Are insects facing survival challenges? Of course, the evidence in support of reasonable concerns is overwhelming. The important questions are: how serious is the decline; is it accelerating; what are its causes; and how can we address them?

Those are not the questions the media have been asking over the past three years, as a spate of Armageddon-like studies has been hyped by breathless reporting in such mainstream outlets as CNN, the Guardian and the New York Times. They’ve uniformly maintained the insect Armageddon was already upon us, and the culprit identified: modern agriculture steeped in the use of agro-chemicals.

On August 30 2019, a comet from outside our solar system was observed by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Crimea. This was only the second time an interstellar comet had ever been recorded. Comet 19 or C/2019 Q4 , as it is now known, made its closest approach to the sun on December 8 2019, roughly coinciding with the first recorded human cases of COVID-19.

The anti-vaccine and anti-GMO movements are products of the digital age. While there were always vaccine deniers, they were a tiny religious fringe until the 2000s, when it took England and the coasts of the U.S. by storm. Similarly, odd beliefs about food always existed but they were relegated to obscure stores. 

Social media changed all that. Facebook and Twitter became hotbeds of misinformation because anti-science activists mastered creating 'buzz' by getting cabals of individuals, sympathetic journalists, and groups who capitalized on it to swarm around bombastic claims. Now those tweet storms become 'and here's how Twitter reacted' articles by lazy media outlets.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were shown to be a bureaucratic mess when the coronavirus pandemic hit - refusing to send coronavirus tests unless hospitals first proved proved patients had coronavirus, then sending faulty reagents - and academic epidemiologists often seemed to be just making things up, but one area came through nicely; academic medicine.

Medicine, along with the life sciences and social sciences, are areas where women dominate in graduates but because leadership positions are often held for lengthy periods, when it comes to the top levels the numbers aren't the same. Men are in control.

Most of us have experienced unwanted calls at home. This is in spite of efforts by regulators, including the Information Commissioner’s Office and Ofcom, whose most recent report shows that around half of the UK population still receive nuisance calls. Many of these unsolicited calls annoy us because they interrupt our dinner or favorite TV show – but some, such as sales or scam calls, can cause distress or even harm.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Berkeley psychologist Joel Moskowitz, and other anti-science conspiracy theorists use the language of science against it to advance their beliefs that we're all being harmed by the modern world.

So when they see a scientific statement like "very low risk" of harm from any cell phone service, including 5G, they have a ready retort to mobilize the coastal Karens and Darrens who make up their ranks; that's not no risk.

When it comes to evolutionary biology and life on other planets, there is talk of amino acids, the building blocks of our existence.

But for any of that to work we first needed magnetic fields and plate tectonics, and a new paper finds that Earth became a "Goldilocks planet" by getting to the right place at the right time. So if we want to find other forms of life, we need to look for exoplanets that developed earlier rather than later.

Exoplanets are planets orbiting stars in other solars around distant stars and with thousands now known, there is a lot of speculation about how to detect life. It will start with narrowing down the possibilities; position, temperature, and geochemistry.

If you know the government is going to subsidize your business, you are a lot more agreeable to starting a company with questionable prospects than if you have to compete in the free market. If government subsidies decline, you are in real trouble if you have not shown your business model works.

That is the plight of alternative energy like solar and wind and ethanol today. Though pundits have insisted their economic models show it works, you can't spend virtual money. Financial reality is that without subsidies funded by governments who force conventional users to pay for those $25,000 solar installations, the industry will collapse.  Governments can't tax economic models. They can't tax an expense.

When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes while when stars that are less massive reach their end, they explode in a supernova and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars.

Those are called neutron stars and heaviest known neutron star is two and a half times the mass of our sun while the lightest known black hole is about five solar masses. What's in that "mass gap" between neutron stars and black holes?

A new paper posits some answers.

How a sunset would appear on other planets is a staple of science-fiction. The sun is as fundamental to grounding our existence as the earth, for most of us. Yet lots of people go months without seeing a sunrise or sunset.

That's extreme, but even more extreme is how it would look on Titan.