Prescription danger! Nobel cheater! Cat in tree! Communication screwups! Bad science learning! Slob doctors! And coreshine won't get you more shine! It's your Friday Science Watch, where we watch science—in a hat, on a mat!

  • Prescription drugs are dangerous! Put down that klonopin and listen. Narcs are telling everybody to turn in their old prescription drugs before you can get them, and gobble them. Just what we need, cops with all the drugs. Not again.
  • Linda Buck, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine, has retracted two academic papers after being unable to replicate the findings. Funny how you hear about that in the news, but if she'd won the Shmobel Prize, you never would.
  • A cat was in a tree for ten days but now the cat's left the tree. Cats are science.
  • Is more communication always better? A new study finds that it's only better if the communication and its subsequent action happen like, BANG BANG FAST. "If there are sustained delays in communication between just two or three parts of a system, performance of the entire system will eventually collapse." Translation: When I say it, do it, no questions asked, or else.
  • A new report says the US economy is all messed up because of our poor science education. Or that's what they tell us the report says, who knows.
  • Turns out that fitness and nutrition advice coming from a fat slob doc isn't as effective as the same advice coming from Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, except in a universe where he was a doctor. But he still looked the same otherwise. Live and learn.
  • A new astronomical phenomenon termed "coreshine" could help give physicists and astronomers a better idea of how stars are born. But it'll never give them a better idea of the female anatomy, amirite? High five! Except for the lady astronomers (call me).

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