The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV series based on the 1985 novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood that presents a dystopian vision of a male-dominated society known as Gilead.

Widespread infertility means that the few fertile women who remain have been enslaved as handmaids and assigned to Gilead’s leaders to produce their future offspring. The series follows the struggles of June, who was separated from her family and forced to become a handmaid.

But just what is a reference to the evolutionist Charles Darwin doing in an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale?

In 2002, Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes got a paper titled "Hermaphroditic, demasculinized frogs after exposure to the herbicide atrazine at low ecologically relevant doses" published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

In it, he claimed this common herbicide was changing the sexuality of frogs, an indicator species.

As it turns out, there is a well-established relationship between pesticides, GMO crops, cancer and any number of other diseases, but it’s probably not the link that most people assume -- and certainly not what you read in the press these days.

The opioid crisis and deaths related to e-cigarette use among teenagers have dominated news headlines recently. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 34 people had died as a result of vaping and, in 2017, opioid addiction was responsible for more than 47,000 deaths in the U.S. Opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency.

One of the most suprising results of the "Machine Learning for Jets" (but really, for particle physics in general) workshop I attended in New York City two weeks ago was the outcome of a challenge that the organizers had proposed to the participants: find a hidden signal of some new physics process in a dataset otherwise made up of some physics background, when no information on the new physics was given, nor on the model of the background.<\p>

People can deny a lot of science without making a huge difference in their lives; no one will die if they deny evolution. Gravity, on the other hand, will kill you. You can't just jump off a building and deny it exists and expect a positive outcome.

This unseen force dominates our entire lives so completely we forget it exists. We drop pencils and struggle to walk uphill and go on with our lives.

How people account for this invisible influence while moving through the world was the subject of a recent experiment, and the results showed we regard it a lot differently when we can see it instead of feeling it through changes in weight and balance. 

“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” – Marshall McLuhan*

The famous media scholar’s statement about preliterate societies seems to apply also to our society today, in which the word “terror” appears in the news daily.

When McLuhan’s oral society gains enough leisure to develop a written language, “leisure” would mean not simply a few hours off work, but also some insulation from the terrors of the interconnected world. Enough insulation so that one could safely turn one’s attention inward for a while, to direct one’s mind to matters other than immediate survival.

I recently presented a mathematical model to describe the evolution of the Holy Trinity from a system formed with differential equations that correspond to the God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Thanks to this, it was possible to obtain an analytical solution of time, and it shows that God the Son is the point of convergence of creation. This work can be obtained at https://cvraulisea.files.wordpress.com/2020/01/holytrinity-isea.pdf

A few years ago, after concern about the administration's efforts to use EPA to pick and choose winners in the private sector reached a crescendo,  the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that EPA "violated publicity or propaganda and anti-lobbying provisions contained in appropriations acts with its use of certain social media platforms in association with its "Waters of the United States" (WOTUS) rulemaking in fiscal years 2014 and 2015."

It was a shockingly bold attempt by the federal government to use water regulations to penalize the public.

Oseltamivir, which goes by the brand name Tamiflu and is sold by Hoffmann-La Roche, has long claimed to shorten the duration of flu severity, to skepticism and sometimes even derision from the evidence-based science community.

A recently unsealed whistleblower lawsuit claims the company bilked U.S. taxpayers out of $1.5 billion by misrepresenting clinical studies and and publishing misleading articles falsely stating that Tamiflu reduces complications, severity, hospitalizations, mortality and transmission of influenza. And that's just when they encouraged government stockpiling, it does not include people who bought it with their own money, based on aggressive marketing campaigns which used the articles as evidence, the lawsuit alleges.