If you were born prior to 1980, you likely had a parent say that you needed to eat your dinner because people were starving in Africa.

And it was true. The Malthusian boom and bust lamented by Paul Ehrlich, John Holdren, and other doomsday prophets in the 1970s had gripped journalists and therefore popular culture.(1)

Yet beginning in 1980 scientists began to run the table on breakthroughs that have headed off starvation. Now no progressive seriously discusses mandatory sterilization or abortion and a Planetary Regime to enforce them the way Ehrlich and Holdren did in "Ecoscience"; the worry instead is that everyone is getting too fat thanks to science making it possible to grow food so affordably.

I have a pocket watch from the late 1800s. Why or how anyone carried this thing comfortably is a mystery. It is bulky and heavy. I can't have been alone because within just a few decades there was a wave of optimization that can best be compared to cell phones; even low-cost watches became small, light, and they kept great time. A pocket watch from the 1930s or '40s can often be found on my person, never the big heavy thing.

I don't like dainty coffee cups or a salad fork and I like a heavy blanket. Though recent trends had been toward smaller and lighter, I am not alone in preferring heft. People have started to love weighty stuff again.

Though we're at the tail end of the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 18 years, and a billion people in the world still use wood and dung for energy, and some people still starve, things are better than ever before. 

The mountains and valleys of feast and famine have tapered into gentle hills and science has made it possible for previously inhospitable regions to grow food.  That has meant prosperity. A decade ago the World Health Organisation set targets for income among the poorest, and those targets were met far ahead of schedule. 

Are you a white person who believes you have a moral imperative to introduce your superior belief system to brown and black people in other countries who have not yet been converted?

No, you're not a 19th century European missionary, you work at a modern European environmental NGO.
 
That reads provocative, even inflammatory, but it may be happening. And agroecology academics want to stop it before it is too late.

Europe has made it plain that they want European laws to be earth's laws. If a developing nation uses a safe pesticide that Europe has still chosen to ban, Europe will put them in their economic ghetto, along with imports from Israel.

Time and again, I get surprised by observing how scientific graphs meant to provide summarized, easy-to-access information get misunderstood, misinterpreted, or plainly ignored by otherwise well-read (mis-)users. It really aches me to see how what should be the bridge over the knowledge gap between scientists and the general public becomes yet another hurdle. 

Diapers are not what you'd think about first when you consider recycling. The CBC estimates the number at billions of disposable diapers entering landfills in North America. With this much waste, recycling these absorbent plastics might seem like a good idea. The super-absorbent material inside diapers is made up of long-chain polymers. Unfortunately, they don't get put into recycling bins because the composition of these materials is too complex to break down and recycle traditionally. The problem with diapers is that we haven't found a way to recycle them into something useful. At least, until now.

Light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anything behind one, but if a black hole is warping space, bending light and twisting magnetic fields around itself, then according to Einstein's theory of general relativity direct observation of light from behind a black hole should be possible.

Now it has happened. 

Material falling into a supermassive black hole powers the brightest continuous sources of light in the universe, and as it does so, forms a corona around the black hole. This light – which is X-ray light – can be analyzed to map and characterize a black hole.

Smartphones tout 'dark mode' as an energy-saving feature, because darker-colored pixels use less power than lighter-colored pixels.

It's mostly an intellectual placebo, finds a new study, because of the way most people use their phones on a daily basis. The study looked at six of the most-downloaded apps on Google Play: Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, Google Calendar, YouTube and Calculator. The researchers analyzed how dark mode affects 60 seconds of activity within each of these apps on the Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4 and Pixel 5.

When subnuclear particles traverse matter they give rise to a multitude of physical phenomena. The richness of the different processes is a crucial asset for the construction of sensitive particle detectors, and it is interesting in its own right. Indeed, it has been a very vigorously pursued field of research of its own ever since the end of the nineteenth century, with the discovery of X rays
(produced when electrons released their kinetic energy as they reached the cathode of an accelerating tube), and then after Rutherford's team bombarded gold foils with alpha particles (helium nuclei) emitted by a radioactive substance.