It could be the opening for an adventure film but give the world since December of 2019 (March 2020 if you believed the World Health Organisation's oft-repeated claims from China that there was no COVID-19 pandemic) I would suggest we go ahead and re-bury the world's oldest runestone. I don't want to know who "Idibera" was, much less still could be, and neither should you.The early Iron Age sandstone, now called the Svingerud stone, was found in a cremation pit near Tyrifjord and were inscribed between 1 and 250 A.D.Photo: Alexis Pantos/KHM, UiO.

Video games are big business, far larger than movies and music - combined. Yet you never see video game developers being interrupted at lunch so fans can take a selfie. More money plus more privacy is a good industry to be in.For the 190 million gamers in the US, it can be a little trickier. Complaints of bullying in games are common, and women complain about it more than men.

The war on vaping peaked during the Obama administration and though the names behind it were groups you expect to be promoting public health - the U.S. CDC, American Lung Association and more - the funding behind many of those efforts may be two groups that are more interested in promoting nicotine patches and gums for Big Pharma than saving the lives of smokers.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and in some sense responses to the COVID-19 pandemic(1), have hurt the worldwide economy - and that will impact poorer nations most.India is cutting its agriculture 26 percent, to 44.6 billion, this fiscal year, and that has risks. This is not solar power or something else that is a luxury that only helps a few, food is a strategic resource. You wouldn't outsource your military to China or Russia(2) for the same reason that a month after Democrats were yelling at oil companies that they needed to cut oil production or else they were telling oil companies to increase production or else - a strategic resource, like energy or defense, is too important to risk handing to competitors.

In the current climate, you can't lie about being a native American if you are an academic but you can get away with a lot. Yet even those options are dwindling. Professor Tyrone Hayes of Berkeley once engaged in threats and bullying of women and it was rationalized by his allies but such cock-fixated megalomaniac behavior would get calls for his dismissal now.

Despite what conspiracy theorists opposed to science want to believe, career bureaucrats are mostly not political appointees - but their ranks are politically lopsided. If you know politics you know that in the United States a career in government will be a lot more appealing to one political party than another.

A decade ago there was controversy over allowing oil drilling in the gigantic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The people living there all wanted it because they knew what the area the drilling would occur was like - the moon more than the earth we love. Activists nonetheless showed pictures of caribou munching on grass far below where the actual drilling was.It wasn't even explored until the 1950s, that is how remote much of it is. There are no roads into it. It's been a political football since the 1970s. A Senate bill forced President Trump to approve two leases while President Biden issued an executive order halting development - and then a few months later was criticizing oil companies for not producing enough oil during the Russian-Ukraine War.

You may not drive 250 miles back and forth to work but you may drive 125 on a trip, and that could be all you are getting in an electric vehicle when it is cold. Electric car efficiency plummets below moderate temperature, 40 percent or more, but just like government will go after conventional fuel companies who get their emissions wrong, now electric isn't without scrutiny. And they are getting penalties for not being more truthful about their limits.

In 1066, Duke William of Normandy left France on a fleet of ships to fight his cousin and competitor for the vacant English throne, Harold Godwinson, and at the Battle of Hastings, the matter was settled. Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon claimant, was dead, and a new age for England began.(1)Had the EU existed then, he'd have never had the chance. Given current EU red tape, efforts to make a replica of La Mora, the ship Williams used to become The Conqueror, mean it may still not be ready for the 1,000 year anniversary. Unless Great Britain, having shucked off their two-decade experiment in the EU, build it for them.

Neither CNN nor ABC will have hosts like Ryan Seacrest and Anderson Cooper firing up cigarettes during this year's New Years Eve broadcasts, watched by millions across the U.S. Wait, they did that last year? Of course not(1) but another class 1 carcinogen - determined when the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was still a legitimate epidemiology group and not the modern grift for ban-everything trial lawyers - was on the air last year.That carcinogen is alcohol. It makes no sense that we fear cigarettes and the impact on young people if they even appear in movies but the next greatest lifestyle killer is promoted on CNN, basically being endorsed by news personalities like Anderson Cooper.