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.
Are young people dying off en masse or are predatorts at environmental groups who prey on public gullibility rending their holistic shaman-blessed hemp garments because a wave of improving public health has spread across America?
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdowns, there has been ample time to look at what went wrong, and perhaps how we didn't learn much from history.There are many examples and while politicians ignored it, storytellers have not. In "The Division" game, for example, eco-terrorists spread their pathogen using cash. That made sense. If you are a zealot, disease can do what eugenics and population control efforts did not; get rid of a lot of poor and minority people without controversy, and no one can be blamed because disease is both egalitarian and exculpatory.Unless it isn't.
The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 35 million tons of plastics are generated just in America, and 12.% of that becomes is garbage like plastic containers and bags and even appliances.Sorry folks, politicians in states like California who insist it's being recycled are lying to you, scientists know better. What really happens to plastic, even if your government is shipping it to China to be "recycled" is landfilling and incineration. A new study finds that measuring how much carbon dioxide a potential chemical looping system would pump out compared to conventional processes to produce synthesis gas could reduce emissions by up to 45.
Yesterday, the Senate confirmed former Congressman Lee Zeldin to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Though the Trump administration has promised reform, there will be big challenges in that. Though high-profile jobs are appointees, the nuts-and-bolts work of governance is done by career employees, and nearly 90 percent of them are Democrats.
Gym Bro, Curl Gurl, Gym Rat if you choose not to identify as any gender - everyone knows what it means, and it can be pretty intimidating if you walk into a fitness center as a new member. Imagine feeling like you have to get in shape before you can join a gym to get in shape.Fitness executives don't want that but store managers know not to alienate their best customers for someone who will join on a special deal, go for a month, and then cancel the first time they download RocketMoney and remember they have a gym membership.
When people see labels or menus listing the calories in their food, it doesn't change their consumption in any way beyond what experts call "statistical wobble." About two fewer almonds worth of calories per meal. But two almonds over time can add up to a lot.That's the conclusion in the data of a systematic review by The Cochrane Collaboration. The team of academics reviewed 25 papers which discussed the impact of calorie labeling on consumption and found a minute reduction in the foods selected - about 11 calories.
Science is always looking for new ways to protect plants and the environment. In Hawaii, for example, when their staple papaya was under attack by aphids that transferred the "papaya ringspot virus" to plants, legacy breeding and pesticides did not work. A gene gun sending in a GMO did.(1) In the Wall Street Journal, I discussed how a non-corporate, free modification by academics could save the American Chestnut from the natural blight that had devastated billions of trees.(2)
With Burns Night this weekend, Scotland will celebrate its heritage. In the First Among Equals country to the south that controls them, Scottish accents used to mean trouble. Now, it is the sound of safety for both English men and women.A new study finds that the English, even some Welsh and Scottish, associate a "working-class" accent with criminal behavior. In a jury trial, that could have serious ramifications, but it likely also matters before that. Arrests and voice identification, for example. You're more likely to be one of The Usual Suspects(1) if your accent is criminal.
Doctors who would never tell a patient to smoke cigarettes in moderation, they are a legitimate class 1 carcinogen, oddly say just that about an identical class 1 carcinogen, alcohol, and as recreational marijuana has become legal they have given it the same umbrella.Legal or not, marijuana is a drug just like alcohol, and it includes the toxic smoke of cigarettes.I am not a social authoritarian progressive so I won't tell you how to behave just because my health insurance premiums went up so 50,000,000 others could get it cheaper, but you absolutely should not be smoking marijuana around kids. It ain't the 1980s, hippie.
Have you purchased organic food and wondered what the chemical is that you need to wash off? Those are alkaline wax-based coatings, designed to preserve food so it looks nice longer. Just like conventional growers use. But chemical wax coatings made including olive bud oil don't prevent fungi and bacteria common in organic food, and a new program would like to change that.
The Biden administration recently issued a new report showing causal links between alcohol and cancer, and it's about time. The link has been long-known, but alcohol carcinogenic properties have been waved away with 'use in moderation' rhetoric. We don't tell young people to use cigarettes 'in moderation', even though nicotine doesn't cause cancer, only cigarettes smoke does, so that alcohol has gotten political free pass shows science is always second to politics.
If a giant bọ biển (“sea bug”) in Vietnam hasn't been 'named' by an academic in a journal, does it really exist?Yes, because they are impossible to miss. Isopods of the genus Bathynomus are 10 inches long so they are hard to miss, but discovery is a lucrative business in academia so a new one has been named and because the authors say it looks like Darth Vader from "Star Wars" they have deemed it Bathynomus vaderi.
