If you have ever visited the Terracotta Army in China, you know they are guarding an old emperor. That emperor was Qin Shi Huang, from 2,200 years ago.

The tomb has not been opened. The Chinese are superstitious, they believe in acupuncture and that grinding up the bones of endangered animals gives them superpowers, but apparently even some western archaeologists believe in magic. They are worried about crossbow and mercury traps.

You know, like "Raiders of the Lost Ark." Fiction.

No bow on earth is working after 20 years much less 2,000 and detected mercury near the tomb is probably because he drank it after listening to Chinese shamen who still sell woo today.

The dirty secret of university admissions in the Affirmative Action era is that it was only affirmative if you matched the preference of the committee creating the secret sauce for admissions. In 2012's "Science Left Behind", written with Dr. Alex Berezow, we noted that Asian students with American last names were told to put Caucasian on the admissions box.

It was so well-known among Asians that being an Asian minority incurred a huge admissions penalty in universities that touted affirmative action that families told young people to deny their heritage. Even white kids had a better chance of getting than Asians.

Harvard Humanities Academic Francesca Gino has filed a defamation lawsuit against her employer, Harvard University, and three bloggers on the site Data Colada.

Humanities academics and social scientists love to wrap themselves in the flag of culture and claim it is sexism if, for example, no evidence shows that standing with arms extended for two minutes will cause a woman to “embody power and instantly become more powerful.” The people who debunked the methodology were overwhelmingly men while social psychology itself is overwhelmingly women.

If your child is allergic to milk, flavored plant juice alternatives like rice and soy, when fortified, can fill in some gaps, but outside necessity, they are not nutritionally equal to dairy, no matter what marketing departments claim.

Once upon a time, the US government protected consumers with Standards of Identity, they sued a cheese company for putting how much milk was in a slice of its cheese because of even the inference it had as much calcium as milk. 

No more. Squeeze any plant and add some vanilla flavor and you can call it milk and Washington, DC does not think that is deceptive.

The US FDA has approved Opill (norgestrel) for oral contraception as an OTC product, the first daily oral contraceptive approved for use without a prescription. That means as soon as the company can get it in drug stores, convenience stores, grocery stores, and online, they will.

According to surveys, half of pregnancies each year are unwanted, but in the modern health care system it can be difficult to get an appointment for a prescription, so this will make contraception readily available without waiting months. 

Norgestrel is well-established, it has been available for prescription use since 1973, so the company just had to show consumers would use it without as doctor telling them what was on the label. 

Environmental Working Group's annual organic food public relations piece, its 'Dirty Dozen' list, is out, and blueberries are the new target for their clients.

EWG produces the Dirty Dozen list by looking at USDA data on pesticides and suggesting detection of a pesticide will give you cancer.

Forget their non-existent command of science, this annual fraud is egregious because they don't list the pesticides used by their clients. Organic pesticides, which can be up to 600 percent higher than conventional, are not included. If they were, the entire Dirty Dozen list would be organic produce.

In 2012's "Science Left Behind", I noted a claim by a politician opposed to natural gas - after environmentalists had previously lobbied for it (see also: ethanol, hydroelectric) - who stated that extracting it was causing earth to deflate.

It wasn't the craziest thing in the book, that more soldiers on Guam would cause the island to flip over or that organic food used no pesticides would also have to be in the running, but people who believe it are going to believe it, just like media outlets touting a claim that we are pumping so much groundwater that we are moving the planet off its axis.

Since 1950, life expectancy has increased from an average of 46 to 73 years. Much of that is due to science, though you might not know it from accounts by activists and their political allies in corporate journalism. Medicine is better, food is more affordable, energy is more available at least, and the wealthy under solar panel schemes even get it free.

In humans, females are generally regarded as nicer - though not necessarily to each other. In many mosquitoes there is no pretense at all, males wander around pollinating and eating nectar while female bite you.