Activists have spent tens of millions of dollars promoting belief in a "Beepocalypse"(1) that they popularized as Colony Collapse Disorder.(2) They readily blamed a new class of pesticides, called neonicotinoids, which were created specifically to save critters, by being seed treatments rather than being sprayed all over the place.But their efforts to get neonics banned failed in the U.S.(3) because bee experts knew that the problem was not pesticides, it was instead a thing that chemicals could prevent - infestation by Varroa destructor. Mites. Pests.

It's pretty common for politicians and the public to rant about Big Pharma but most people don't know what they are talking about. Though they say "Big Pharma" the real culprits in gouging the public are instead generic companies who bilk the public (Purdue, Mylan, etc.) even though they didn't spend a penny doing any original science.And when it comes to people who believe in alternatives to medicine and hate the real thing, they'll throw in thalidomide. What they don't know is that thalidomide was never approved in the U.S. European doctors had been using it off-label for pregnant women and American scientists discovered it caused birth defects when Europeans wanted to sell it here.

An ocean heat uptake paper published in Nature has been retracted, and it is a credit to the authors for pulling it, but it's also an indictment of the kind of insular culture that corporate peer review creates. Especially when the science is a political hot potato like climate, where no one wants to be critical lest they feel like they are aiding global warming deniers. Or worse, being labeled that themselves as part of a #cancelculture agenda.I have long joked that while science academia is overwhelmingly liberal, peer review is conservative. Competitors of your work are going to go over it the way Sprint engineers fact check Verizon cell phone service claims. 

Media are framing the reappearance of a "Spanish" Stonehenge dating back 7,000 years as a harbinger of climate change drought, and while there is plenty of reason to be concerned about emissions, this is not it.Hyping things like this instead undermines confidence in science. But media do it every day, claiming a "bird apocalypse" last week and endocrine disruption every month before that. 

Rockefeller, Hewitt, Moore, Tides, they've all been funneling money to Canadian environmental activists to halt progress in energy production and if you have heard of that last one, it's because they are well known for taking donations from overseas interests like Russia and acting as a "donor advised" fund for environmentalists who don't want the stigma of taking funds from Russia directly.(1)

Tiger mom, sure, but don't mess with a walrus either. When a Russian navy landing boat got too close to her calves, a mama walrus sank it for them, CNN reports.  The Russian navy did their best to salvage their pride, writing, "Serious troubles were avoided thanks to the clear and well-coordinated actions of the Northern Fleet servicemen, who were able to take the boat away from the animals without harming them."

At a House hearing on vaping this week, there was one lone advocate for smoking cessation and harm reduction products, a huge decline from a year ago when even I testified at FDA to support a new product. Everyone else was solidly against it, and the reason is JUUL.

You might not think the somber, sacred nature of medieval Catholic rites has much in common with the ornate, secular pomp of Hollywood films, but they do - everything from "Star Wars" to "It's A Wonderful Life" uses a particular four notes to get serious points across.Nothing would be more ridiculous than an evangelical doing an exorcism in a possession movie, you need to have Latin to get the cultural power flowing, even though no one speaks Latin (unless you have a really old priest, since when Vatican II decided to become hip and use local languages for mass no one doesn't understand Mass equally any more), and it helps to go old school in cinema as well.

A recent analysis of Board of Director's political makeup of S&P 1500 firms found that in 276 cases of financial misconduct, those whose members donated to conservative politicians (a reasonable proxy for their own proclivities) were 3X more likely to dismiss a CEO than liberal Boards.The implication is that, at least when it comes to financial matters, the primary reason companies exist, conservatives will demand more ethical conduct.  The authors believe they have addressed sample‐induced endogeneity and alternative explanations with additional analyses.If this holds up, how else might the ideology of board members influence critical actions companies take?

Given a choice between eating brown rice or white rice, many people pick brown, citing the clean, natural, brown rice as a way to be healthier while white rice has been marketed as unhealthy because it is more "processed."That's a meaningless marketing designation, though not as dumb as "ultra-processed." All food is processed. If you have ever tried eating rice or wheat out of the ground, you know that.When it comes to calorie, protein, carb, fat, and fiber content, they are nearly identical and the difference between them is almost as biologically meaningless as eating non-GMO pumpkin whatever (there is no GMO pumpkin.)