Joel Moskowitz, Ph.D., of Berkeley is the kind of anti-science "truther" that even most west coast activists steer clear of, because he makes all of the social sciences look bad by association. Worse, he is a "social" psychologist, which for the last 20 years has been beset by fraud and retraction. 

But at Scientific American, which has become the home of activist crazies, he fits right in.

Few topics arouse as much interest and controversy as sex. This is hardly surprising. The biological continuance of the species hinges on it – if human beings stopped having sex, there would soon be no more human beings. Popular culture overflows with sex, from cinema to advertising to, yes, even politics. And for many, sex represents one of the most intimate forms of human connection.

Despite its universality, sex and its purpose have been understood very differently by different thinkers. I teach an annual course on sexuality at Indiana University, and this work has provided opportunities to ponder sex from some provocative angles, including the body, the psyche and the spirit.

A new study has found that the switch from coal to natural gas hasn't just reduced greenhouse gas emissions from energy, it has reduced water usage. That is even factoring in water used during hydraulic fracturing - fracking - and shale gas generation.

It's a surprise for Americans to learn that the U.S. has more open land than the entire continent of Africa, even though Africa is 3X the size of the U.S., and it is an even bigger surprise when people learn that, of all the area not covered by ice, half of the world's land remains wilderness. 

The inventory of open land was conducted in 2017 and 2018 by the National Geographic Society but a new study says that the wilderness is getting more fragmented. That makes sense, but it's not a bad thing. If a new housing development goes up and a city designates a lake and surrounding marsh as protected, it can be called fragmented but it's better than being gone.

A new study finds that if the United Kingdom did as The Guardian routinely advocates and abandoned modern agricultural science, people would starve. Or diets would change to where the rich had a variety while the poor suffered on subsistence fare.

It was easy to make a strong adhesive in the Stone Age so claims about the presence of glue 50,000 years ago meaning higher intelligence for "Neanderthals" don't stick very well.

Neanderthals and other early humans produced a tarry glue from birch bark to make tools and because modern anthropologists think birch tar could only be created through a complex process in which the bark had to be heated in the absence of air, they used that as proof of a high level of cognitive and cultural development. 

But a new study shows that there is a very simple way to make the glue.

At our English boarding school in the 1990s, my friends and I would spend hours immersed in roleplaying games. Our favourite was Vampire: The Masquerade, and I can well remember experiencing a kind of psychological hangover after spending an afternoon in the character of a ruthless undead villain. It took a while to shake off the fantasy persona, during which time I had to make a conscious effort to keep my manners and morals in check, so as not to get myself into some real world trouble.

The jet-setting habits of Bill Gates and Paris Hilton mean that they produce an astonishing 10,000 times more carbon emissions from flying than the average person. This was the conclusion of my research mining their social media accounts (tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts) as well as those of a number of other celebrities for clues as to where they were in the world over the course of 2017 and how they got there. As such, this estimate is conservative – they may well have taken more flights and not volunteered the information to their millions of followers.

Though plant burgers like Beyond and Impossible have surged in popularity, they are still alternative versions of the real thing. Science has been consistently pushing toward real meat, but grown in a lab, which should defuse activist claims about the meat industry without forcing people to settle for substitutes.

The challenges are doing so at a reasonable cost and having it feel like real meat. 

Snus, a smokeless tobacco popular in Sweden, has led to a dramatic reduction in smoking-related diseases compared to the rest of Europe. But though it has been legal for sale in the U.S. since 2015, it was not legal to claim it is less harmful than cigarettes. 

After analyzing decades of evidence, FDA has agreed that these products are safer than cigarettes and has granted its first-ever modified risk orders to eight of their smokeless tobacco products.