I find is http://www.arxiv.org./ It's a preprint archive for physics, math, computer science and so-on. http://www.science20.com/ has some interesting blogs, but you have to be careful as there are a number of people there who use it as a platform to advance their own ideas. For more general science reading I have http://www.sciencedaily.com/ and http://www.astronomynow.com/ bookmarked. On the educational side I have Leonard Susskind's general education courses in physics bookmarked. They can be found at http://newpackettech.com/Resources/Susskind/.

If you're just looking to keep abreast of recent/current developments in your favourite science I'd recommend http://www.sciencedaily.com/. It's not comprehensive but it does highlight some of the coolest stuff going on that is of probable interest to edumacated types rather than the great unwashed herds of popular Everyman news about the latest diet pill to lose 50 lbs while eating nothing but pizza and cheeseburgers.

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Some sites that are helpful:

Science News

Science Daily

New Scientist

Here's a few I use all the time:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/

http://www.pandasthumb.org/

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/ataglance

http://scienceblogs.com/channel/24-hours/?utm_source=globalChannel&utm_medium=link

http://sciencehack.com/

This is the best website for science news for reasonably educated but not specialized people: http://www.sciencedaily.com/

Science News has a website - http://www.sciencenews.org/ and a weekly magazine which are always good, if overly sober, though the magazine doesn't have near enough content to cover everything that happened that week.

New Scientist is a weekly mag that has drifted towards Omni or PopSci lately ('IS SENSATIONAL THING TRUE? (...no)'), but will still keep you up to date on most happenings including things you might miss online. http://www.newscientist.com/

Scientific American is a monthly mag that's a bit too political but has some good articles: http://www.scientificamerican.com/

Then there's Discover Magazine, which is a step down from either but has some good blogs: http://discovermagazine.com/

Live Science is a further step down, a good site for training wheel science: http://www.livescience.com/

I won't recommend the mag Science, because even though it's The Magazine, it's not suited for the dabbler.

My balanced suggestion is add the news feeds for all of these to your RSS reader (like Google Reader), click on what looks interesting, and subscribe to New Scientist in print or on Zinio and read it every week.

I like sciencenews.org, but I also like http://www.sciencedaily.com/ as a good source on a variety of science related subjects.
Oops,I almost pulled a Palin and typed "sciency".

... is it even possible to orbit the Moon, which has a very low gravity?

*facepalm* of course you can orbit the moon. What did you think the Apollo 11's Michael Collins was doing while Buzz and Neil were walking about on the moon?

It's simply a function of how fast and how close you are. Heck, you can orbit around asteroids if you really want to.

There are at least 8 bases in the DNA sequence and this will be only looking for 4 of them
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110721142408.htm

I'm pretty surprised that it exists in nature since it seems that it wouldn't serve any useful purpose.

Well, ensuring everyone is doing the same thing has direct benefits for locusts.

... I'm wondering what useful applications will be made with this.

Target acquisition for the new micro-UAVs the DOD is developing with armed weaponry. They need test subjects.

This is the last I read about it:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101007183018.htm

tfa doesn't mention if they are using silver nanonparticles or no but a lot of times the side effects of these wonder chemicals are worse than the malady.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028114025.htm

If they are accounted for, why is this news?

Well, actually climate models do account for aerosols and this isn't news.

Plus of course those nasty oxides of nitrogen (since the combustion is happening in air) that turn into nitric acid when you breath them in to moist lungs. You don't get much of them but a wild absolute claim like that (emissions are only water) shows that you have either been very badly conned by PR or are deliberately attempting to fool others that you assume are either very poorly informed or of low intelligence.

Talk about low intelligence! Your claim took about fifteen seconds to dismiss from that evil PR tainted source, the U.S. Department of Energy on Hydrogen Vehicles...

You see, with a lot more than a high-school education and some practical experience with real life mechanical things, you will learn that even hydrogen cars can use emission scrubbers to get rid of trace nitrogen oxides... emissions are what comes OUT OF THE CAR. Which you will learn when you get one and have to have them tested.

