The litigation group Earthjustice, the sue-and-settle arm of Sierra Club, has joined other controversial environmental trial lawyer groups, such as Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Union of Concerned Scientists, in a lawsuit to try and force EPA to keep Obama-era standards that environmental lawyers helped write. The now discarded additional regulations would have further limited carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks for the model years 2022-25.

American government-funded science likes to declare wars. War on cancer, war on obesity, during the Obama administration there were seven different "Manhattan Projects" related to science and health. It connotes action, it makes the public feel like something important is happening with taxpayer money, revolutionary, instead of being iterative and slow.

Plants are more practical. They developed an evolutionary strategy to "tolerate" rather than "resist" infection to maintain health.  And that may be the roadmap for tuberculosis. 

If you want to spread fake news, and rarely have it corrected, Twitter is the best way to go, according to a new analysis. Experience does not help. Instead, the social media platform’s most active users are complicit in detecting and spreading falsehoods, even during public emergencies. 

An analysis in Natural Hazards, looked at four false rumors — two each from the Boston Marathon and Hurricane Sandy, including an infamous falsehood about the New York Stock Exchange flooding. The authors looked at whether Twitter users spread the false news, sought to confirm it, or cast doubt upon it:

A paper by B. Fornal and B. Grinstein published last week in Physical Review Letters is drawing a lot of interest to one of the most well-known pieces of subnuclear physics since the days of Enrico Fermi: beta decay.

What started as a technology development project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in August 2013, has become The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft which will travel with the agency’s Mars 2020

Like sex, Stephen Hawking was and is mainly a cheap way to obtain publicity. They still publish posthumously now to keep it going. The media feast on the occasion of his parting was not enough, sadly also here at Science2.0 by the usual suspects. I refused participation, because there is just nothing good to say, but the “he just dead, you can’t say that”-period has passed now, too. Let’s be scientific: Hawking’s main contribution was sitting in a wheelchair!

There are many different types of human papilloma virus (HPV). Some are associated with the development of cervical lesions that can become cancerous and are considered as high-risk HPV types. Two of these high-risk types (HPV16 and HPV18) account for about 70% all cases of cervical cancer worldwide.

Most people who have sexual contact at some point in their life will be exposed to HPV. In the majority of women, HPV infection will be cleared by the immune system but when the immune system does not clear the virus, persistent HPV infection may lead to abnormal cervical cells which can progress to cervical cancer if left untreated. 

Across the North Atlantic, shipwrecks scatter the seabed like the carcasses of prehistoric creatures. Bygone relics of sea exploration, trade, migration and conflict, these historical monuments are important sites of cultural interest. But they also form the basis of a burgeoning recreational dive tourism industry, and contribute substantially to the biodiversity and abundance of marine life.

In 2015, 4,528 "children" - the mean age was 18, pediatricians presenting at the Pediatric Academic Societies 2018 annual meeting today counted children as anyone under age 21 - died from firearm-related injuries. Eighty-seven percent were male and 44 percent were black.  And the pediatricians argue that background checks and thus waiting periods to buy ammunition might help lower those incidents.

This is a debate hosted by the SETI institute between Robert Zubrin, founder and head of the Mars Society, and one of NASA’s former planetary protection officers, John Rummel. They debate the requirements of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to protect both Earth and other celestial bodies like Mars from any harmful effects from the exchange of living organisms between the planets on our spacecraft.