In 1692. the MacDonalds of Glencoe kept balking at swearing allegiance to King William III after the Jacobite uprising (basically, a secession promoted by France), so when they refused to take the oath for two years Scotland sent The Campbells to negotiate. And non-partisan history says they tried, ferrying messages back and forth while they were "billeted" by Clan Donald - a custom in Scotland since no one had much money. Clan Donald was hosted by the Campbells when they had been called on to police Argyll earlier.

In 2006, a provocative article in Trends in Plant Science claimed plants handle information in ways that resemble sophisticated animal nervous systems, even though they don't have brains. Sorry vegans, you are eating another form of sentient life, creatures that can feel happiness or sorrow or pain, make decisions and even possess consciousness. But the chances of that are “effectively nil,” retired plant biologist Lincoln Taiz and colleagues write in an a Cell article.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told California it must remove glyphosate cancer warnings from pesticide labels, saying the state’s Prop 65 labeling requirement for products with glyphosate is misleading, since no science studies have found any links to human cancers, including long-term studies of 50,000 ag workers.

Millennials can't be blamed for lower alcohol consumption, that's just smart health thinking. But they are a barometer of future drinking habits.Across all age groups, around 40 percent of 1,166 U.S. adults say they're drinking less than they were five years ago. A year ago 31 percent of drinkers said they were drinking less while 56 percent said they stayed the same. Of course, that means up to 11 percent could be drinking more but even that is an improvement over two generations ago, when the majority in their 20s increased alcohol consumption.

Europe, the market that once wanted to ban lower cost "ugly" fruit because it looked discriminatory against poor people, while ignoring how much food waste and resulting environmental strain their desire for cosmetic fruit caused, seems to have turned a corner.10 percent now claim they think about carbon footprint when buying food. While that doesn't sound like much, especially when 80 percent of Europeans are happy to ban both DNA and Dihydrogen Monoxide in food, it is quite a lot. So much so that if you believe it I have a bridge in Amsterdam I'd like you to buy. 

Until about 8,000 years ago, the British Isles were instead a peninsula attached to mainland Europe by a now-submerged world archaeologists call Doggerland. As the Ice Age ended, sea levels rose and former villages were swamped - but one event turned the slow rise of the sea into an apocalyptic terror. An underwater cliff collapsed along the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf that runs for six hundred miles along the Atlantic Basin and over 50 Mount Everests, of rock broke off and slid into the deep ocean, reaching a speed of 90 mph underwater. 

You've been in a supermarket check-out line where it say 10 or 15 items and a self-important jackleg wheels a cart full of stuff in there. Stores don't police their own policies, they just throw up a sign, because they don't want to alienate anyone and get a social justice campaign against them on Twitter.For those of you who have ethics, a cashierless store seems like the way to go. Amazon wants to have 3,000 "just walk out" locations by 2022, and other companies want to compete against Bezos and company, grocery stores aren't waiting and are funding their own.

A decade ago, if you wanted to find a wealthy neighborhood, you looked for a Whole Foods. They knew that if they stuck a store in a wealthy location they would also find opposition to science, medicine, and agriculture - their ideal customers.Now things are less clear. A new national study of grocery stores' impacts on nearby home values found the biggest payoff in neighborhoods with a Trader Joe's. The average home value near Trader Joe's is $608,305, compared to $521,142 near Whole Foods. They also sell lots of organic stuff but don't have employees pretending you're bad parents if you don't buy it, so perhaps that is why more wealthy people are going there. Which makes them open more stores which will allow them to sell Two Buck Chuck.

There are claims that the modern world of science and medicine (conventional food, cell phones, vaccines, natural gas, trace chemicals, whatever) is making kids ill but that is just shoddy correlation.Writing at Science Based Medicine, former Scienceblogs contributor Dr. David Gorski separates fact from myth.

Chick-Fil-A has dethroned In-N-Out as America's favorite fast food restaurant. I actually thought
In-N-Out
was just California so I was surprised they could win any poll, but I learned they are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Utah as well.