A new strain of disease-causing bacteria has been identified which may explain a rise in more serious Strep A infections in England and Wales, according to results from cases published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal. 

When the Australian federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, went snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef in August, she told waiting reporters on the shore that she’d seen “amazing wildlife, fish, turtles, clams … a reef teeming with life”.

Such an upbeat assessment seems at odds with the Scientific Consensus Statement, released by the Queensland government in 2017, which said “key Great Barrier Reef ecosystems continue to be in poor condition”.

A few weeks ago, in an article where I discussed some new ideas for fundamental physics research, I briefly touched on an incident in which Paul Frampton, a well-known theoretical physicist, got involved in 2011. The paragraph in question read:

If you live in a city, your chances of being involved victim of a criminal act go up, and as cities grow in size, crime grows even faster.

But not all crimes go up at the same rate.  Rape grows only linearly, at roughly the same pace as a city's population, while car theft and robbery compound and outpace the population.

A new mathematical model says the same underlying mechanism that boosts urban innovation and startup businesses can also explain why certain types of crimes thrive in a larger population. 

Anthropologists have long speculated about why neanderthals while Homo sapiens thrived? Was it some sort of plague specific only to Neanderthals? A cataclysmic event in their homelands?

A new paper in Anatomical Record posits that it was not some exotic pathogen, but chronic ear infections and plain old evolution. Ear infections are common in kids but how serious they are is a matter of debate. In parts of culture worried about both modern medicine antibiotic resistance, some parents believe an ear infection should just rest while a lot of older people with poor hearing believe kids should get them fixed. But killing off a species?

Though age is the big risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, an analysis of Swedish twins has led some to believe that half of individual differences in Alzheimer's disease risk may be environmental.

Chemists, toxicologists, and biologists note that we would have gone extinct long ago if our bodies had not been able to absorb, metabolize, ignore, or excrete trace substances but since 2005, when a new salvo against public trust in the modern world was opened, there has been talk that an "exposome" can cause all kinds of diseases.

Environmental Working Group, the trial lawyer organization that claims modern pesticides are killing us but the old kinds labeled as "Organic"(™) create healthier families,  has a new conspiracy tale out, this time that a "chemical cocktail" in plain old drinking water is causing 100,000 cases of cancer per year.

While USA Today (they'll blame Trump) and New York Times (they'll blame scientists) are sure to cover it, you don't need to be concerned. Like everything EWG does, this is manufactured hype.

Our present moment is characterized by a growing obsession with the long term. The study of climate change, for example, relies on increasingly long-range simulations. Science’s predictions are no longer merely hypotheses for validation or invalidation but are often grave threats – of growing scope and severity – that must be prevented.

Eight years ago I wrote about how environmental lobbyists working for environmental lawyer groups kept the federal government in such a tail-chasing frenzy nothing could ever really get accomplished.

My frustration was over the Paiute cutthroat trout, a rare High Sierra fish that everyone agreed needed help. The government agreed, sportsmen agreed, the courts agreed, environmentalists agreed, but then it was environmentalists preventing it from happening.

Though there is far less economic inequality in America than at any point in history - poor people in America live in more square footage per person than the middle class in France, not to mention the low cost of food, TVs, and cell phones - there is a longing in some quarters to reduce it at the fringes. There are complaints, for example, that the .00001 running companies make high multiples of what the average employee gets.