NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine laid it on the table recently; to him, Pluto is a planet. News outlets are calling him out, saying the "official governing body" does not agree.

The Paris-based  International Astronomy Union (IAU) is not really astronomy’s official governing body any more than NASA is. They often claim to be but they are a few hundred astronomers. They do not determine official designations any more than a few scholars with expert in CRISPR at a National Academy can tell FDA to stop treating harmless gene editing in plant varietals as a new drug in the regulatory scheme.

At the beginning of this decade, there were clear lines in science denial. If you denied evolution or global warming, you were more likely to vote Republican, and if you denied medical, agricultural, or energy science, you were more likely to vote Democrat.

The evidence was clear; if you took a compass and drew a circle around a Whole Foods store, you were going to find anti-vaccine beliefs, organic food, and insistence that solar power would keep the lights running. And Whole Foods stores were only in wealthy areas, 80 percent of whom had voted for President Obama.

White rhinos (Ceratotherium simum) are the second largest land mammal after the elephant. Adult males weigh up to 3.5 tons.

Called by some the square-lipped rhinoceros due to their square upper lip, they have a longer skull than black rhinos and a larger shoulder hump. They have two horns.

There are over 20,000 of them left, a big conservation win, but if you read environmental accounts they are going extinct, only two remain. 

How can there be 20,000 of a species and yet only two?

In 1979, the United States Department of Education was created and no one was sure why, since education is done at the local level. But both chambers had a Democratic majority and Carter was a Democratic president and they said it was for the children so they split up the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two Cabinet level departments.(1)

In science, the saying goes, if it can happen in nature it will. 

This Totalitarian Principle expressed by Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann actually originated with Plato. Nothing new there, what is interesting in a recent article by by Tom Siegfried in Science News is that Gell-Mann doesn't seem to have been inspired by T.H. White of "The Sword In The Stone" fame.

White did have that statement in the 1958 edition of "The Once and Future King" compilation but not in the prior books leading back to 1938. Gell-Mann had placed it in a strong nuclear force paper in 1956.

Federal law requires known allergens such as eggs, peanuts and other ingredients to be declared on food labels. Even if they are organic apple cookies from Whole Foods. So frosted “Decorated Red Apple Cookies” have been recalled due to unlabeled allergens, in this case eggs.

The company removed the product from stores in in Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada.

Secular modernity requires the weeding out of all the baloney. Yet it’s not clear that we are any less credulous than before, notes Emily Ogden. an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, in Aeon magazine.

In the summer of 2018, the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft arrived at the Ryugu asteroid and in October of that year sent out the Mobile Asteroid Surface Scout (MASCOT) lander to gather information about the surface.

Now the images taken during its 17 hour mission have revealed something interesting. The asteroid, just over half a mile in diameter, has rocks like carbonaceous chondrite meteorites but there seems to be no dust, like is on the moon. The rocks are instead "bright, with smooth faces and sharp edges, or dark, with a cauliflower-like, crumbly surface."

Mung bean protein, canola oil, onion puree and turmeric - it's what's for breakfast. Maybe.

Fake versions of foods are all the rage but egg farmers who survived the Vegg ("nutritional yeast flakes, Sodium alginate, Kala Namak, beta-carotene") can't rest easy just yet. Joining any number of eggless egg substitute concoctions, Just Egg is rolling out in 2,100 Kroger stores nationwide.

Unlike most others, which are just used as a leavening agent or a binder so egg is substituted by xantham gum or tofu or some other chemical and isn't really for cooking, three tablespoons of Just Egg is touted to be just like a regular egg and can be used for an omelet or scramble.

So if you don't want to eat liquid chicken, you can eat whatever this is instead.