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.
As American culture becomes more polarized, with various constituencies aligning themselves on left-right graphs, religious groups are not going to win with a subset of people, even among rational scientists who should be immune from motivated reasoning. If the Catholic church wants to hold a conference on stem cells but doesn't include the controversial and, to-date, wildly overhyped human embryonic stem cell research among its discussions of adult and induced pluripotent stem cell breakthroughs, it's all yelling about Galileo and bans and general political theater on blogs only read by people who need a new shot of confirmation bias.
Because I signed a petition asking for increased open access of studies, I got an email from White House Science Czar Dr. John Holdren today - don't get excited, after all of the mean things I have said about him he is not suddenly writing me personally, it was a mass email - saying they had 'listened' and were making some changes, a letter we all knew was coming.It reads, in part:
Legislation to restrict guns is a lot like legislation to restrict abortion - it's a tough sell at the federal level because of that pesky Constitution so it requires a friendly court and and a lot of lawyers. States, of course, can do it more easily. Some states have ways to restrict abortions and some states have ways to restrict guns.Gun restriction proponents like Vice-President Joe Biden would probably like to restrict abortions too. America is the only civilized country that still allows late-term abortions on demand, but abortion doctors don't rush into schools and go on an abortion spree so score one for abortion fans.
Meg Urry was on the senior scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. That's no surprise to people outside the government-funded research world, women have been doing quality science work forever - heck, Marie Curie got two Nobel prizes and she was living in France at the beginning of the 20th century, you don't get more misogynistic and biased than what she had to endure. Yet it may be a surprise for you to learn that in 2001 Urry became the first tenured female faculty member ever in Yale's physics department, and then in 2007 she was elected the first woman Chair of the Department of Physics at Yale, 104 years after Curie became a Nobel laureate.
If you are a long-time Thor comic book reader, you know Thor's hammer used to be really, really heavy. That means Thor used to be really, really strong. Somewhere along the way Big Hulk lobbyists decided that the green guy should be the strongest character in Marvel comics,so writers gave him both virtually unlimited strength and decided that Thor's hammer, the creatively-named Mjolnir (doesn't it just sound like Norse should sound?) was magic, and that is why only he could lift it. He wasn't the strongest guy around any more, which left it with being supernatural, kind of a cop-out even to me as a kid.
You can bet that if I don't have my Double Black Diamond Extra Bold tomorrow morning, I am writing me a letter to Congress. Guatemalans take their coffee just as seriously and have already gone to Def-Con 1 over coffee rust, which is affecting 70% of the country's crop.Roya is a fungus that grows on the leaves of the coffee plant and that starves the beans. It's caused by too much rain, which is a recurring problem and always has been but coffee is big business now. In 1982, the world used 2.6 billion pounds of coffee beans but in 2011, that number was 17.6 billion pounds, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department. Meanwhile, a growing human population and heavy rains there have caused Colombian output to drop 36% in the last seven years.
As most of the entire world knows by now, Mother Nature gave us a bit of a surprise this week - a meteor exploded in the atmosphere and shattered windows and injured hundreds of people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia.With just the concussive force of the meteorite explosion shattering things, you can imagine what would have happened if a meteorite hit a building - one meteorite did land, thankfully in a lake near Chebarkul rather than on a house.
Some controversial modern psychologists claim that conservatives and liberals don't just differ in political ideology, correlation and causation is inferred in actual personality templates and even genetics - yes, that would mean Americans are evolving into two distinct species separate from the rest of the planet. So in that odd framework they have decided American liberals are conscientious, conservatives are reactionary, conservatives are afraid of uncertainty, liberals are open to new experiences, etc.
Here's a good way to standardize education across the states without enraging powerful education unions and the US Department of Education: get rid of real standards.In a bit of pedagogical brilliance, California has decided to forgo algebra I, even for 8th graders, if they are not 'ready'. And it will work, because with President Obama's killing of No Child Left Behind, despite its proven benefits in minority education and bringing parity to female math students for the first time in history, test scores (which determine money) will be based on an 'alternative' test that doesn't use algebra.
"GMO Inside" is demanding that America's largest candy sellers, Hershey's and Mars, put GMO warning labels on their Valentine's Day candy or remove these 'risky' ingredients completely.Wait, they make GMO chocolate now? No, of course not, though there is nothing natural about chocolate anyway. A lot of corn and soy is genetically modified and those are in chocolate products. Science has made wonderful progress in bringing safe food at reasonable cost to billions more people than was once thought possible and cheap Valentine's Day candy when chocolate was once reserved for nobility is testament to that.
There is a good reason I was not a fan of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's nationalistic claim that we are in a 'race' to beat China in creating cheap solar panels.
Does naming every large storm something new and distinct help?When all those media companies in midtown Manhattan wanted to put on their election push and remind America global warming would only happen if they voted for the wrong guy, they were disappointed that Hurricane Sandy was not actually a hurricane any more - so they called it Superstorm Sandy. It was good marketing.A few days ago, I got an email from the Weather Channel outlining all of their coverage for winter storm Nemo and where they would have meteorologists, etc.
