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.
A year ago I noted an alarming increase in celiac disease patients - it seemed to be afflicting a lot of rich, white, American women.Outrage and scorn were delivered to my door; dozens of comments vilified me for saying it was not a real disease - which would have been fine, had I actually said that. Yet dwarfing those comments by hundreds were the anecdotal claims of people who had self-diagnosed themselves as celiac, at least until they discovered that since it was an actual life-threatening disease, they couldn't claim they had it, so they had reverted to being gluten sensitive, or even intolerant - vague and non-descriptive and requiring no pesky diagnosis.
Athletes are competitive, they are always looking for that extra edge. And the line of right versus wrong can get a little blurry - even in the case of sporting events held for impaired communities.The Deaflympics, held between 26 July and 4 August this summer, had that concern. Do deaf people have a disadvantage in events like running? And if deaf people have a disadvantage, couldn't someone fake deafness to win a medal, the same way a guy could claim to be a girl inside and compete in a women's event? What about cochlear implants? Are those cheating?
The circular stone enclosures known as the temple at Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey remain the oldest of its kind, dating back to around the 10th millennium B.C. But
Göbekli Tepe
may also be the world's oldest science building.Giulio
Magli of the Polytechnic University of Milan hypothesizes it may have been built due to the “birth” of a “new” star; the brightest star and fourth brightest object of the sky, what we call Sirius (Greek for "glowing").
Kopi Luwak, coffee made from berries extracted the feces of Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), is all the rage. At our neighborhood Labor Day party we had not only that in attendance, but moonshine too (1), so you know it is trendy. We're thought leaders when it comes to drinks.
The FDA is planning Experimental Studies on Consumer Responses to Nutrient Content Claims on Fortified Food - that means they want to find out whether fortifying snack foods with vitamins and noting its nutritional content on labels would convince people to swap out regular old junk food with a slightly less unhealthy form of junk food.Your 'federal family' at work, supposedly to protect you, again?
It's easy to forget that there was once a time when a lot of hype resulted from claims that magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed biological differences between political brains - it was open season on the opposition by people who understand biology even less than psychology.
With increased regulation, the overwhelming chance of failure and lawsuits looming for each new treatment, it's little surprise that the private sector is abandoning medical research - or at least wanting to share the costs.
One of the four founding tenets of Science 2.0 since its inception, along with publication, communication and public participation, has been collaboration. In medicine, for example, the Science 2.0 vision for collaboration would drug companies and government regulators from an early stage.
Friends don't sue each other, right?So it would seem to be a bad idea for animal rights groups to sue the EPA because the EPA is going to not do something they never started doing anyway. Activists need the EPA to enforce their goals, they have no authority without the EPA or various other federal laws and bodies to oversee laws that highly-paid lobbyists convince lawmakers to pass.While it might lead to hurt feelings if you and I sued each other, for activist groups and the government, it is not only smart strategy, they sometimes plan it together in advance. Why? Once a lawsuit is filed, the EPA can 'settle' - since the EPA is an appointed body outside lawmakers and the public, as long as the White House does not object to their settlement, it will be fine.
A common technique of activists and people who generally distrust science and want to undermine it is to clog up the discourse with sophistry, like "it depends on how you define X", or they claim that their personal belief means science is not science, but rather morality.
The administration can turn a blind eye to enforcing federal laws when it comes to marijuana farming but they won't have a choice when it comes to pollution - because they will get sued into taking action.
It used to be that religion impacted politics but now politics is instead changing religion. And the catalyst for how religious people are modifying their other beliefs to achieve a common political goal is abortion.
The cozy political lines of the last generation, where Republicans are generally against abortion and Democrats are for it, may get more blurry. The reason is evangelicals; a whole lot of them are Democrats and a whole lot of them are increasingly concerned about abortion.
I think a lot about science outreach. As a non-scientist, I am simultaneously the exact person science outreach advocates say should be excited about science while a few believe my interest (along with 80% of you) in science should consist solely of paying taxes that can then go to government grants, to pay for science they can insist they are doing for us.