That's not likely. Storage is still a problem and the WWII gas powered vehicle solution of a great big balloon on top of the vehicle to get extra storage capacity doesn't work very well with hydrogen

Well it's nice that your history class went well. But in the meantime lots of research has been going into alternative ways to store hydrogen.

You know, the thing about stupidity is that it's really a choice. It starts with ignorance, the thing that makes someone stupid is when they refuse to learn from new data. So are you an idiot or just ignorant? It is time for you to decide, a choice only you can make.

I will let you have the last reply, if you so wish - an ignorant man would learn from error and leave things lie, while the idiot always digs the hole deeper.

I know the shovel at your feet now tempts you mightily - but I urge you to put it down.

"commercial and private jetliners" "When an airplane flies through a cloud, its propellers"

The number of jetliners with "propellers" is mighty fucking few, though not zero.

Linking to the PARENT Science Daily piece

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110630142835.htm

instead of the pointless Inhabitat bullshit summary would have been nice. There is NO excuse for the Inhabitat link other than SPAM.

AC is anonymous because he/she/it wants page hits for Inhabitat.
Now I know not to visit Inhabitat again. Fuck you too and thanks for nothing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110630142835.htm

"commercial and private jetliners" "When an airplane flies through a cloud, its propellers"

The number of jetliners with "propellers" is mighty fucking few, though not zero.

Linking to the PARENT Science Daily piece

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110630142835.htm

instead of the pointless Inhabitat bullshit summary would have been nice. There is NO excuse for the Inhabitat link other than SPAM.

AC is anonymous because he/she/it wants page hits for Inhabitat.
Now I know not to visit Inhabitat again. Fuck you too and thanks for nothing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110630142835.htm

Here's a 3-gram UAV that carries a 0.5-gram camera

I see your point, but actually, there's evidence that marijuana actually reduces your risk of cancer. But the truth is that smoking probably should be banned except on your own property and in designated public areas. I smoke on occasion so it would actually inconvenience me, but I can perfectly understand others not wanting to be exposed to an inhalant that has been proven to cause cancer. How about we just call it even... legalize pot for smoking in private, and make tobacco illegal to smoke in public.

Not if you accelerate the instrument to match speeds.
Its not rocket science... Oh wait, it is... Never mind.

In any event, we've done it before. Continue your education here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7812623/First-spacecraft-to-land-on-an-asteroid-due-back-on-Earth.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010214075526.htm

Pot smoke contains most of the same carcinogens as regular tobacco smoke. Likewise, THC does have some CNS depressant characteristics.

Yet pot doesn't cause lung cancer.
Pot certainly isn't for everyone, but it is about as dangerous as nutmeg or sage oil with all their scary myristicin and thujone. I mean Coka Cola is still made using coca leaves for crying out loud... But don't worry, they remove all the dangerous alkaloids!
Imagine if pot were a legal drug, advertised on weekday-afternoon TV between personal injury attorneys and diet pills. Would it have scarier disclaimers then your average pharmaceutical?

PS I get your point that making overly broad claims about the safety of MJ can make the pro-legalization position more difficult to defend, but honestly "100% safe" is pretty defensible compared to other consumables that are widely considered benign.

100% Safe? Really? I guess there is some magical property of marijuana smoke that heals your lungs as you inhale it. Awesome.

Well, as far as lung cancer goes, that is exactly the case.

and if we didn't stop using CFC's then yes, you'd have other problems on your hands. Educate yourself:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/07/030730080139.htm

Well, I don't think you can ignore a lot of the facts about how temperatures are rising and how that is correlated with CO2 concentrations.

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

Now, from a particular Carlinesque viewpoint we are a "minor surface nuisance" and yes the Earth will survive, even as scientists predict when the Sun becomes a Red Giant near the end of it's Nuclear Cycle and it is reduced to a rock floating in space, the Earth will survive. It just wouldn't want to be a place where I'd like to live.

If indeed Sun spot activity and the lack thereof is correlated to Earth Temperatures, then yes, lack of Sun Spots would mean less energy radiating from the Sun and less heat here on Earth, normally. Now that we've pumped billions of tons of C02 into the atmosphere, we're probably averting the next Ice Age but again I probably wouldn't want to live close to a coastline or in areas where strong weather fronts can converge creating severe weather patterns. Wait, that rules out most of the inhabitable space on the planet, doesn't it?

