In America, anyone can sue over anything and when it comes to a jury trial, facts and the law matter a lot less than emotion.Though spectacular jury verdicts get the media attention, it's in the appeals process that science and precedent enter the picture. So a gigantic award resting on the allegation that a pharmaceutical company violated the state's public nuisance law because they marketed opiods - as required by federal law, because consumer groups claimed a few decades ago that sales reps talking to physicians directly removed consumer choice - and that it was wrong for J&J to be held liable on those grounds. 

Valve, of Steam gaming platform fame, has announced that its Steamdeck portable gaming device has been delayed, until at least February of 2022. Which means for nearly everyone who made a preorder reservation, July or later.Why is that unclear? Well, because even this may be optimistic.This isn't as huge surprise, when even big guns like Microsoft and Sony can't make the new Xbox Series X or Playstation 5 in stores.

If you have never played "League of Legends" - and most of you have not - you might think you'll have little interest in (1) a cartoon about (2) said video game, but that may not be true. In fact, the game may continue not to interest you (1)  but the series could be the first in a long line of must-watch programs if this quality continues.Without spoiling the plot, it opens with a simple montage that tells a compelling story without a lot of needless exposition (we mean you, "Eternals") and draws you in. A kid, and then two kids, and some guy who is clearly the bad guy killing a bunch of people before he sees a crying child and throws down his weapons and carries them off.

If you read corporate journalism, you may get the impression that anti-vaccine sentiment never existed before 2021. That's not true, it was just rationalized (anti-corporate, distrust of Big Pharma) when anti-vax beliefs were held by the same political tribe as journalists - coastal residents in the US.

In 2021, there may be recognition it's better to release a game later than anticipated than to release a flawed game. "Cyberpunk 2077" may be the last of the AAA games that got thrown into the market unfinished. The backlash was substantial.Plus, as games have become cultural behemoths, 3X the revenue of movies and 10X the revenue of music, culture also turned the guns on the industry. Where once you could quietly become a multi-millionaire while enjoying lunch uninterrupted, the Crunch work ethic recently came under fire - and names and faces became attached as Part Of The Problem. Following that, there were rampant claims of sexism and psychological abuse.

A few decades ago there were claims we'd fight wars over dwindling coal supplies and 20 years there were models claiming the "virtual" water cost of products like coffee would become such a problem there'd be wars over water.Those both got a lot of media traction from sympathetic journalists even if the science was lacking. A new paper uses computer simulations to allege a new reason - climate change.

It's great for alternative energy groups to tout how much more solar and wind there is than 10 years ago, and how if some cosmic curve of installations continues indefinitely, fossil fuels and nuclear power will go extinct - but in the real world, where California has to jettison emissions standards and Germany has to go under the control of Russia to prevent blackouts, a world where everyone pays a fortune to get rationed energy is bleak.

In 2009, Dr.

Katie Couric recently revealed that she cut some comments by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who said in an interview that she thought kneeling during the national anthem was wrong, because she ‘wanted to protect’ her. Couric said she felt racial justice was a ‘blind spot’ for RBG so she was doing her a favor.

In 1864, Charles Darwin gave a microscope (designed by Charles Gould for the firm Cary) to his 14-year-old son Leonard. Leonard died in 1943 but it stayed in the family - and now it is going up for auction; the only one ever offered to the public.Other microscopes he owned are still at Charles Darwin’s family home, Down House, and the Whipple Museum.Of this one, Darwin once wrote in a letter to his eldest son, ‘Lenny was dissecting under my microscope and he turned round very gravely and said “don’t you think, papa, that I shall be very glad of this all my future life”.’