Featured Articles

Yes, We’re Living Inside A Simulation

Yes, We’re Living Inside A Simulation

Apr 01 2025 | comment(s)

Interna

Interna

Mar 29 2025 | comment(s)

In the past few years my activities on this site - but I would say more in general, as the same pattern happened also on social media - have progressively shifted away from pure casual blogging and reporting of personal matters to a more focused discussion of scientific topics, always lingering around my research interests. 
Reporting Live From The SmartZero City Conference, Taipei

Reporting Live From The SmartZero City Conference, Taipei

Mar 28 2025 | comment(s)

What are sustainable cities, and can we build them? I put my Institute Fellows’ decades of experience together with the content of this fine conference, and conclude: (1) A sustainable city will attend equally to innovation, to human opportunity and dignity, and to the Earth. (2) Cities are not yet doing that. (3) There are obstacles.

With Fluoride Ban, Utah Sets Out To Be The California Of The Right Wing

With Fluoride Ban, Utah Sets Out To Be The California Of The Right Wing

Mar 28 2025 | comment(s)

When asked about an effort to ban fluoride in drinking water, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said, "It’s not a bill I care that much about” but he still signed it, despite the health benefits being well-established and claims of harm being the kind of slimy epidemiology that claims "risk" of BPA, weedkillers, PFAS, and too many products to count.

Utah wants to be the California of the right-wing; ban things because it matches the politics of their voters and science will be marginalized.(1)
Is Canadian Patriotism Why Religion Is So Unpopular In The Country?

Is Canadian Patriotism Why Religion Is So Unpopular In The Country?

Mar 28 2025 | comment(s)

In 1961, less than one per cent of Canadians identified as having no religion. In 2021, 43 per cent of those between 15 and 35 considered themselves religiously unaffiliated.

Organized religion — and especially Christianity — is in decline. Secularization is advancing apace. Most sociologists of religion agree on this. What they disagree about, however, is why.

Sticky Pesticides Reduce Chemicals Needed To Protect Plants

Sticky Pesticides Reduce Chemicals Needed To Protect Plants

Mar 25 2025 | comment(s)

It's easy for Greenpeace employees in cities to talk about farming but in the real world, without pesticides we'd lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetables, and 32 percent of cereal crops.

Most farmers want to optimize razor-thin margins and protect their biggest asset, land, so they are cautious about spraying too much, but the organic process leads to startling amounts of nitrogen runoff into rivers and ground water. A study claims 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution while the old ways of German farmers recently showed they were exposing everything to wasted chemicals. Seed treatments like neonicotinoids have gone a long way to reducing runoff but some products can only be sprayed. 
If The World Bank Stops Banning Nuclear, Boomer Environmentalism Is Over

If The World Bank Stops Banning Nuclear, Boomer Environmentalism Is Over

Mar 24 2025 | comment(s)

Greenpeace is facing bankruptcy after a $667,000,000 judgment. For the first time ever, the number of U.S. federal employees declined. Democrats have begun to consider they might be wrongly defending terrorists. They even became pro-vaccine for the first time this century. 

The best thing President Donald Trump may have done for science and political sanity is to switch from Democrat to Republican and bring Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk along with him. It forced Democrats, who are nearly 90% of career government employees, to suddenly defend things they had opposed for decades.(1)

Like nuclear energy. Which means we could usher in a new Golden Age of Science.
Learning Through Student Feedback And The Role Of Digital Engagement

Learning Through Student Feedback And The Role Of Digital Engagement

Mar 20 2025 | comment(s)

In this article I'm going to examine how student feedback plays a pivotal role in enhancing learning design and engagement, particularly in online education environments. I will explore the mechanisms by which timely, constructive feedback not only improves course content and delivery but also empowers students as co-creators in the learning process.
Something Happened In Silicon Valley

Something Happened In Silicon Valley

Mar 20 2025 | comment(s)

Wild Caught Salmon: Elites Love Knowing Peasants Die To Catch Restaurant Food

Wild Caught Salmon: Elites Love Knowing Peasants Die To Catch Restaurant Food

Mar 19 2025 | comment(s)

If you insist you will only eat berries picked by hand near a stream, you are virtue signaling to other wealthy people that you have more money than than they do, while masking it in a halo of claiming to care about taste or renewability or other nature.

