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.
Imagine a site where the lead developer supported the Discovery Institute, the Tea Party, the Mitt Romney campaign, Greenpeace, Joe Mercola, Just Label It, and various other political activist and anti-science groups.Would you believe it was really neutral about science?Perhaps. It depends on how many other people are involved in the project, but it would certainly bring a higher level of scrutiny.
If you lived in Hilazon Tachtit, near the Hilazon river of Israel 12,000 years ago, you might have borne witness to a world first; the earliest known religious ceremony.
You may not have realized it, but women's voices are a big topic. For women, at least. I suppose it may be true. If someone asks me to describe the characters in television comedy "The Big Bang Theory", my natural response would be 'the guy that matches the stereotype of how people think physicists are, the actual physicist, the engineer, the psychologist, the girl who looked a lot better with longer hair and the girl with the squeaky voice.'See? 16% of my responses were related to female voice. She did better than the Indian guy, I forgot him completely, but whatever her science degree is was completely left out, the voice sticks out.
Right now, the police can't do much to help you until after a crime has been committed. In a science-fiction tale about free will and psychological determinism, Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" detailed a world where PreCrime officers stop acts before they happen. They know who is going to do it.
But psychic mutants are a simplistic convention, criminologists have instead been trying to do it in the real world.
Science Left Behind, a book I co-authored in 2012 with Dr. Alex Berezow, covered the ways that anti-science beliefs had become mainstream among political progressives in the United States. It addressed dozens of topics but the three biggest ones denied by progressives (along with a few fellow liberals and Democrats) were the findings that anti-vaccine, anti-biology and anti-energy science positions were overwhelmingly left.
Canada, which has roughly 1,500 vials of an ebola vaccine called VSV-EBOV, has offered 1,000 vials to the World Health Organization and said the rest would be used for upcoming clinical trials in 5 locations: two in the United States, and one each in Germany, Switzerland and a non-Western-African country that isn't battling ebola.
Credit: Millionaire Chess tournamentWhen I was a kid, no one outside Texas played Texas Hold 'Em. We played Stud, we played Draw, we played Liar's, but not Hold 'Em.Like Esther Williams movies and organic food, some things just make their way into pop culture and there is no rational reason why. Texas Hold 'Em is now the most popular card game in the country, every month or so our neighborhood gets together at one of our homes and puts in 20 bucks each and we go at it.
The 21st century promises to bring a kind of science warfare only dreamed about in science fiction. Already it's become clear that it is possible to paralyze a large chunk of America and get policymakers in perpetual crisis mode, even with something as well-known as ebola.(1)That kind of threat is getting mainstream attention now, but it has long been researched by government agencies that are in the business of predicting threats. And scientists working for them have recently created a hybrid bacteria - a cyborg mix of computer chip and genetically modified organism - that can not only detect infectious diseases but automatically mobilize to defeat them. This ain't your daddy's Deathlok.(2)
Vermont recently passed a law putting warning labels on GMOs, but they made sure to have lots of important exemptions - restaurants were exempt, any prepared food was exempt, alcohol was exempt - and milk from cows that had GMO feed also don't need a label.
Almost 2 million Americans have an advanced form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and about 100,000 are blind from the disease. In AMD, cells in the retina, that layer of tissue in the back of the eye, begin to break down. What was once sharp central vision becomes blurry.
Artificial hearts were invented at a time when progress in science couldn't come fast enough. In 1969, when they first went into human use, DDT hadn't been banned, vaccines were considered the medical highlight of the century, and the Green Revolution promoted genetic modification as the way to feed the world's poor in the future.
The seasons are about to change and that means a new round of projections, prognostications, sooth-saying and doomsday forecasts.If you think you know which of those are done by the civilized world and which of those are done by pagan Wildlings, you know nothing about modern climate science and culture.In George R.R. Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire", a wall separates two very different people - think England and Scotland. South of The Wall, the people of Winterfell are always preparing for the worst. North of The Wall, they are just living their lives and rolling with the punches. And there is a lot more (consensual) sex. These two groups live in the same world but approach it in very different ways.
