Major droughts in California happen every 20 years and smaller ones more frequently, yet northern California has not built major water infrastructure since the 1960s while the population has doubled. Environmental lawyers block any infrastructure improvements so no new water storage can be added and regulations about water flow in rivers were based on an optimistic guess. During the current drought California is sending so much water to the San Francisco Bay, which doesn't need it, that they have to issue warnings for people on the rivers.

Most people don't recall the LinkedIn data breach from nine years ago, the Adobe customer cyber attackers from eight years back, that Equifax exposed private information of millions of people just four years ago.

Those are the high profile ones but most participants in a recent University of Michigan study remained unaware that their email addresses and other personal information had been compromised in five data breaches on average. Most breaches never make the news, and often they involved little or no notification to those impacted. 

(Inside Science) -- Tens of thousands of years ago in what is now Europe, people held their hands against cave walls and blew a spray of paint, leaving bare rock where their hands had rested. Many of these stencils show all five fingers, but in some, fingers appear to be shortened or missing. 

Researchers have proposed grisly explanations for these absent digits: Perhaps the artists lost fingers to frostbite or disease, or perhaps they endured amputations for ritual purposes or punishment. But other experts have long argued that it's more likely they weren't missing any fingers at all. Instead, the stone age artists may have been folding their fingers down to make hand signs -- possibly humanity's earliest venture into writing on the wall. 

The popular belief is that sexual activity must have declined during the pandemic, but that relies on the trope that young people go to bars and sleep with strangers and that lessened.

Some people were instead getting busy during the pandemic more than ever before. Older men with erectile dysfunction prescriptions. The qualifier "prescriptions" is because the number of men using them dwarfs the cases of actual erectile problems, the pill just makes it better.

In a review of National Sales Perspective data, the researchers found that sales of prescription daily-use erectile dysfunction drugs, such as tadalafil, soared after March 2020, when the country went into the nationwide lockdown.

One of the reasons why I love my job as a researcher in experimental physics is that every day brings along a new problem to solve, and through decades of practice I have become quick at solving them, so I typically enjoy doing it. And it does not matter whether the problem at hand is an entirely new, challenging one or a textbook thing that has been solved a million times before. It is your problem, and it deserves your attention and dedication.

Cheese and insulin are two products most people don't realize were GMOs long before they became the target of anti-science groups. GMOs were instead embraced by activists like Rachel Carson, who saw them as a way to produce a lot more of things like insulin - no pigs needed - while using a lot fewer pesticides for plant crops.

In western nations it remains controversial - though a weedkiller has been found safe by European science authorities yet again it is "socially dead" - but elsewhere not only is science still acceptable, people want more of it.

It is no surprise that cancer survivors often express gratitude for being alive and mention God or a divine acknowledgement that had improved their health and well-being.

Is there evidence spirituality helps? It may be that healthier levels of cortisol, a biomarker commonly associated with stress, among breast cancer survivors is key. 

Honeybees die each year in great quantities and some years are worse than others. Since they are a big business, primarily as roving pollinators for crops that need them at a certain time (like almonds(1) there is always a concern about how to keep losses low.

Causes of death were once a moving target. For as long as records of bees have been kept, there have been reports of extraordinary die-offs, recorded all the way back to the Dark Ages. Now we know the big problem are pests like varroa mites but there are also concerns about harsh winters, land use, and some environmental groups even try to raise money claiming it might be pesticides used on crops.

(Inside Science) -- When you first hear it, a cicada chorus may sound like simple buzzing. But to a cicada, that cacophony is full of meaning. 

There are three species in Brood X, the cohort of 17-year cicadas now emerging in much of the eastern U.S. Members of each species congregate with their own kind and talk to each other with their own species-specific sounds. Males sing to court females and "jam" the songs of other males, while females make clicks with their wings to encourage or repel suitors. 

Humans can learn to decode these sounds. John Cooley, a biologist at the University of Connecticut, can speak cicada so well he can seduce insects of either sex. He uses his voice to imitate males and gentle finger snaps to imitate females. 

As Carl Sagan once said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

You may have recently read some extraordinary claims that total sperm count has dramatically declined among “Western” men and that endocrine disrupters - but only the synthetic kind, not natural ones - are the reason. The extraordinary evidence is lacking.

Scientists from the Harvard GenderSci Lab are putting the brakes on the alleged “apocalyptic” trends in male reproduction.