HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Sky actually falling, report scientists. “A study of clouds over the last 10 years has found that their altitude has been declining, perhaps offsetting some global warming.”

SCIENCE: With New Technique, Tiny Robots Can Be Mass-Produced Like Pop-Up Books.

ON THE DEFENSIVE: As Gas Prices Surge, Obama Defends His Energy Policy.

POPULAR MECHANICS: What is the total value of the world’s sunken treasure? “We put the question to marine archeologists, a historian, and a shipwreck hunter. Their answers ranged from ‘Who knows?’ to ‘$60 billion’—and each was instructive.”

MARKDOWNS ON Cuisinart Food Processors.

REASON TV: The Great Gibson Guitar Raid: Months Later, Still No Charges Filed.

GLOBAL WARMING: Teaching The Controversy.

If we teach students that there’s a controversy, how will they know what to think?

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Turbo Tax Tim Gets His Tax Facts Wrong.

TRY IT ON A CLIMATE-SCIENCE DEPARTMENT OR NEWSROOM NEAR YOU: A “Transparency Grenade” for would-be Bradley Mannings.

“Equipped with a tiny computer, microphone and powerful wireless antenna,” Oliver explains on the Transparency Grenade site, “the Transparency Grenade captures network traffic and audio at the site and securely and anonymously streams it to a dedicated server where it is mined for information. Email fragments, HTML pages, images and voice extracted from this data are then presented on an online, public map, shown at the location of the detonation.” The notion is that you might be a civil servant outraged at what your department or agency is keeping hidden from the world. You storm into a meeting, pull the pin, and boom! It’s a data leak detonation.

I was expecting an earth-shattering kaboom. But wait, there’s more: “He says on his site that he’s working on an app for rooted Android devices that will mimic the grenade’s functionality while running stealthily on the background of users’ phones.”

TODAY IN ACADEMIC FRAUD: “Among the 937 applicants, 357 put down that they had at least one research study that was published or about to be published in a peer-reviewed outlet. When Amies Oelschlager’s group went to find those publications, 156 of the 1,000 publications listed turned up missing.”

Conclusion: “The higher the stakes, the greater the incentives to cheat.”

THE HILL: Obama tells Univision he’ll be in White House ‘another five years.’

CHRONIC STRESS associated with shorter telomeres. “My advice: Live lower stress lives.”

ED DRISCOLL: The Paradox of the Nostalgic Progressive.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Progress with Ferroelectric Nanotubes.

IN TODAY’S WASHINGTON TIMES, I review Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century.

WHO DO PEOPLE LIKE? This new PJ Media Presidential Poll looks at actual candidates and people who aren’t running to see who’s most popular, and the answer is kind of surprising. Plus this: “But the news is not good for the President either. Besides the fact that several candidates (Romney, Chris Christie, and Jeb Bush) trail him only within the margin of error, as you will see in the cross tabs tomorrow, Obama scores abysmally among independent voters.”

ELECTRIC CAR UPDATE: Tesla Roadster facing ‘brick’ battery problems?

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-CRAZED BUREAUCRACY: In this podcast, my colleague Ben Barton talks about the libertarian side of the Harry Potter books. There’s a transcript at the link, too.

SENDING IN THE CLOWNS: A Politico Fact-Check Bellyflop.

DECOLONIZATION FAIL? Hong Kong Was Better Under The British. “Most expatriate officials retired to Blighty, so they were less tempted to do favors for the local business elite. The government rewarded them with pensions and OBEs. A Lands Department bureaucrat didn’t have to worry whether his child would be able to find employment in Hong Kong if a decision went against the largest property developer. Contrast all this with Hong Kong after the handover. The government is still not democratic, but now it is accountable only to a highly corrupt and abusive single-party state.”

SOUTH AFRICA: Addicted To Corruption. “It’s a dichotomy South Africa has lived since the end of apartheid: The proud standard-bearer for democracy’s triumph in Sub-Saharan Africa is a state beset by chronic, debilitating corruption.”

ROBERT BLITT ON DEFAMATION OF RELIGION. “In the face of the OIC’s repeated assertion that defamation of religion continues to enjoy international legitimacy, the US and other concerned states have remained virtually silent. The illusion of a consensus ending years of acrimonious debate at the UN has apparently caused these governments to lose sight of the crux of this debate: whether international law should countenance privileging the subjective ideas and beliefs of various religions at the expense of individual human rights. . . . Malaysia’s deplorable decision to abide by Saudi Arabia’s request for Kashgari’s return is deadly evidence that an international norm authorizing criminal prosecution – and even extradition – for defamation of religion offenses is alive and well. This reality should be deeply disconcerting to those concerned with maintaining the integrity of the international human rights framework.”

Personally, I have come to doubt whether that “integrity” exists at all.

ACTA UPDATE: Top EU court to decide whether trade treaty with US violates rights. “The European Union on Wednesday decided to have Europe’s top court decide whether the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which the United States signed last year, violates the freedom of expression. Critics of the ACTA say it has the potential to stifle the Internet and compare it to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which is before Congress.”

Bury it in a crossroads with a stake through its heart.

UNFAIR: HALF of Americans don’t pay income tax despite crippling government debt.

Where’s that “shared sacrifice” we’re always hearing about?