Science sure is neat when it is either presented in a way that doesn’t put you to sleep, or is so mind-blowingly interesting that you couldn’t possibly fall asleep. Unfortunately, within the scientific community, scientists may be manipulating their facts and numbers in such a way that molds their findings to whatever they’re trying to prove. This, of course, isn’t science, it’s just misrepresentation. It may be more rampant than you think.

What are thought to be the world’s oldest human beds were recently found in a cave in South Africa. Considering how primitive they were, perhaps the better term would be “sleeping mats,” but in either case, these are the oldest beds or sleeping mats that have ever been found. Previous sleeping mats dated back 20,000 or 30,000 years, but these new ones — or rather, these old ones — are more squarely in a 50,000 to 70,000 year old ballpark.

Because what better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than having your mind completely blown?

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, called Curiosity, blasted off today from Cape Canaveral, FL atop an Atlas V rocket on its way to Mars. The ambitious mission will place the most advanced space rover yet conceived on the red planet, in hopes of discerning whether Mars has ever been home to microbial life. Following today’s successful 10 AM launch, the rover will cruise to Mars arriving in August 2012.

See video of this morning’s launch, after the break.

At the end of October, it came to light that a paragon among the European psychology community, Diederik Stapel, had admitted to falsifying the data in his publications, and the data he provided as coauthor. According to the University of Tilburg in the Netherlands, a probe into Stapel’s work has founded “dozens” of publications which used falsified data and 14 PhD theses supervised by Stapel. Among these was a study we reported on back in April.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stapel said that he, “was not able to withstand the pressure to score points, to publish, to always have to be better.” In the end, it was his own students who questioned his methods, and blew the whistle on his rampant academic dishonesty.

The only thing more mind-blowing than what’s going on inside your head when you experience déjà vu, presque vu, or jamais vu.This video is a bit on the long side, but it is completely worth your time. That’s the great thing about learning how your brain works, it changes how you look at everything.

Are you into science, but don’t like the stuffy feel that is generally associated with science? Want to sport your love of beakers and discoveries, but still want to get invited to all the cool parties? With the Monsters of Grok t-shirts, which take band symbols and band fonts and replace the words with history’s great scientists and thinkers, you can now smash an electric guitar into an amp and stage dive into a crowd of the cool kids wearing spiky wristbands and belts in the name of science.

A team of researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign have developed small electronic devices that can be worn on the skin. These temporary tattoos make the person wearing them a part of the device, that can bend, stretch, and move along with the skin. The researchers were hoping to make less obtrusive medical monitors for special needs patients, like premature babies. But the new sensors have proven so successful they could also be used for a variety of other applications.

The idea of making wearable sensors that adhere to the skin seems so easy and useful its surprising no one has developed them before. According to researchers, the major challenge in developing the technology was making the parts of the sensor as flexible and stretchy as skin. To do this, the researchers had to take brittle silicon and make it more bendable by making the sensor incredibly thin. The electronic parts of the sensor, light-emitting diodes, solar cells, transistors, and antennae, were assembled in an S-shape that would allow the circuits to still work when stretched in different directions.

For nearly 25 years a spectacular fossil that could answer scientists’ questions about an ancient marine reptile lay buried in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The fossil was of a plesiosaur, a large four-flippered creature that roamed the oceans some 78 million years ago. But it wasn’t just any fossil, this fossil was pregnant.

The fossil shows the mother, around 470 cm long, carrying a single fetus, around 150 cm long. The fetus has 20 vertebrae, shoulders, hips and paddle bones, and is believed to be about two-thirds grown. This is the first case of a pregnant plesiosaur fossil, and it shows that the creatures gave birth to live babies rather than hatching eggs. The finding also suggests that the creatures cared for their young similar to modern day whales and dolphins.

Every time NASA holds a press conference it is completely impossible not to start thinking, well maybe they’ve done it this time, maybe they’ve found alien life. It happened when the Internet got carried away with the arsenic life debacle last year. So, when NASA said they had a special announcement about Mars, who didn’t start hoping for aliens, really? But, alas, once again NASA has not found life on Mars. What they did find, pictured in the image above, is water. Or, what is most likely, probably, should be, water of some kind.

Now, liquid water on Mars, that is pretty cool. But what is the evidence? Images gathered by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have showed dark, finger-like features that appear and extend down some of the slopes on Mars’ surface. These features appear during the warmest months on Mars, and retreat as it gets colder, leading to the conclusion that it could possibly be the result of water flowing on or beneath Mars’ surface.