There's no love lost between open access PLoS (Public Library of Science) and print journals. Nature doesn't think much of PLoS, for example, and PLoS says they created the company to make science less insular so it isn't any surprise that that a new PLoS essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli claims that the current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides "a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic."

They apply shade-tree-mechanic economics principles to support their idea of the distortion. There is an "extreme imbalance," they say, between the abundance of supply (science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact to be valuable to the authors - let's come back to that part later). Scientific information, they say, is an economic commodity and the 'consumers' are other scientists, patients, funding agencies, etc.

The result of the imbalance, they note accurately, is that only a small proportion of all research studies are chosen for publication in the best journals, and these results are unrepresentative of scientists' overall work.

Countries with strict social rules and behavioral etiquette may foster unruly drinking cultures and characteristic bad behavior, according to a new report on alcohol and violence released today by International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP). The report also lists 11 cultural features that may predict levels of violence such as homicide and spousal abuse.

And the culprit is, of course, not just alcohol, but men.

We cannot change the male propensity for aggression, but we can channel it into appropriate and socially acceptable forms. In particular, we need rites of passage for young people that offer challenge and a route to adult status and recognition. The aim should not be to completely suppress male aggression, but to utilize and channel it constructively.

But alcohol and men together make things worse. Apparently, lacking big animals to hunt, a night at the bar starts to resemble gay porn.

17 years ago, September 26, 1991, 8 brave souls locked themselves inside a sealed dome to simulate what it would be like to live in an artificial closed ecological system.

It was called Biosphere 2 (the original 'biosphere' being Ma Earth here) and was made in Oracle, Arizona by Space Biosphere Ventures.

The idea was to learn about ecology but it ended up being about anthropology as well - as fellow Scientific Blogging scribe Jane Poynter says, they discovered that even in tiny groups, and much as they might have protested the notion in advance, they broke into factions.

Fossil Fuels Brewing Company of Manteca, California is convinced that beer, like wine, takes time to get right. In this case, 45 million years. It's truly a beer no one else can claim to have.

Manteca is a short drive from here so you can bet this story is just beginning. It's for science, after all.

Raul Cano, Cal Poly microbiologist and director of Cal Poly’s Environmental Biotechnology Institute (EBI) caused quite a brew-ha ha(1) with the announcement that beer made from living bacteria extracted from a bee entombed in amber 25-45 million years ago was really, really good.

Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna say that people make lots of assumptions about sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at human faces - and we do it with cars as well.

They're not the first ones to come up with this idea; five year olds have been finding personalities in inanimate objects for thousands of years and my kid has been saying "Ka-chow!" ever since he saw Cars, but they are the first ones to tackle it in a systematic fashion.

How did they do it? They asked people to describe car grills anthropomorphically. Then they used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information, whatever that means. One-third of the respondents associated a human or animal face with over 90 percent of the cars and everyone noted eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grill), and a nose in 50 percent of the cars. Yep, that means people think cars have a personality.

When scientific terms become part of the cultural fabric they often lose their meaning. Biology has had its share of modern misunderstandings with 'evolution' becoming colloquial rather than scientific, along with the general term 'theory', which today is used by anyone with a crackpot notion about particle physics, math or the end of the world due to a tunnel in Switzerland.

So it goes. That's why today we have advertising claims like 'the next evolution in cars' and then press releases about the 'missing link' in comets.

Hey, we don't shape the culture, we just try to cut through it. So this time we will talk about the 'missing link' between an Oort cloud and Halley's comet and discuss the 'evolution' of these mysterious space bodies, which will make biologists here irritated. Later on we can use terms like 'genesis' and 'creation' in their place so religious folks can feel slighted also.

Why mention all that? Well, we run out of science terms to use when there is no previous explanation for an object, so we have to fall back on cultural ones in order to convey why something is important. In this instance, a team of scientists has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun is just baffling enough that it may tell us about the origins of some comets.

You heard me. Researchers from the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey project have discovered an object that orbits around the Sun -- backwards. And it is tilted at an angle of 104 degrees, almost perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. Take a look:

To some on the fringes, the only good planet is one without people. To some pseudo-environmentalists, a good planet is one where theirs is the only SUV. To millions more, nature is a way to escape the rigors of city life and enjoy the outdoors without being intrusive.

Ecotourism is big business these days. Convincing society that nature's beauty should be preserved and enjoyed has convinced more people than ever they should actually enjoy it.

But an examination of Californian forests says that hiking, bird-watching and other low-impact activities are linked to a sharp drop in carnivores like bobcats and coyotes. In other words, if you really care about Mother Earth you should leave nature to conservationists who get paid to monitor wildlife and instead walk around the local mall.

Sauna has long been a cottage industry in Finland and the entire Northern hemisphere, with Scandinavians and Russians claiming to have used saunas for cleansing and relaxation for over 2,500 years.

Saunas are the new Prius, with various studies claiming a positive influence on general health.

A recent study(1) conducted in 41 healthy volunteers and presented in Dermatology says that regular sauna also has a positive effect on skin physiology.

Our friends at LiveScience love Garth's stuff so much (*) they have created a nifty widget that will give you a little drop-down tool and let you see lots of his equations. So if you are unsure whether or not to bluff in Texas Hold 'Em, simply stop the game, pull out your iPhone, and plug in the numbers.

Likewise if you are standing in line at Starbucks and unsure how many cups of coffee you should have, this widget can tell you.

Basically, you can completely abdicate responsibility for your own decisions. Leave it to Garth. He knows what he's doing.