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 American politics there is a comfortable détente about which science craziness to allow under the big tents - Republicans are okay if their members won't accept evidence of climate science or evolution while Democrats are fine if their voters don't accept the science behind food, energy and medicine.
In the latest episode of Cosmos we got some history regarding how science has tried to converge on the age of the Earth. With that, we also got another jab at religion. Why use yet another religious contrast from hundreds of years ago to show the awesome power of science now? Is there so little actual imagination in their Ship Of The Imagination?(1)Just like with the age of the Earth, it's hard to know for sure, we only know there is a range of choices and can narrow it down as we get more data.
20 years ago, your parents knew there were two things you did not discuss with dinner guests. Your grandparents knew it, your great-grandparents knew it. 2,000 years ago people knew it.
In 2014, we are so much smarter we no longer know it.
Maybe some surveys will help. And so to help us out, two papers address the most pressing topic in popular culture - how people feel about being un-friended on Facebook. Ironically, they found this out by surveying people on Twitter.
In Science Left Behind I wrote a segment about a national discrimination issue that was eroding not only science, but the very notion of fairness in our culture.No, it wasn't the lack of Republicans in faculty jobs at universities. It was instead that, for decades, schools had been using skin color to routinely impede the chances for the best students to get admitted. They were using racial profiling to skew who got to attend.This wasn't 1950s Alabama, it was - and is - mainstream academia from the 1970s on.
Apparently the EPA has not yet discovered how to do a video conference.The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has announced that Administrator Gina McCarthy will promote President Obama’s Climate Action Plan to cut carbon pollution, slow the effects of climate change and leave a cleaner environment for future generations by doing an Earth Week Tour, flying around to talk about how we should cut emissions.She likes to fly. When she is not flying around to save all of us from emissions, she is commuting to Washington, D.C. weekly from her home in Boston.
Sid Salter, director of public affairs at Mississippi State University, writes in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger that labels have gone too far.
Earth Day is fast approaching and, let's face it, if you celebrate Earth Day you probably hate science. And you really hate chemists.
But there has never been a reason for it, it is simply modern chemophobia. If you ask an environmentalist if they should use a chemical solvent or baking soda to clean, they will say baking soda - but baking soda is a toxic synthetic chemical (NaHCO3) unless it is used properly, where it is harmless and biodegradable.
Since the Blood Moon - whatever that is, it sounds Biblical - was last night, and it spells the beginning of our doom, according to a guy trying to sell some books, it's time to start prepping for the days of ultimate holy war. That means no more Southern blots and particle colliders, it's back to basics.In preparation, this weekend the kids and I decided to see what kind of life we could make for ourselves while the Four Horsemen duke it out with the Holy Ghost in what would arguably be the best D&D game ever.
A recent paper found an increased risk for malignant melanoma in men who took sildenafil (Viagra) for erectile dysfunction.Unlike some observational studies, this is not being exaggerated by attention-whoring researchers. They are cautious about what it means and doesn't mean. The media is making hay, of course, and they may be making it for good reason.The prospective cohort study was based on participants in the Health Professionals’ Follow-up Study who were questioned regarding sildenafil use for erectile dysfunction in the year 2000. A total of 25,848 men were used after excluding those who reported cancers at baseline.
Kansas Republican Mike Pompeo, a Congressman from Wichita, is behind a bill to create a national standard for mandatory for review of GMO foods by the FDA, called the"Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act."What? Have Republicans gone over to the anti-science dark side too? No, Pompeo sides with science and recognizes GMOs are safe. He says this is more to cut off state ballot initiatives popping up across the country, which are invariably hijacked by homeopaths, alternative medicine gurus and the $29 billion organic industry to claim a facade of 'food awareness' but really are just warning labels for competitive products.
Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King believes that an ancient Coptic fragment, the first-known explicit reference to a married Jesus Christ, is authentic, and supports the argument with an article in Harvard Theological Review.The fragment, announced at the International Coptic Congress in Rome in 2012, contains a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in which Jesus speaks of “my wife” and so it was informally given the title The Gospel of Jesus's Wife.Here is the translation:
When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth - Revelation 6:12-14We've only had a few doomsday events come and go in 2014 but a new one arrives April 15th. No, it isn't the IRS, though that is doomsday for American wallets.
