Is it sacred land if it's two and a half miles in the air and only a few elites were allowed to visit on penalty of death for anyone else?

Another post to help people scared of the Iran - US situation. For most people the personal risk is zero. Short summary: Trump seems to have ordered a strike on selected Iranian facilities - and then backed down at the last minute after attempting a diplomatic phone call with Iran and talking to a couple of Iranian officials. He says he did it becaue he was told at the last minute that it would kill about 150 people in Iran which is not proportionate for shooting down an unarmed drone. He may also have been influenced by reports that powerful national leaders in Iran were angry at the drone shooting and didn’t order it.

Short summary: This is another climate change story hitting the news which is not the scary thing it seems to be. Yes it is likely to be due to global warming and yes it adds to sea level rise. Yes, the early melt this summer is likely to mean a significant net loss, similar to 2012 which also had an early melt. It is dramatic and draws attention of the public to the reality of climate change. However this one year doesn't mean that the Greenland ice loss has suddenly increased its long term rate of loss of ice. One year of new data is not a new trend. It is just natural variability. It is balanced to some extent by snowfall in winter, which also was low this year.

In synergy with the third season of the hit Netflix series "Stranger Things", Burger King is selling upside-down Whoppers starting today, retro 1980s packaging included.

If you are not familiar with the show, and without too many spoilers, "Stranger Things" is a science fiction-horror show revolving around teens in the 1980s. If you are not familiar with Burger King, I suppose it's simple enough to say they sell hamburgers. And want to catch up to rival McDonald's. 

RR Auction in Boston has a selection of pretty interesting Apollo program stuff, but you have to bid before 7PM.

This is the perfect time to sell, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing is a month away, so it may not be the perfect time to buy. I have made a decent amount of money selling key comics a month before the next Marvel movie release and buying identical or better copies a year later from people who made impulse buys.

Up for grabs is an American flag flown into orbit on Apollo 11, signed by Command Module pilot Michael Collins. There is also a burn chart page from the flight plan that went into orbit on the Columbia Command Module, signed by both Collins and Buzz.

This has lead to some clickbait headlines such as “Glacier melting doubled since 2000, spy satellites show”. However, that’ not what is new about this study; its figures just confirmed earlier results. Increased glacier loss is one of the more robust predictions of climate change, though the details are harder to model.

The new thing about this study is that it covered the entire region in a uniform way. This let the authors conclude that the ice is most likely being lost due to warming rather than to precipitation changes or soot from cities.

In today's Wall Street Journal my article Science Saves an Old Chestnut discusses the potential benefit of President Trump's executive order requiring USDA, FDA, and EPA to modernize when it comes to biotechnology approval. They have to consider actual risk instead of treating every product like a new invention. They don't make flowers go through tens of millions of dollars and 20 years of regulatory stonewalling, why do it for anything else? 

I am reading a fun paper today, while traveling back home. I spent the past three days at CERN to follow a workshop on machine learning, where I also presented the Anomaly Detection algorithm I have been working on in the past few weeks (and about which I blogged here and here). This evening, I needed a work assignment to make my travel time productive, so why not reading some cool new research and blog about it?

Once upon a time, epidemiologists believed bacon caused cancer, as did hot tea, a weedkiller that acts on no human biology, bread, apples, lettuce, mustard, tomatoes, and more.

That faraway time was actually last year.

You name it, and it is possible for statisticians at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to find a chemical in it that links it to cancer. With most foods, it is also possible for other epidemiologists to link them to prevention of cancer.(1)

What did epidemiologists once deny causes cancer? The cancer history of your family - genetics. 

Some parents with a lesbian, gay or bisexual child report just as much struggle to adjust two years after the fact as they did when they first learned of their child's sexual orientation, according to a recent survey. That has nothing to do with caring for their child, most do, but it informs how to make the adjustment easier for everyone involved.