In his just published final book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions," physicist Satephen Hawking wrote, "There is no God. No one directs the universe" but in a universe where only 6% of what must exist is even matter that can be detected, the science community is unwilling to be as definitive as he was.

It may be that God is in the gaps, and different people have different definitions for what that is. Yet it may be perpetuating the false narrative that religion is on one pole and science is on another.

Anti-science activists who make money promoting alternatives to medicine have succeeded so well that 47 percent of those aged 18 to 37 think they can cure cancer with food or supplements or ancient Chinese wisdom.

That alarming bubble of woo brings the average up to 40 percent overall, which must embarrass Baby Boomers, who elected the President that put folk medicine on the same stage as science at the National Institutes of Health.

Lyme disease is the most prevalent tick-borne disease and is caused by the bacterial spirochete Borrelia. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended two-tier method, Garg et al., claim that 72 percent of individuals they examined classified "negative" by the CDC two-tier lyme disease test showed positive for the Borellia biomarker, and other microbes such as Babesia, Bartonella, and Ehrlichia.

That means some lyme disease patients do not follow the "one microbe, one disease" Germ Theory, according to an analysis of patients at different disease stages which found they respond to various microbes 65 percent of the time. And that ticks carry more than just lyme disease.

Modern life has many benefits. Transport, comfy furniture, smartphones, TV, the internet, dentistry and advanced medicine would be at the top of most people’s lists. Our bodies also show signs of responding positively to modern life. In almost every part of the world, we are much taller than we used to be. We also live much longer, with life expectancy inching towards 80 in many wealthy countries, while everyone “knows” ancient humans usually died in their twenties. But what I discovered while researching my book, is that things are more complex than that.

America is the most science literate country in the world, we are dominant in Nobel prizes and science output, and we are thankful we are not France, but a new survey by Harris shows that we still have a long way to go.

The results of the new survey reveal that 47 percent of people ages 18 to 37, our future leaders, have become convinced by efforts to promote alternatives to medicine and think they can cure cancer with food or supplements or ancient Chinese wisdom - 40 percent overall.

How did we get here?

Three ways.

Comic books of the 1950s and 1960s made a point of their potential to terrify, with anthologies from Entertaining Comics, such as Haunt of Fear, Vault of Horror, and Tales of the Crypt, boasting covers with straplines such as “Within these pages dwell creatures from the terrifying beyond!”

Anti-gun proponents like to produce headlines showing a young child accidentally shot another family member with a pistol, but that kind of cultural framing may be doing more harm than good, because a new study reaffirms what most gun owners knew: Gun harm is not caused by lazy or irresponsible gun owners letting their kids get them by mistake, it is from assaults by men. And teenagers at greatest risk for committing acts of violence are at greatest risk of receiving it, not pre-schoolers.

Of the over 75,000 youths who visited emergency rooms for gun-related injuries from 2006 to 2014, 86.2 percent were males and overwhelmingly in large cities.

Fake news has become a common claim, and for good reason. The Russians, for example, have been caught using environmentalists, food activists, "journalism" professors, and trade groups to promote fear and doubt about American science and technology
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But organic food shoppers and people scared of natural gas are not alone in believing fake news. A new study shows that dogmatic individuals, fundamentalists and delusional people of all kinds are more likely to believe fake news. The less open-minded a person is, the more likely they are to be swayed by fake news claims.

In California, we have warning labels on trees, because they will give us cancer. And that is not even the strangest of California's warnings about nearly 1,000 chemicals on hundreds of thousands of products.

We call it "leadership" to put warning labels on the things activists are not yet allowed to ban. "Leadership" is a dog whistle for the kind of social authoritarian mentality that is the enemy of science and progress.  And we are very much the enemy of science and therefore progress. 

I woke up from a nap, on my back, looking up through my bedroom window at a brightly lit blue sky and saw them again: numerous small, uniform dots swimming in my field of view.

This time I paid attention. They went right past the images of floaters in my eye. So they are on a different plane. They moved at what seemed like nearly uniform speeds, although they sometimes went in arced trajectories. Each disappeared individually, sometimes seeming to radiate from a point, acting a bit like sparks in fireworks. They all remained in focus.