Since the first use of electric lamps in the 19th century, society hasn’t looked back. Homes and streets are lit at all hours so that people can go about their business when they’d once have been asleep. Besides the obvious benefits to societies and the economy, there’s growing awareness of the negative impact of artificial light.

Light pollution has been blamed for wasting energy, disrupting wildlife behavior and harming mental health. One aspect has avoided the spotlight though. Namely, that light not only allows one to see, but also to be seen. This could well attract unwelcome attention – and not just from moths.

The first potentially habitable world outside of our own solar system is only about 31 light-years away and a new paper models the conditions under which the planet GJ 357 d, discovered a few months ago, could sustain life.

With a thick atmosphere, the planet GJ 357 d could maintain liquid water on its surface like Earth and that means it could be habitable. It is nearby a diminutive M-type dwarf sun, about one-third the size of our own sun,(it is unclear if the planet transits) which harbors three planets, with GJ 357 in that system's habitable zone.

This is surely going to be one of the 93% of bills that never make it to law. First there is his op. ed. and surely this is not serious:

First his “maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.” is part of an argument. He is saying we need to be tough on social media and not let ourselves be shoved around by them.

Confront the industry, we’re told, and you might accidentally kill it — and with it, all the innovation it has (supposedly) brought to our society.

Maybe. But maybe social media’s innovations do our country more harm than good. Maybe social media is best understood as a parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society.

Short summary - the Arctic is always on fire in summer, and it’s a natural part of the ecosystem, to the extent that moose, bears, bison, voles, foxes, owls, birds of prey, …, they are all dependent on the fires directly or indirectly. It would be a very different ecosystem without them. Part of the Arctic burns every year but other areas recently burned grow new growth such as birches, berries, herbs, willow, grassland, others then are turning into mature forests of spruce, which burn when they become very dry, others are peat banks that again burn when they are very dry and it cycles round and round.

Articles that warn about the effects on global warming are a bit premature. You need to look at all the effects over multi-year periods.

Another paper has disqualified claims by organic industry trade groups, sympathetic academic journalists, and trial lawyer organizations that the weedkiller glyphosate, which acts on plants, somehow causes human cancer

Thee researchers evaluated as yet unpublished data from the Agricultural Health Study (AHS) in the USA, the observation period of which had been extended by eleven years. Through the extended follow-up of the AHS, they come to the conclusion that no connections could be established between applications of plant protection products containing glyphosate and the occurrence of cancer among the examined population group.

A color additive petition submitted by Impossible Foods Inc. requesting the FDA to issue a regulation listing soy leghemoglobin as a color additive for use in such products such as Impossible Burgers has gotten FDA approval.

A new paper states that Einstein still holds up "for now" but that Newton is wrong.

The reason the authors believe Einstein’s general theory of relativity is weak is because it cannot fully explain gravity inside a black hole - and though no one has experimented inside a black hole to get measured data they believe the theory must come first, which happened with Einstein but not with Newton.

Tillage. mixing and churning soil and crop residues like corn stalks, has been around for thousands of years. Even the earliest farmers knew that soil could become depleted and tillage could make the next crop more likely to be successful so we eventually developed a chisel plow for field cultivation, to turn over soil at the end of the growing season.

But not everyone could afford a plow and some just let old stalks break down naturally, a kind of top level composting. Then in the spring they planted new seeds. Some didn't till at all.

A new paper in the journal Early Human Development hopes to use the infant form of the Body Mass Index(BMI) to predict future heart disease.

BMI is famous by now and has been used by government guidance bodies since the 1980s. It was invented nearly 200 years ago but, like homeopathy from the same period, somehow remains dogma to a few. It's a simple math calculation that takes into account height and weight. If you want to calculate yours, multiply your weight by 703 and then divide that by your height squared - (weight x 703)/(height in inches x height in inches).(1)

That is with adults. You can't do it with growing kids. 

Could Lyme disease in the U.S. be the result of an accidental release from a secret bioweapons experiment? Could the military have specifically engineered the Lyme disease bacterium to be more insidious and destructive – and then let it somehow escape the lab and spread in nature?

Is this why 300,000 Americans are diagnosed annually with this potentially debilitating disease?