The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a CRISPR-based treatment for sickle cell disease, an inherited disorder that distorts the shape of red blood cells and disrupts the function of hemoglobin, the protein that carries and distributes oxygen throughout the body.

Going into his final year in politics, California Governor Gavin Newsom is banning everything he can to create a legacy among anti-science progressives. He recently created a black market for Skittles by banning brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, and red dye 3 because, wait for it, Europeans progressives did.Given that the coast of California hates science, they hated vaccines so much that the rest of the state forced through a law banning arbitrary exemptions by San Francisco Karens after Whooping Cough spread inland to more normal families, you'd think that a new beer which doesn't use artificial flavor but also doesn't require fruits shipped on emissions-belching ships would be welcome.

The trial lawyers going after Monsanto are cheering that a jury 'awarded' them $175 million - but they will never see most of it.Convincing a jury of something is easy, especially if it is an anti-science pro-corporate-conspiracy city like San Francisco, or Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is stuck with a Senator who wears hoodies to Congress, only because Democrats in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh dominate the state. That makes Philadelphia the perfect place for a jury trial about agriculture.

For decades, if you wanted to get a grant from the NIH, the best route was to go to Johns Hopkins. They received so much money from the federal government that it is a surprise they can't let students attend for free. They never would, like Harvard they are in business to make money and student loans are a giant pool of money that Congress made unlimited in the 1980s - way to stick it to Reagan, Democrats - and schools are going to get all they can, and lobby to keep it while agreeing that $200,000 in student loan debt for arts degrees is a problem.

During the last periodic drought cycle, California politicians, catering to their environmental allies, told everyone to replace their grass with artificial turf so that bizarre environmental regulations mandating water flow into the Pacific Ocean could stay in place. None of it had a basis in science. The 'flow' in rivers, so strong the state had to warn kayaks to stay out - during a drought - was chosen by activists who used a high level, not the levels that a state which is naturally a desert had in the real world world. Artifical turf meant less water needed by humans, we were old, and compassionate voters dutofully ripped up their grass. 

With myths about razor blades or GMOs in candy, pedestrians running down children, and sugar rushes, not to mention belief in ghost and UFOs, October needs some science help.So we are creating National Happy Spectral Apicology Day beginning October 16th next year. Bees are important but the apparition of them dying off remains undetectable. Yet honey bees are important, if you like honey - or are in a business where you need to rent them, like almonds. Outside honey bees, we don't really know. We don't even know how many species there are, because tens of thousands of bee species don't have hives to guess about numbering.

Do you know someone old who takes proton pump inhibitors and got Dementia? Lawyers are standing by to sue, thanks to epidemiologists who can "correlate" anything to anything. If an emotional appeal to a jury is made - 'we need to hold these corporations accountable!' - they are sure to win.And then lose on appeal, as has happened with weedkillers, because a jury can believe anything they want but an appeals court uses science. And science says plants are not tiny green people so they cannot cause human cancer, and science says epidemiology is only over in the EXPLORATORY pile, with claims about mice and cell cultures. No drug has ever gone to market based on correlation or a mouse study, and none ever will.

Activists in the Baby Boomer and Generation X demographic promote a narrative that guns are a big worry for youth, and climate change will kill them unless everyone gets solar, but it is only resonating with people in their tribe.Gen Z has been raised in an information age, they know that outside suicide and criminal activity, gun deaths are so rare that it's only slightly more concerning than dying due to a tornado. And they like their phones too much to endure the persistent black- and brown-outs that countries which relied too heavily on solar endure now.

A Science editorial sought to appeal to scientists who might want to publish open access, or in another journal, by suggesting ways AAAS is better than other corporations: "Despite these similarities, the fact that Science is a nonprofit journal makes a big difference in how we operate" and then noting the profits they make "does not go to corporate shareholders."

Next week is the oddly named National Health Education Week. Like calling a law that will dump poison into rivers the National Clean Rivers Act, the Health Education name is odd because the year it was created, 1995, by the Clinton administration's appointees in the National Institutes of Health, was the year after he exempted supplements and alternatives to medicine from FDA oversight. The $35 billion industry populated by grifters who get away with lying as long as they put “This statement has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease" in small print and don't adulterate their placebos with real medicine.