Well, we'll all see. It's one big experiment and while I'm not a C02 alarmist I think there's enough evidence there that indicates we need to make some changes. We may not eliminate C02 emissions either, but we certainly could reduce it. Heck the Ozone layer was going away and we were all going to die of skin cancer, but wait it's healing! But wait, that may cause more global warming! http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100125192016.htm So, let's bring back CFCs so we can deplete the Ozone layer to create brighter clouds and reduce warming otherwise we'll all just die in a massive Tornado! It's just one big happy experiment with the planet and we're the lab rats.

Part of the answer may be immune system triggers caused by food intolerances (believe it or not). I have Celiac Disease, and it's amazing the array of symptoms that gluten intolerance causes. Not just the commonly known symptom of the immune system attacking the intestines, but it also causes Dermatitis Herpetiformis, which is similar to psoriasis. It actually started me wondering -- if your immune system can attack your intestines, and your skin, why can't it attack any organ in the body, including your brain?

Sure enough, check out this study from the Mayo Clinic. Celiac may be linked to Alzheimer's.

I suspect that food intolerance that cause immune system disease will eventually be linked to other brain issues (that I won't mention, because I don't want to make a controversial point the focus of this post).

Recently there have been lots of positive and promising developments in this area. May be he could help fund the lab battling the disease. Some examples:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602122250.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601075126.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531135714.htm

Recently there have been lots of positive and promising developments in this area. May be he could help fund the lab battling the disease. Some examples:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602122250.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601075126.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531135714.htm

Recently there have been lots of positive and promising developments in this area. May be he could help fund the lab battling the disease. Some examples:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110602122250.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110601075126.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110531135714.htm

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 1997) — Computer "eyes" are now up to such tasks as watching for fugitives in airline terminals and other busy locations. A sophisticated face-recognition system that placed first in recent Army competitive trials has been given the added ability to pick out faces in noisy or chaotic "street" environments. The new "Mugspot" software module developed at the University of Southern California automatically analyzes video images, looking for passers-by. When it finds them, it picks out the heads in the images and then tracks the heads for as long as they remain in the camera's field.

Almost 15 years ago, it was already possible to accurately track and recognise people in grainy, blurry, low-res video. As if intelligence agencies *aren't* having a field day with facebook.

But 15 years ago millions of people did not voluntarily (albeit unknowingly, for the most part) submit their personal photos and videos for this kind of analysis.

After facebook facial recognition technology comes to fruition, your behavior patterns will be analyzed and recorded, and you may be 're-programmed' to fit back in to society nicely. If you fail to comply with the surveillance overlords, you must be prepared for the inevitable consequences.

Hohoho.. do you really think that facial recognition technology hasn't been there from the beginning?

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 1997) — Computer "eyes" are now up to such tasks as watching for fugitives in airline terminals and other busy locations. A sophisticated face-recognition system that placed first in recent Army competitive trials has been given the added ability to pick out faces in noisy or chaotic "street" environments.
The new "Mugspot" software module developed at the University of Southern California automatically analyzes video images, looking for passers-by. When it finds them, it picks out the heads in the images and then tracks the heads for as long as they remain in the camera's field.

Almost 15 years ago, it was already possible to accurately track and recognise people in grainy, blurry, low-res video. As if intelligence agencies *aren't* having a field day with facebook.

You mean by acknowledging the risk? I don't get why slashdot's audience tends to skew towards "radiation is good" fanboyism. Radiation poisoning is cumulative. And as our society continues to add exposure here, exposure there... it adds up. And maybe that means we are accepting a 10% higher rate of incidence, or maybe that number is even higher. The only fear I see is fear of contradicting the notably greedy mobile phone industry. Which seems odd, given how often there is an article on slashdot justifiably trashing AT&T or Verizon, that slashdot readers are so quick to rush to their defense in the face of cell phone radiation being potentially carcinogenic.

Radiation does general damage to the DNA and can cause many health effects including heart attacks
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091022202710.htm

Dr Phaedon Avouris, of IBM. is behind on his papers.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090610133453.htm
Tunable band gap graphene at room temperature.

