Crappiest effort to prevent the public from having access to truthful scientific information about global warming: Earlier this week,a two-year investigation of NASA's public affairs office concluded. Investigators released a report confirming that the PR wing of NASA had prevented scientists from informing the pubic about research that proved the existence of global warming and other kinds of climate change. According to the Washington Post:

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA's public affairs office "managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public." It noted elsewhere that "news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution."

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found "by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases." . . . Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the senators who pressed for the investigation, said in a statement that the report showed that citizens had been denied access to critical scientific information that should inform public policy.

NASA did not prevent scientists from publishing their findings in scientific journals — they only prevented them from publicizing those findings to the general public via press conferences or reports written in layperson's terms. Not only is this crappy for the public, which deserves access to the latest scientific information in clear language, but it's also crappy for NASA scientists who have been so ill-served and abused by their own public relations team. Crap, I tell you, crap! [Washington Post]

Crappiest effort to tie together every kind of cutting-edge science buzzword into one giant science fiction TV "event": The Andromeda Strain miniseries aired early this week, raising hopes that this classic scary space virus story would get an awesome update. It didn't. The "update" was basically slapping every single piece of science into one giant ball of lameness, with its Von Neuman death probe coated in "cutting edge nanotech Bucky Balls" which encoded some ASCII text (now there's cutting-edge for you, though maybe encrypting it with ROT13 would have been even more mega) and was sent from the future through a wormhole. Have I left anything out? Oh yes I have. The virus is also "like stem cells." If only they'd somehow stuck the G-phone in there, or maybe some dark matter, then the science buzzword compliance would have been complete.

Oh, and the plot was really bad too, with Very Special Messages about drugs being bad, environmentalism being nice, and making out with Benjamin Bratt being totally awesome.

Crappiest effort to pay homage to a once-great franchise, while also failing to pay homage to 1950s science fiction and misapplying CGI ant swarms:

Sure, I said Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a fun afternoon diversion, but that doesn't mean it wasn't total crap. I love Indy, and I loved the "alien skull" premise of this film, and yet the more I thought about it, the less I liked it. The ending felt like bad TV. And no, it's not cool or neato that Indy was able to survive a nuclear bomb blast by hiding inside a refrigerator. I can believe that he might escape a giant zooming rock by the skin of his teeth, but a nuclear bomb? That stretches the bounds of credibility so far that I'm not having fun anymore. I'm just feeling condescended to. Plus, as many io9 commenters already noted, the CGI ants were crap. Swarm of ants = good. Swarm of ants so fake they look like a batch of angry M&Ms (and not the good kind you can drink with the Carl Brandon Society) = crap.

Plus, why did putting the crystal skull inside a burlap sack prevent it from being magnetic? Oh I know: probably the same forces that made gold and gunpowder ferromagnetic in the movie. The force of crap.

Crappiest speculations about futuristic security threats to the United States, according to the U.S. Government: Watch out kids, because the melting arctic ice sheet could lead to trouble for U.S. national security! Luckily, the military has a solution, and it's totally cyber.