If you believed Monsanto controlled 500,000 biologists who accepted GMOs and weedkillers worldwide while Whole Foods, with more revenue, was standing alone selling organic food that made you healthier, you are a conspiracy theorist. 

You're not alone, even if the demographics changed. A few years ago, conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his claims that cell phones cause cancer and vaccines cause autism were embraced by the crazy fringe of the Democratic Party, like Organic Consumers Association and their puppet attack groups such as US Right To Know and SourceWatch. Now he is embraced by the crazy fringe of the Republican party, who think the COVID-19 vaccine is a Big Pharma effort to control our brains.

The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding, and the implication that this communication network may also influence our mental state - as if "hangry" is science any more than a child getting hyperactive if they eat a piece of candy is - means it has been linked to everything from autism to Parkinson's disease.

Because there is very little science, it is mostly suggestion used to sell supplements and yogurt that makes you poop. A new technology hopes to introduce data to brain-gut mysticism. 

Blitz games on the internet are a lot of fun, if you love chess as I do. Perhaps a good share of the fun is due to the complete chaos that may arise, when you have few seconds left on the clock and decisions have to be taken instantly. But sometimes you may happen to play correct chess, too. It is exceedingly rare, and when it happens it is a good indication that you have been able to hold on to clear strategic ideas leading your play into the correct decisions.

A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats were good, until butter was good and trans fats were bad. If you were gullible enough to buy quinoa, teff, or any other superfood, some influencer you believed had an epidemiology paper on their side.

A colloquium with a former thesis intern yesterday brought me to ponder again over the important question of determining whether a student should choose an experimental or rather a theoretical curriculum of studies. It is a problem that arises at a variable point of the student's trajectory depending on the way the university courses offer is structured, but the issue is universal as it revolves around the skills of the students rather than anything else.

Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go supernova and create ultradense objects like neutron stars and black holes. When two stellar remnants form a binary system, they also can collide. 

Yet a new paper shows there may be a fourth way - a collision where non-binary stars in dense regions can be forced together. The work used a long-duration gamma-ray burst with the Gemini South telescope in Chile.

In the 1990s, utility regulations promised to do for electricity what it had done for airline travel and telephone calls - reduce costs by 90 percent for consumers. California instead did what government had done to cable television costs; used over-regulation so that only the largest companies could survive the political phalanx they created.

In the early 2000s, a California Governor was recalled because he refused to use an executive order to mitigate the energy crisis government over-regulation had created. PG&E, the largest government-chosen utility, was banned from owing its power lines, and they could not change rates without government permission. They could not buy on the spot market, when demand was high, without government permission.

While modern weedkillers are great about using fewer chemicals and therefore less runoff into streams, the organic manufacturing process uses older, less effective compounds and that means on a calorie-per-calorie basis, the harm to the environment may be substantial. Water contaminated with copper sulfate, the most popular organic weedkiller, is harmful to crops, animals, and people.

One way to keep a healthy genetic population is a diverse enough group that there can be a random exchange of material. If that is a big factor, then geographically isolated giraffes on preserves may be at future risk.

If you have traveled, you have seen someone who is a frequent traveler be offered an upgrade but decline because they are with someone else and want to stay together. This is rare in other species. 

Yet not all experiences get equal treatment - if a parent is traveling with a child they may take the upgrade to give it to the child - and a new paper sought to understand how consumers make trade-offs between experience quality and togetherness. The authors write that consumers prioritize physical togetherness with relationship partners over opportunities that would improve an experience in real time.