Pacific Standard, the social justice magazine founded by its chairman, Sara Miller McCune (who is also the founder of academic outlet Sage publications), is shutting down.

Alligators prefer men who live in Florida over tourists.There are numerous confounders in this. It may be that Florida men get bit more often because the stereotype of Florida people is based on a kernel of reality.

Kids say the darnedest things, like they could tell "there was something else ground up in the ice cream."Children have revolted against ice cream and frozen treats made from beets, spinach and soy. You can fool them a little, by mixing in sugar with plant juice and pretending the Tooth Fairy turned that into milk, but kids draw the line when you throw mashed carrots into ice cream and call it a treat.

The Great British Beer Festival banned drinks with 'sexist' names. Sorry, Slack Alice fans, social justice has prevailed. Living in California, I don't know what the wine industry would do if provocative names were banned. If my town is any indication, women would revolt.It seems awfully heavy-handed to ban certain names because some women said they wouldn't buy them. If only someone would invent a free market where consumers could ban products they dislike, by simply not buying them. We can only dream.

A new analysis says beer existed in Israel long before its commonly assumed origin in China.At the Raqefet Cave burial site in Israel, 13,000 year-old stone mortars show evidence of Natufian ritual feasting with fermented food and drink.Cereal-based beer brewing by those semi-sedentary, foraging people predated the appearance of domesticated cereals by several millennia in the Near East, meaning that agriculture may have come into existence for beer along with food.

Dr. Mikko Paunio , MD, MHS, of the Finnish government discusses how World Bank policies, including mandates by America, prevent the centralized energy needed to lower emissions and provide better health outcomes for poor countries. It is reprinted from the American Council on Science and Health below.Current conservation policies often clash with public health initiatives in the developing world but they get little attention. There are real harms in advocating water and energy conservation over people.

Why linguistics attract so much nonsense is because these “crackpots” are not linguists, according to a linguist.
Scholars of yore, when reflecting upon language, would wonder things such as: which of the contemporary languages was spoken by the first man? Which one is superior to the rest? And which of the human tongues deserves the label ‘divine’? Modern linguists will not touch those with a 10-foot pole.

Given the extensive body of historical knowledge collected since, one would expect that claims of Goropian and Rudbeckian absurdity would be a thing of the past.

That would be wrong, writes Gaston Dorren at Aeon.

In 2015, I had an employee write a short consumer awareness book about concussions and football and since NFL offices were a short subway ride we accepted an offer to come over and speak to their physiologists, no filters. Concussions are complex but they were and are a high-profile issue, In 2015, Will Smith was set to play Dr. Bennet Omalu in "Concussion", a movie intended to indict the NFL about its treatment of players and head injuries, and so the NFL teamed up with the National Institutes of Health to create awareness, but that seemed to be a concession they were wrong for existing.(1) 

It's no surprise to see a Best Science Websites list. RealClearScience does a great one each year (and I am proud to say I made their list twice) but perhaps even more valuable to the public is a list of science websites to avoid.Anyone who reads science and then reads environmental sites, or those of sue-and-settle groups like Center for Science in the Public Interest, knows there are a lot of junk science sites out there, and then those who read the Food Babe or homeo- and naturopaths knows there is even more pseudoscience, so getting them all down to a few is the hard part.