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.
Want to find the flaws in a study? Ask a competitor, just like you would ask a competitor about the flaws in an iPhone or any other product.And if you really want to see griping about the flaws in a study, ask someone who happens to believe just the opposite. When a paper comes out that uses the exact same terminology as studies that advocates happen to like, conservative scientific verbage like using the word "possible" is touted as a weakness and they will insist there is no "clear" correlation. When culturally contradictory papers are published, we are told cross-sectional studies can't tell us anything at all about causality, exactly the opposite of what we read about papers confirming a position.
Federal appointees do not report to the public. They are political picks chosen to advance the agenda of their administration. Since they are picked to influence issues of science, politics comes first, and science might come second — but, more often than not, last. That explains how institutions such as the EPA and Nuclear Regulatory Commission ignore and suppress inconvenient research. Frustratingly, political appointees and their hand-picked experts are also determining the future health of our children. Administration True Believers are deciding what is dogma and what is heretical. We’re facing a looming Food Inquisition, and few people seem to notice.
When you have been around as long as Harvard, and your library contains 15 million books, you are bound to have a few that are bound in human flesh.Wait, what?Yes, an interesting article by Samuel Jacobs in The Crimson from 2006 got resurrected recently. It detailed what librarians would rather not become an object of morbid fascination - that some of their books are bound in human skin. Odd, right?
Enjoy Greek yogurt?Maybe, if you hate nature. Because it is now a $2 billion a year industry, activists have turned on it, a fate that the $29 billion organic food industry has so far escaped. One Green Planet says the greek yogurt manufacturing process is "creating an ecological nightmare beyond all comprehension" which tells you that no one at One Green Planet can do simple math. And they are prone to hyperbole. It is entirely in my ability to comprehend what a cup of yogurt can do.
Organic food has built a lot of mythology around its process - more ethical, more nutritional, fewer pesticides, a larger penis for the sons of organic shoppers - but one claim was a puzzler only subscribed to by the kind of people who buy homeopathy and healing crystals; that eating organic might reduce the risk of cancer.
California State Sen. Noreen Evans wants any food that contains a genetically modified ingredient to have a special label declaring it - unless the product is alcohol.
When Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" was taking the country by storm 50 years ago, it was a puzzle to scientists and farmers who did not see the cultural future looming in front of them. Scientists dismissed it as anecdotal evidence while farmers recognized that if you don't use a pesticide according to instructions, bad things happen. Both knew that without pesticides, yields would be devastated.
If there is one thing wealthy elites across the developed world share in common, it is increasingly denying vaccines and genetically modified foods.
The obvious way to avoid getting a speeding ticket is to always obey speed limits. But there's no science or thought in that, there is just conformity.Instead, figuring out how to fool a speed camera is the very essence of liberty.
The American Physical Society is reviewing its Climate Change Statement. The APS Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) formed a Subcommittee, consisting of Steven Koonin, Phillip Coyle, Scott Kemp, Tim Meyer, Robert Rosner and Susan Seestrom, to consider revisions to its 2007 statement and that group convened a workshop with 6 climate experts, including 3 who are skeptics, though really they are more "lukewarm-ists" than the 'denier' label attributed to everyone who isn't a Think Progress-style Doomsday prophet.
If there is a pleasant, chemically-induced but culturally acceptable pastime, someone at U.C. Davis is probably studying it. They have one of my favorite beer scholars, Prof. Charles Bamforth, and are even setting up a coffee science group. Their nutrition department has been generously funded by Mars candy company and, no surprise, a whole 'science of chocolate' panel appeared at an AAAS meeting as a result.
America has seen a 30 percent rise in autism since the last estimate in 2012, according to the Centers for Disease Control.That's a big jump, an epidemic even. Mainstream media is going to have a field day and everyone will be looking for ways to demonize their favorite societal targets.Before we start writing to Congress, we need to keep a few things in mind.(1) It's an estimate based on diagnoses