There's also this: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/04/020429072519.htm

Which is to say, the measured benefit probably is not from caffeine.

But there was a report a while ago that said that caffeine might protect against Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

So from a disease prevention standpoint, you're still stupid if you buy decaf.

The males can fertilize the hermaphrodites, but the hermaphrodites can fertilize themselves as well. This is gross, and as a guy, kind of feels like nature telling me I'm non-essential.

Check this out about boas. I sometimes wonder if we're just PWBs. Parasites With Benefits

Just google "what happened 250 Million years ago" from Science Daily Nov 28, 2006 - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061126121112.htm The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago, an event that wiped out an estimated 95% of marine species and 70% of land species. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.

Has been doen for years.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080124161613.htm

But does not work as nice, as there is no way to stear it (and its one-way street down).

The miniature pumps will just continue to pump. We stick fans on them, and they must be replaced, but the heat pump itself will stay and be equally effective after 10 000 years," Bording continues.

Misleading headline, both on this blog post and on the blog post that this blog post cites.

Care to explain to me exactly HOW Am I supposedly trolling? Are newborn children not currently being found to have plastics in their bloodstream from their first breath of life? Why I believe that is a yes. In fact it looks as if plastics may even be causing liver damage in preemies.

Now would YOU care to show me those long term peer reviewed studies on the massive electrical smog we are currently blanketed in NOT paid for by a company that makes devices that would be harmed if anything bad was found? because frankly all I have seen is studies bought and paid for by the cell phone handset manufacturers with if you believe they will be fair and impartial you probably believed MSFT's get the facts and Mohave campaigns.

If there is one thing I have learned it is the USA government is MASSIVELY CORRUPT full stop. That is why we have superfund sites, why the government has repeatedly covered up the misdeeds of corps (hell they even covered up a contractor in Afghanistan selling 9 year old boys for fuck toys to get a contract! How fucking corrupt do you got to be to sign off on THAT?) so frankly if the government told me it was raining outside I'd want a second opinion. You believe them if you want, but you might want to look up a little thing known as "frakking" which is being given the green light by the current government. So what if the water smells funny or catches on fire right? The government is protecting you!

I literally had no trouble finding endless references to the fact, it is in fact, an antibiotic. The antibiotic properties, seemingly, are directly based on a protein called defensin-1, which originates from its host.

Nowadays Type 2 diabetes is seen more frequently in younger people too, apparently due to HFCS consumption. It isn't really news, it's been known for awhile.

This article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with America's science reporting. If the UN had released a report claiming 50 million global warming refugees by 2010, there would be dozens of news articles on it. The supposed incriminating evidence is a Google Cache page with this map that doesn't itself say anything about refugees, but does highlight areas most susceptible to sea level rise. The "50 million climate refugees by 2010" statement is not referenced anywhere in any UN report, it's a six words on one defunct graphic that was part of a larger report on world agriculture by the UN University. This 50 million by 2010 figure comes from Dr. Bogardi at the UN University in Bonn, NOT the United Nations.

The problem with this prediction being made by any scientist is that keeping track of how many refugees there are is difficult (current estimate by the UN is 1 million a year, a figure that the Red Cross lends support to with the statement that environmental disasters are displacing more people than war now) and the causes are debatable. The epic flooding in Pakistan created 10 million refugees, Hurricane Katrina added a quarter of a million refugees, and desertification in Africa is displacing millions. Can we blame these events on Global Warming? Hurricanes and floods happen without a warming world, but a warming world increases the chances of such disasters happening.

Then there are the refugees that no one realizes. In the small coastal town where I live in North Carolina, houses have been falling into the swamp one by one for decades, but the residents blame it on people building their homes in flood zones, not realizing that sea levels in their state have risen three times the rate of rise on the rest of the Atlantic coast. People didn't build their homes in the water, the water rose 1.5 meters over the 50 years since they were built, but nobody realizes this because of landscape amnesia.

You can read all about the various estimates concerning environmental refugees on Wikipedia. It took the author of this untruth less than an hour to post their nonsense and the deniers flooded the Internet with it quickly. It took me two hours to research and write this response, because I wanted to know what I was talking about, and I will only reach a very small audience in comparison. This is why I despair when considering how science could possibly stand a chance against the overwhelming confidence ignorance brings the unscientific masses.

