All five people who watched the Emmy Awards Sunday heard Actress Patricia Arquette claim "the life expectancy of trans women of color is just 35 years old."Which is less than half of all females, whose life expectancy is 74. Shocking, right?It's also completely wrong, notes Katie Herzog in The Stranger. But Arquette didn't make it up, it's a common statistic reported in media. 

The number of birds in North America has declined by 3 billion, according to one group's estimate, and New York Times is sounding the alarm over it, like they sound the alarm over everything. But this was written by Carl Zimmer, who's not usually prone to hyperbole, so it's surprising to see him taking an estimate based on amateur logs as fact, and then quoting Rachel Carson, author of the activist Bible called "Silent Spring."  (1)

There is a saying in military units across the world that no Frenchman ever won a war, and that is technically true. But a French woman once did. Joan of Arc stopped the English when they were about to win the Hundred Years’ War. Though she became a Catholic Saint, she was first branded as a heretic by Henry VI, who didn't like that his army was bested by La Pucelle, a teenage girl.(1)Yet that sexism was not always the case. Nearly 1,400 years earlier  tribes were often ruled by warrior queens. And not in a "Game of Thrones" way, where women simply survived and become stronger after being abused or taught by men, but in their own right, as equals.

When the political debate about abortion was the rage there was concern by some that it was modern day eugenics. Federal abortions would overwhelmingly impact minorities, they said, while others argued that abortions controlled by states meant only wealthy people got them.

The U.S. will have more than 720,000 tons of blade material to dispose of over the next 20 years, and that's without newer, taller versions that might crap out sooner than claims say they will.
 The reason is that are are few ways to recycle turbine blades, and what options do exist are expensive because all of the government subsidies go to prop up companies building these essentially useless things, not toward re-purposing the junk they leave behind.
 

A few years ago, the Obama administration disclosed what must have been painful - the Russians were using donor-advised funds to send "dark money" donations to American environmental groups who were being "useful idiots" for them - the term Communists use for western liberals von Mises described in 1947 as "confused and misguided sympathizers."

Once a year I go to San Francisco. I used to go a lot more, every place I've lived I've had season tickets to baseball games, I still have my hat and pin and ticket/lanyard from the 2002 World Series, but once I moved inland it was hard to go to games because of traffic so now it is just annual. And in the last decade the city really declined due to a resurgence of vagrants and addicts that hadn't been a problem since the early 1990s.

On Slate, Rich Juzwiak recounts a situation where a man with a persistent depressive disorder who had sex with a transgender guy said the transgender man worried about sexual transference of gut microbes and transmittal of depression thereof.Well, it's on YouTube and that has authority to a lot of people, and it involves gut microbes and claims of studies in mice, both of which are so abused by (a) unethical researchers and (b) hucksters selling fancy supplements it's hard for the public to know what to trust.

For years, California has been able to act in defiance of federal standards because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has given them a waiver to do so. Today, EPA revoked that waiver, signaling that California will no longer be able to unilaterally intimidate companies into creating special standards that are not warranted by evidence.

"Numerous studies have indisputably demonstrated that particulate inhalation results in health problems far beyond the lungs," write the authors of an article in Nature Communications saying they can detect small micron particulate matter in a few placentae and therefore, what, that birth defects are probably happening?