HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
In 1966, when the "Star Trek" television show debuted, it was revolutionary - not just in the ways that are commonly stated, like that it took a stand against racism and petty geopolitics, we had Sidney Poitier and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. by then, but rather what it did for science.In the post-World War II era, science had gone from being a well-respected endeavor to being 'mad'. This was after Harry Harlow's monkey isolation experiments, after LSD on unwitting subjects, after the atomic bomb and after the forced sterilization of 60,000 people under the label of science.
A dress that seems to be different colors to different people has all the Internet intrigued - and that's a good thing. It's a good way to understand science and psychology.There are two hypotheses as to why people see dramatically different things; one is that our brains are constantly being bombarded by information and so we end up making a lot of assumptions and interpretations based on parameters. If you are looking up close at something and infer a blue background, you see the dress differently than people who assume it has an artificial light background, like yellow.
Though adopting a whole-food diet has become popular in some circles, is it really going to help you? Perhaps, perhaps not. One reason to err on the side of caution and not chase diet fads is that fads tend to be expensive and their benefit is unknown. A gluten-free diet, for example, will be 242 percent higher cost and the extra sugar, extra fat, hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose and xanthan gum in gluten-free foods are not a health positive. What about the whole food diet?
It's Academy Awards time, which means the science community is aflame with debates about whether Hollywood elites are racist, sexist, bigoted or not liberal enough...okay, no one in science actually debates any of that the way Hollywood does, but we do get to think about how science did in film in 2014.Science is big in culture these days - everyone loves it. You can't watch a blurb about a superhero movie where a character jumps out of a building and into a helicopter because the helicopter turns on its side without someone making the movie claiming they are grounded in science.
Northern British Columbia's First Nation leaders repeatedly rejected the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines from Alberta and so oil companies are shipping more oil by rail, which requires no new approval, and is inherently more environmentally risky than the pipeline they said was too risky. If you are more familiar with U.S. scientization of politics, it is like the Obama administration ignoring Yucca mountain science reports so that nuclear waste can remain in over 100 different locations of suspect quality: A win for environmental activists who wanted to flex their muscles but a loss for everyone else.
Would you like some Campylobacter
or E. Coli today? Raw milk in 26 U.S. states is now the best place to get it, since most readers of Science 2.0 are not going to have the opportunity to buy chicken from a street vendor in China.
Everyone has heard of Louis Pasteur - most people know that pasteurization is a process of sterilizing food to make it safer. (1) And today is Darwin Day, when Charles Darwin is fêted for his work on evolution and natural selection.Fewer people have heard of Robert Koch, though he is responsible for keeping billions of people alive in much the same way Pasteur is.
A California Democrat believes he can curb diabetes by requiring warning labels on sodas and energy drinks.Warning labels are not new to Californians. Ever since Proposition 65 required the ubiquitous 'may cause cancer' signage in virtually every business, lawyers and the politicians they lobby have been seeking to duplicate it for their pet causes.
In this century, vaccine denial is primarily located in progressive hotbeds of states like California, rooted in distrust of science. It's an embarrassment for Democrats, who pride themselves on being more scientific than Republicans, to see that right-wing states like Mississippi and Alabama have negligible exemption rates while supposedly more educated places like California, Washington and Oregon lead the charge in bringing back dangerous infectious diseases.
In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave us "defining deviancy down", a clever bit of alliteration based on the work of sociologist Emile Durkheim from his defining work of 1895. Durkheim wrote that crime is normal, it is going to happen, but by defining what is deviant, a community decides what is not and creates a reasonable standard for living together.
Peak Oil, which was supposed to have happened in 1992, set off the craze of declaring 'peak' everything, to such an extent it is a running joke now.(1) The good news for Peak Oil believers is that they are going to be right eventually. Oil is a 'fossil' fuel and we aren't making any more giant dinosaurs. Even in the 1970s, when the peak oil date was floated, no one outside environmental doomsday prophets believed it, because it fell victim to the plight of most advocacy-based projections; it created a curve of demand but assumed technology and science, and therefore the supply, would be static. By creating a false metric they concluded all the oil that would ever be found had been found.
