Nine years ago today, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto from a planet to a dwarf planet — a move that was resented because not only was it a tiny percentage of astronomers, actual planetary scientists were ignored, despite the fact that planetary scientists focus solely on planets, moons, and planetary systems while astronomers look at a large variety of celestial objects and cosmic phenomena."It's bulls---,"Alan Stern, the lead scientist behind NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto, told Tech Insider in July (and said we could quote him on that).
Vani Hari, "The Food Babe", has apparently made pretty good money selling pseudoscience to her audience. Obviously, almost anything she has said has been debunked by qualified doctors and scientists, but what was little realized is how much money she makes selling the ingredients she claims are dangerous.No one's life is in peril, of course, because like her claims on microwaves and air travel, she is goofy, it just seems odd she only worries about a "2B carcinogen" (which applies to lots and lots of stuff, the International Agency for Research on Cancer [IARC] has done 900 monographs on products and only found 1 that they didn't think is a carcinogen - that's why the UN shouldn't do science) when she isn't selling something that is a 2B carcinogen.
While progressives scramble to rationalize President Obama's new restrictions on energy companies with everything but science (arguments instead are things like 'something had to be done' or 'it's important') actual liberals worry about even more overreach by his administration.Harvard's Laurence Tribe, America’s foremost liberal voice on constitutional law, the man who led the campaign to vilify Robert Bork in order to keep him off the Supreme Court and then did his best to put Democrat Al Gore in the Presidency in 2000, has come down against President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency,
Want to learn Kantian morality? Please don't go to Wikipedia for philosophy - or anything else. Besides, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been around longer. Now 20 years old, America's best resource for philosophy was, like Science 2.0, designed to be much more modest than it became.It was designed by Edward Zalta, a senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information and the executive editor of the site, to be something of a glossary. Now it has 1,478 entries, 2,000 contributors and about four million pageviews a month, according to the team.
Dr. Oz may have thought he won the culture war by making "Dr." really tiny in his logo and hiring an anti-science fact checker for his program, but serious doctors are not buying it.In Reuters, a consortium worries about the 6,000,000 people per day being told that homeopathy, Miracle Herbs and whatever else will be popular among the anti-science crowd this week will be taken seriously.
The U.K. government has lifted a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides that was put in place by the EU after some suspect studies said neonics caused harm to bees. In other parts of the world, like Australia and Canada, where neonics are heavily used, there was no decline in bee colonies even in 2006, like there was in one part of Europe that set off the environmental craze, but Europeans were swayed by a well-organized publicity campaign (and even a conspiracy, as I showed in When It Comes To Neonics, Activists Understand PR Better Than Chemical Companies Do) and banned them.
The coffee berry borer, Hypothenemus hampei, is a pesky beetle. It is thought to destroy $500M of coffee crop annually, affecting some 20M small farms worldwide. The borer spends most of its life cycle buried inside of the coffee berry, feeding on the sacred bean held within.
Artificial turf may be an abomination of sports but is it also dangerous for health in other ways?
Dr. Joe Schwarcz doesn't know it is, but he links together some circumstantial evidence that might be worthy of Environmental Working Group. He notes that the “infill” is composed of sand and granules of “crumb rubber” that keep fibers upright and provide shock absorbency. He's talking about old rubber tires and sneakers that were repurposed.
Environmentalism, once the domain of science-based progressives like Dr. Norm Borlaug, has been hijacked by...conservatives.You read that right. Outside America, 'conservative' usually meant 'attached to the old way', rather than not wanting to hand money over to the government to redistribute for votes. To those classic conservatives, the past is supreme. Sports were better, society was better, it is basically cultural nostalgia and fear of the modern. That kind of fear of the modern still exists but rather than being old rich white people on the right, it is old rich white people on the left, who pay a lot of political science majors to raise money at environmental groups so they can send us back to the 19th century.
A GMO wheat meant to reduce insecticide use rather than enable plants to survive heavy spraying that was being researched at public institution by government scientists rather than an evil biotech company is being celebrated by environmental groups...because it failed.Union of Concerned Scientists, Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Working Group and others who routinely side against science were still suspicious because it used a pheromone to scare insects away - a trick borrowed from mint plants - and that is confusing to the lawyers and lobbyists they spend their hundreds of millions of dollars on each year.