"It's almost like the summary is describing a different article" : because it is.

Why would older languages have more phonemes and not less?

I think that the increase in variations of a source relates to Darwinian evolution. For instance, corn is from the Americas and moved to Europe after Columbus. And if you look at the varieties of corn in the USA there are a certain number. But if you look at South America, there are many more types of corn. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080627163156.htm

The greater amount of variation indicates the origin.

This is also true for genetics. There is the greatest variation of genes in Africa, and fewer, say, in subset migrations, e.g. Greenland. ["Africans have world's greatest genetic variation "] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30502963/ns/technology_and_science-science/

Sprawl allowing more exercise? I wondered WTF you were on about but then I saw "Portland" in your address. If you're in Portland, OR, you certainly see the positive walking experience afforded by decent city planning. I've been there, and plan to move there permanently. I currently live in Memphis, in the "Midtown" area, our most walkable area, which is kinda like Portland in terms of mixing business and residential. Outside of Midtown, the scene is nothing like the non-downtown parts of Portland though... miles of residential with *nothing* else mixed in... not a couple extra blocks to walk to something... think nothing to walk to within an hour or more besides more McMansions. And maybe sidewalk connecting the McMansions in a subdivision, but no sidewalks outside of it leading to the nearest stores or restaurants. Sprawl so far beyond infrastructure that it's rural-style ditches on either side of the road, and lots of narrows that are unsafe to walk or even bike. Our Cordova and Collierville make Gresham and Beaverton look like active-walking-person-paradise. Cordova was farmland in the '90s. Now it's miles of one central road with businesses, and a miles of depth of residential to either side, with hardly any safe walking or biking routes between. The places locals lived before at least had some mixed zones, and things on parallel streets. This has happened all over the US... Portland did some rare forward thinking to stop that crap there, so its worst cases of "sprawl" look like central areas of the cities that grew through the 80's 90's and 00's. Also, scientific studies here and here.

As for what High Fructose Corn Syrup does to appetite: John Hopkins and Iberaki study discussed and linked here. Princeton study here. HFCS also has the business benefits you mentioned... but increasing appetite in your consumer audience is one hell of a business incentive to include it too.

I'd love to see better caloric information, awareness, and data spread... that may help quite a bit. Meanwhile, some things changed in the US a few decades ago and there was an obesity explosion. Some pre-existing, high awareness of caloric intake didn't disappear, but other things certainly happened. If and when there's a serious effort to solve this problem on a wide scale (ahem), that effort needs to include these and/or other well-linked causal factors.

Natural family planning.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070221065200.htm

Maybe this doesn't apply to you specifically, but hearing "natural family planning" irritates me to no end.

I went to a Catholic wedding last year. And they just went on and on and on and on and on and on about welcoming children and praying for the souls of women who'd had abortions and on and on about their natural family planning program at their church. And more about welcoming children, etc. etc. etc.

Then for the life of me I couldn't find a restroom with a changing table for my daughter.

This is a link to the same research with pictures that address your concerns.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070221065200.htm

According to a similar article in science daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/03/110327191042.htm it is 10x more efficient than (natural) photosynthesis.

I'm amazed that the foundation of life on earth is so inefficient (one tenth of 5.5% is only .55%!). Is this right? If it is then I'm glad our solar devices may not have to cover up too much of our planet to generate the energy we need (but if we ever develop solar powered self-replicating nano-bots, they will totally out-compete the natural biosphere).

Also, if this is true, then isn't this a major reason against using biofuels? I mean in addition to this inefficiency of photosynthesis, you've still got to convert it into some sort of fuel (but I guess the same is true of this artificial leaf; hydrogen is not the most practical of fuels). I guess maybe biofuels are still in the running because they can be "manufactured" very cheaply (farming and fermentation) with thousands of years of technology developed. (Or maybe it is the politics of the farming lobby).

(I'm also amazed that they used water from the Charles river in Boston and that it still worked. I remember a time when an accidental dunking in the none-too-clean river meant a quick trip to the doctor's office for shots!)