* Caroline Baum: 5 questions for Bernanke on Capitol Hill
* Bruce Knuteson: Should science be capitalist or socialist?
* TXU says that hedge fund claim of $20 billion+ debt default is “meritless”
* Morning Call: U.S. futures look flat, London falls early, European shares pare losses and the Nikkei climbs.
* BIG deal: Ventas (VTR) to buy Nationwide Health (NHP), forming the country’s largest healthcare REIT
* MIT researchers: A word’s length reflects the amount of information it contains
* SEC denies multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests into its probe of private stock trades
* Is JPMorgan (JPM) negotiating to acquire a 10% stake in Twitter? Or is it just funneling money to longtime Twitter investor/advisor Chris Sacca, who last fall was raising Twitter-specific funds. (UPDATE: I have reason to believe the “funneling” story is accurate)
* Felix Salmon dismisses Mary Meeker’s USA Inc. report: “The truth of the matter is that you can’t run the country like it’s a technology company, and you can’t analyze it that way either.”
* Dave McClure: “It is incredibly hypocritical and patently false for the VC industry — which has NEGATIVE IRR over the past 10 years, and historically poor performance — to criticize high-volume strategies as being somehow crazy.”
* Inside Job director Charles Ferguson, accepting the Oscar last night for Best Documentary: “Forgive me, I must start by pointing out that three years after our horrific financial crisis caused by financial fraud, not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that’s wrong.”
* Survey says: Our obsession with mobile games is growing. Speaking of which, here’s video of Angry Birds, the playable cake:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hwVRzaQNkA]