Design and purpose are definitely not two things that scientists consider as their guiding ideas in trying to decypher the fabric of our Universe, or of natural phenomena in general. So teleology should not belong to this blog, I agree.

Are you being monitored all of the time? You certainly are, by both corporations and the government. It just may not be obvious in the U.S., whereas in London you are filmed by government 300 times each day, and that concerns privacy advocates.

What if the spying were more obvious? Like a webcam that looks like human eye?

A few years ago, much of the academic science community finally turned on the anti-science progressives that dominated the coasts of the U.S. and who refused to vaccinate their children. 

Standing up to their political allies definitely turned the tide, even California Governor Gavin Newsom grudgingly conceded and signed a law banning the arbitrary vaccine exemptions for kids that had become common in places like San Francisco, where he'd been the mayor, and Los Angeles. Some schools there had vaccination rates under 30 percent.(1) Pretending the problem did not exist set California back, especially when coastal cities had more vaccine exemptions than the rest of the US combined, but scorn so long after it was common likely did not make much difference.

If you missed the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, wait a few years and catch the next one. One happened in 2012, and in 2003, and since it was only discovered as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s, they may have been happening forever.

If it isn't coronavirus, it could be a new flu. 

At the end of the 17th century, Sir Isaac Newton scientifically showed the motion of the planets around the sun through a law of universal gravitation. 

He also explained the motion of the moon. Yet since both the earth and the sun determine the motion of the moon, Newton became interested in predicting the motion of three bodies moving in space under the influence of their mutual gravitational attraction, a problem that later became known as “the three-body problem”.  He did not succeed in creating a a general mathematical solution for it.

The three-body problem was easy to define, yet difficult to solve. There is extreme sensitivity to the bodies’ initial positions and velocities - chaos. And chaos is hard to predict.

In western nations, there is a great deal of interest in improving standardized test scores compared to Asian students, but few schools want to do what Asian schools do most; teach to the test and teach by rote.

Instead, programs focus on increasing things like 'motivation' have become popular. And so we get a mashup of math and basketball. Should we call it mathketball?

A group of Copenhagen schools placed 756 1st through 5th graders in a six-week program that they found had a positive effect on their desire to learn more, provided them with an experience of increased self-determination and grew math confidence among youth. 

Just like people, trees can die of thirst, especially during a drought, but a recent field study found that a rapid collapse in the hydraulic system of trees is happening more rapidly than previously thought.

The heatwave of summer 2018 was exceptional and that can be hard on trees but it was an opportunity for researchers at the University of Basel to closely study the reaction of trees to this weather phenomenon. In 2018, the Norway spruce suffered most as a result of the drought. It is the most important conifer both in Switzerland and in central Europe. The results of the study are representative of northern Switzerland as a whole, and can also be applied to other conifer species. 

Though it is common to complain that advertising is following you everywhere and algorithms control our news, it is instead the case that the more tedious or challenging a task becomes, the more humans trust computers instead. Not many people listen to 4,000 songs to create a playlist they like, they make a playlist with a few and let Spotify do the rest.

A recent study involved 1,500 individuals evaluating photographs. The team asked volunteers to count the number of people in a photograph of a crowd and supplied suggestions that were generated by a group of other people and suggestions generated by an algorithm. 

Some people believe that marijuana can be medical but almost no marijuana users think it impairs their vision.

Though over 90 percent of users believe that cannabis has no effect on their vision, or perhaps a slight effect, smoking cannabis significantly alters key visual functions such as visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, three-dimensional vision (stereopsis), the ability to focus, and glare sensitivity, according to research.

Using their own proprietary consultant as the sole source for their "evaluation", US Fish and Wildlife Service once tried to extort up to $30 million from a private landowner in Louisiana, by stating they needed to created a habitat for an "endangered" frog and that was the only suitable location. And the landowner had to pay for it.

Except the frog already lived just fine in Mississippi. Its name was literally the Mississippi Gopher Frog.

Had sue-and-settle groups like Center for Biological Diversity actually won, not only would they have gotten fat from 'legal fees' paid by you and I, they could have created an ecological disaster chain, in the form of foreign parasites and diseases carried by those frogs.(1)