The precautionary principle has been around in all countries and for centuries, it seems. The ancient temple of Perperion, south-east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, contains a vampire burial site containing skeletons which all have an iron rod impaled through their bodies where their heart would have been - further evidence that people really did believe that vampires could rise from the dead if they were not buried properly.Professor Nikolai Ovcharov, called Bulgaria's Indiana Jones, has also found 700-year-old corpses ‘nailed to the ground with iron staples driven into the limbs’.  There have been two vampire burials found around there in the last two years.

On September 29th, 1954, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), commonly known as CERN, came into existence.It's had some high-profile achievements. In 1978, they circulated antiprotons for 85 hours in the Initial Cooling Experiment. In 1983, the Super Proton Synchrotron discovered the particle carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons.  They even tried to take credit for the top quark in 1984, but that was incorrect and it would be 11 years until the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory would actually discover it.

20 years ago President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry, currently Secretary of State, satisfied election pledges to voters and killed off nuclear energy in America. They insisted any nuclear power meant nuclear bombs, which was a public relations campaign of anti-science groups like Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace but squarely in defiance of the evidence.Nuclear power had already been on hiatus and America dramatically increased its use of coal. The resulting increased on CO2 emissions led to escalating concern about global warming but rather than accept their role in greenhouse gases, environmental corporations instead continued to lament affordable energy and demand more bans, taxes and regulations.

On the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington, a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode in 1976 and Harold McCluskey was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard.McCluskey
had to be removed by remote control and transported to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank. Doctors then spent 5 months removing glass and metal from his skin while he was scrubbed and shaved every day. He lived for another 11 years, known as the "Atomic Man".

Over 40 years ago, President Richard Nixon authorized a War On Cancer, with the goal that cancer could be conquered with the right amount of money and ingenuity.

Coca-Cola is apparently developing new beverage package made from citrus juices, fibers, and and peels. They filed a trademark September 16th saying it would call such packaging "Peelpack."It's not their first bio-based packaging, they also make the PlantBottle. Coca-Cola picks citrus for new containers by David Allison, Atlanta Business Chronicle

In 2008, during the economic glory days of the Bush years, Californians did a number of crazy things - spending $3 billion for human embryonic stem cell research, which no corporation thought was even close to being ready - comes to mind. And they bought into an animal 'liberation' agenda, which had been talking about the minimum size of cages and passed Proposition 2, which mandated the size of chicken cages.

East Asians and Westerners tend to suffer the same types of food allergies in about the same proportions. But there is an exception. Westerners are roughly twice as likely as East Asians to be allergic to peanuts.Why gives? And why are people allergic to peanuts at all? Writing in The Economist, Alex Berezow dives into clinical immunology and discusses a study finding that mice were also more likely to develop a peanut allergy - if the peanuts were dry-roasted.

Nothing says romantic nostalgia like the idea of riding a train - it's slow, it is serene. I'd do it more often but it takes 21 hours to go from my home in California to Seattle - and the last time I went the power outlets hadn't been updated since about 1975, so you could use an electric shaver but not a laptop.That means 21 hours of doing nothing, unless you write longhand. Or you carry a manual typewriter and want to annoy the entire car. 

Neonicotinoid pesticides were invented because there was concern that they could have an effect on bees.Colony collapses have happened all throughout recorded history, of course, but in an immediate news cycle when every blip leads to gigantic fundraising opportunities, it is customary to hyperventilate and mobilize the donor base against science. Yet despite the beliefs of environmentalists, a 1980 PC is not better than a PC made today and legacy pesticides are not superior to neonicotinoids.