No one is fooled. That is why restaurants and consumers who fetish-ize wild caught fight while claiming it is more nutritious or tastes better are so cloying. Sure, there can be differences in taste, just like if you give a chicken different feed, but that is easily solvable, and has been, like in the chicken industry.

Genetic Engineering Could Solve Spider Mite Infestations With Fewer Pesticides

Genetic Engineering Could Solve Spider Mite Infestations With Fewer Pesticides

Mar 19 2025 | comment(s)

The world is producing more food using fewer pesticides than ever, thanks to modern science. The gap between modern pesticide usage and organic food pesticides needed per calorie of food got so large, up to 600% more organic pesticides used, that California stopped itemizing organic pesticides separately to improve the optics of the organic industry.
The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

The Probability Density Function: A Known Unknown

Mar 18 2025 | comment(s)

Perhaps the most important thing to get right from the start, in most statistical problems, is to understand what is the probability distribution function (PDF) of your data. If you know it exactly -something that is theoretically possible but only rarely achieved in practice- you are in statistical heaven: you can use the maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation, and you can get to understand a lot about the whole problem. 
Hate Your Cats? Buy Raw Pet Food

Hate Your Cats? Buy Raw Pet Food

Mar 18 2025 | comment(s)

It's no secret that cats have the same α2,3-linked (SAα2,3) sialic acid receptor as birds, which means their mortality from bird flu which acts via that receptor is 50%. Or that raw pet food, raw milk, and organic chickens that refuse medicine are key transmitters of the disease outside the wild.

Why are you still buying that stuff? Why did you ever? 
MAHA And The Looming War Over Food Between USDA And NIH

MAHA And The Looming War Over Food Between USDA And NIH

Mar 18 2025 | comment(s)

Environmental lawyers, especially lawyers at Natural Resources Defense Council, exist to sue companies and to have casus belli they need to suggest corporations are killing us all. It is no surprise that NRDC has hired lots of lawyers who are anti-vaccine, anti-cell-phone, anti-food (ingredients, colors, the type of seed), anti-nuclear, etc.

If you don't know any scientists or Republicans, and NRDC employs neither, it is easy to demonize them because you never have them looking at you over lunch.(1)

NRDC knows a Republican insider now. Their former lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is part of the Trump administration and the "mainstream" positions they prize, that food science is evil, medicine is evil, technology is evil, are becoming government policy.
Lost In Austin - The Evolution Of An American City

Lost In Austin - The Evolution Of An American City

Mar 16 2025 | comment(s)

       The book is author Alex Hannaford’s lament about changes in Austin, Texas, since his initial visit to the city in 1999. This at first spurred your reviewer, who moved to Austin in 1969, to think, “1999? Well, isn’t that just too precious?”

H5N1: Raw Milk And Raw Pet Food Are Unsafe But Raw Cheese Aged 60 Days Is 87% Not Killing You

H5N1: Raw Milk And Raw Pet Food Are Unsafe But Raw Cheese Aged 60 Days Is 87% Not Killing You

Mar 14 2025 | comment(s)

The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.
Government Claims Victory Over Virtual Vaping

Government Claims Victory Over Virtual Vaping

Mar 14 2025 | comment(s)

Imagine if I put out a claim that I had prevented teens from playing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II" and therefore saving billions in dollars in future mental health care costs.

Well, I can, because COD:MWII has dropped a lot in usage from a few years ago. Sure, critics might claim it is an older game and new games come along and people switch to those, but if I am at FDA, none of that matters.
No Patchwork Regulations In 50 States: OpenAI Wants Federal AI Rules For Everyone

No Patchwork Regulations In 50 States: OpenAI Wants Federal AI Rules For Everyone

Mar 13 2025 | comment(s)

When a tourist visits California, the first thing they notice getting off of the airplane is a warning sign that the material they are near will give them cancer. Then another one. Then another. Soon, they become invisible but not before people do searches to see how much more cancer Californians develop than everyone else.(1)


Not only will most things in Walmart have a cancer warning, the building itself can give you cancer. Photo: Hank Campbell
Unscientific And Illegal WOTUS Agenda May Finally Die

Unscientific And Illegal WOTUS Agenda May Finally Die

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.
Legacy Survey of Space and Time Gets Closer

Legacy Survey of Space and Time Gets Closer

Mar 12 2025 | comment(s)

The Trump administration announced a major milestone for the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory with the installation of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera on the telescope.

Next up is the final phase of testing before capturing "first look" images and then the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time will begin.