During the Obama administration, he was concerned about vaccines causing autism and it showed when it came to guidance about swine flu vaccines. His administration banned multi-use vials because of his party's insistence that preservatives caused the disorder.
K2-18b, detected in 2015, orbits a star 124 light years away. Though it is over 800% as large as Earth, its space in the habitable zone of its star, like where we are, means the possibiliy that liquid water could exist on its surface.The science community calls it The Goldilocks Zone. Like the character in the children's story who wanted porridge neither too hot nor too cold, a Goldilocks planet that might have life we could recognize would need to be in a similar narrow band.
In a bizarre experiment, scholars declared that survivors of one of California's annual wildfires instead suffered PTSD due to climate change.It was a small group, 27 who had been near a fire in 2018, 21 who had seen smoke, and 27 in the control group. Participants had EEG brain scans taken while they engaged in behavior which could provide monetary rewards. The scholars also subjectively scored their Win-Stay behavior, basically how often they sought the highest long-term rewards.
President Donald Trump is about to sign an executive order restarting coal leasing on federal lands while classifying coal as a critical mineral. Social media critics, and academics being quoted in media, are declaring the end of the world due to American pollution. Are they correct?
When the Proposition 65 referendum, the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, was being debated, concerns about abuse and high cost were dismissed by the lawyers behind it with the assurance that lawyers wouldn't decide what products would be deemed carcinogens, the state would abdicate that to France's International Agency for Research on Cancer.
A French team conducted experiments using sparrow chicks and write in Environmental Research that their tests led to slower growth, with females impacted most. They targeted the common fungicide tebuconazole, popular on food crops because it can stop everything from necrotic ring spot to blights, mildews, and smuts. They compare it to the popular weedkiller glyphosate, which they claim has caused a decline in birds in Europe, despite scientists showing the top reason for bird population changes in various areas has been land use changes and not the use of pesticides lacking an Organic™ label.
When asked about an effort to ban fluoride in drinking water, Utah Governor Spencer Cox said, "It’s not a bill I care that much about” but he still signed it, despite the health benefits being well-established and claims of harm being the kind of slimy epidemiology that claims "risk" of BPA, weedkillers, PFAS, and too many products to count.Utah wants to be the California of the right-wing; ban things because it matches the politics of their voters and science will be marginalized.(1)
Greenpeace is facing bankruptcy after a $667,000,000 judgment. For the first time ever, the number of U.S. federal employees declined. Democrats have begun to consider they might be wrongly defending terrorists. They even became pro-vaccine for the first time this century. The best thing President Donald Trump may have done for science and political sanity is to switch from Democrat to Republican and bring Bobby Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk along with him. It forced Democrats, who are nearly 90% of career government employees, to suddenly defend things they had opposed for decades.(1)Like nuclear energy. Which means we could usher in a new Golden Age of Science.
The only real way to wipe out H5N1, the bird flu that has been ruining egg prices since last year, is to kill off all the wild birds. That is not practical but what we can do is stop buying raw pet food. All of it. Now. And never start again. You will kill your cat if it is transmitted in that food. And stop buying raw milk. All of it. Now. And never start again.
Claims about occupational hazards, chemicals correlated to disease, occur every week, from non-stick spatulas to flame-retardant couches, and the group targeted more by those efforts than pregnant women are first responders like firefighters.A new paper links gliomas in the brain or spinal cords to a specific mutation and then using epidemiological correlation to "suggest" cause from haloalkene, a common chemical in use for 600 years and in the 20th century in nearly every home with fire extinguishers, but then denying they are trying to suggest cause down at the bottom.
I have a trans flag flying from my house but I completely understand concerns by women that they're being set back 60 years if someone born a biological man starts setting female swimming or boxing records. Women have their own sports because we turned scientific differences into policy. It created fairness.If you're in a binary world you may have decided one thing about my beliefs in the first eight words of that paragraph and then something else after the rest of it. If you insist there is no binary in biological sex, I hope you at least consider the existence of irony in making sweeping generalizations about the psychology of people based on one issue.
Messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a molecule that provides blueprints for cells to make a protein that may be needed by the body. Though around for nearly 60 years before COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China, it didn't get a lot of attention from government-funding agencies, where the grant system most often means experiments likely to work rather than anything revolutionary,(1) That all changed when Moderna said they could make a COVID-19 vaccine fast, they just needed the bloated federal government and its need to make companies spend 18 months getting approval for a font color on a product label to instead get out of the way. The Trump administration did just that and by the end of 2020 it was being rushed to those on the medical front lines.(2)
In its second year, Avian Influenza has wrecked the U.S. poultry industry and caused egg prices to rise sharply. A month into a new presidential term, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has been given $1 billion to get the problem under control.Hundreds of millions fewer chickens mean expensive eggs, and poor people who suffered through 44% food inflation were counting on lower prices.
